The Globalization of Augie March
BY ALAN CHEUSE
Here’s an obscure moment, that when it first happened, seemed to me to be an example of I didn’t know what, but now shines through the fog as a precursor of some news to come: about ten years ago I served on a jury that decided one of the largest international literary prizes in the world. Nearly a dozen of us jurors each nominated a writer and we spent days discussing them and their work. It happened that I nominated Norman Mailer, whom a bigoted self-important Egyptian feminist writer on the jury railed against as “that Jew”—but that’s another story. Among the ten or so other nominees was a Bengali writer, nominated by a Hindi-speaking woman from Delhi who confessed that she could not read her nominee in the original, only in English translation, a Polish poet nominated by a South African writer who could only read his choice in translation, and an illiterate Moroccan “writer,” nominated by the Egyptian bigot, who dictated his stories to Paul Bowles, the American expatriate who had been in residence for many years in Tangiers.
Odd world we live in, I thought, literary and otherwise. Though my father had been born near Kiev in old Russia, he met my mother, a second-generation American, at a dance in Brooklyn, and I was born in New Jersey—so I at least could read Mailer, “that Jew,” in the original. What I didn’t see then was that all of us, writers and readers alike, had already crossed an invisible line in time. On the one side, classic American literature, bountiful, insulated, great and influential as it had been. On the other side, our current period of increasing globalization in the west, a period in which, though paradoxically, fewer and fewer translations are being published in the American market and fewer and fewer Americans are reading translations of fiction from other languages, the world beyond our borders speaks to us every day in our own American English.
Influence of course was a river that ran both ways. We gave the world our greats and in return we received translations of great writers from Europe and South America who gained some heft in the imaginations of U.S. readers. Clearly, American literature has been globalized, long before the term came into use, by the world coming to its shores. Unlike the Americanization of French fiction—as in Faulkner’s influence on, for example, J.P. Sartre—or the Americanization of Latin American fiction—as in the influence of Faulkner on writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Onetti—American audiences didn’t have to go out in search of the world. The world came to its shores, its cities, its countryside.
But with the decline in the number of translations being published here in recent decades—and it was never large to begin with—that river seems to have nearly stopped flowing toward us.
Meanwhile a tide of new writers and new work has been rising up around us that remains quite international in breadth and flavor. This phenomenon began rather slowly, as literary phenomena usually do. Look all the way back to the post-World War Two flowering of first and second generation Jewish-American writers and you can see how it first made itself known. The best-seller list began to sport names like Bellow, a déclassé Jew, from Chicago by way of Montreal, Mailer, a déclassé Jew from Brooklyn with a South African father, and a little later came the early work of another Brooklynite, Bernard Malamud, and lo and behold, there was what passes for a movement—Jewish-American writers were born. Though now and then you’d see an Italian-American name pop up on the shelves, or a Greek or two, a Polish-American, perhaps, the Jews led this charge and encircled the old list of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) names that had dominated the pre-war sales charts.
The charge, in fact, became a rout. Though Richard Wright had published Native Son before World War Two, it wasn’t until the fifties that names like Ellison and Baldwin showed up on the lists and in magazines, but they did show up. So, too, with James T. Farrell, advance scout for the ranks of the Irish-American writers, like William Kennedy and Thomas Flanagan, and Alice McDermott, to come.
Then came the Hispanic movement, with grand old man Rudolfo Anaya, author of the novel Bless Me, Ultima, a magical-mystical novel upon which tens of thousands of high school students in the Southwest have cut their teeth, leading the parade that still goes on today, with a new generation of Mexican-Americans such as Sandra Cisneros and Dagoberto Gilb in the forefront. Cisneros’ fiction and poetry exudes, as she does, celebrity-personality, and has a lyric accent. Gilb, who began adult life as a construction worker, dramatizes in his stories and novels the hardships of work and everyday life, and in his public persona celebrates the triumphs of first generation Spanish-speaking Americans.
The American Indian population, internal émigrés, you might call them, put forward its writers, too—N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich, among them—who sold fiction in the tens of thousands of copies. In their focus on the land and the generations of people living upon they make up a truly American subject.
And some anomalous immigrants as well, like my dear late friend Victor Perera, a wonderful novelist and essayist, a Sephardic Jew who was born in Guatemala, educated in the United States, and with ties to family in Israel and the Lancandon Indians of southern Mexico. And Chinese-born novelists and story writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li, who came to study, stayed to master American English—she more than he, as it happens–write and win numerous prizes. On the march, too, were Asian-Americans such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, and South Asian émigrés, like Bharati Mukherjee and later Chitra Divakaruni from India, Samrat Upadhyay from Nepal, and talented newcomers such as Samina Ali, born in Hyderabad, India, and educated in Minnesota. And Arab-American writers such as Diana Abu-Jaber. And the Serbian émigré Aleksander Hemon.
Recently we’ve read work from Dominican-American and Peruvian-American story writers, Thai-American story writers. The parade continues, with its origins in the great American melting pot that with all of our use of a newer phrasing—the multicultural metaphor—we sometimes have forgotten still boils and bubbles up new genius and new ways of seeing our newly enriched but yet still common culture.
It’s not just us this is happening to, either. Other countries with great literary traditions that have influenced the world around them have been feeling this impact as well. France has seen a rise in émigré writers, many of them from the Maghreb, on their best-seller lists. Old England’s tradition has been colonized by great writers from the former colonies, from Doris Lessing to Naipaul to Rushdie—though Rushdie now seems to have undergone yet another permutation in emigration by setting up household in New York City.
All this pushes me to my point, dramatized by Saul Bellow’s thundering opening to The Adventures of Augie March in 1953 which set the tone and mark for incoming language from un-native born first generation Americans in the same way that the opening of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn set the mark for previous generations of native-born American writers.
I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
How might it be emended after all the migrations after Bellow’s? “I am an American, Chicago (or Seattle or Houston or New York City or Phoenix or Jersey City or L.A.) born, I have amazing things to tell you about new American lives, and you don’t have to read me in translation!” First to knock, first admitted. But this Augie, a Polish or Peruvian or Serbian or South Asian American doesn’t have to use his knuckles on the door. As much as any writer feels comfortable in a family and a culture and a country, he finds himself already at home. And as a writer friend of mine with a deep talent and a name that calls up much earlier waves of immigration to our grassy shores has mused out loud, there’s no going back. These writers, all of us, are home to stay.
Bellow has a successor now, in that Serbian born story writer Aleksandar Hemon. “Back in the days of the war in Bosnia,” Hemon writes in the opening of his story “Good Living”, “I was surviving in Chicago by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. My employers thought that my Bosnian accent, clearly manufactured in the nether area of ‘other cultures’ was quirky, and therefore stimulant to the shopping instincts of suburban Americans. I was desperate at the time, what with the war and displacement, so I shamelessly exploited any smidgen of pity I could detect in lonely housewives and grumpy retirees whose doors I knocked at. Many of them were excited by my presence at their doorstep, as I was living evidence of the American dream: here I was, overcoming adverse circumstances in a new country, much like the forebears of the future subscriber, presently signing the check and wistfully relating the saga of the ancestral transition to American.”
Though for a while it seemed as though American literature was going to be outsourced to writers of indeterminate national fealty such as Salman Rushdie, whose love of the American novel remains clear from early work to present productions, or to self-Americanized Brits such as Martin Amis, whose love of Bellow’s work almost overcame his attention to the sound of his own style. But writers such as Hemon have brought home the new idea of American literature as the melting pot. As does the debut collection by a writer named Daniyal Manueedin, son of an American mother and Pakistani father. When you read his stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, it becomes easy to suggest that the best new story writer in America has a family name easy to mispronounce. With all of the gifts of insight into human behavior of a Chekhov and the gift for detail we find in Updike and William Trevor and the ability to make sentences and paragraphs that pack the punch of something out of James Salter and Richard Ford, this extraordinarily giftedshort story writer is as accomplished as any young writer working today, and promises a great deal for the future.
Mueenuddin was educated in the U.S. and Pakistan, attended Darmouth and Yale Law. As do a number of his characters in these sharp and insightful stories, he lives on a farm in the Punjab, which, given his strong talent, he offers as the center of the world. From the opening story onward, a large cast of characters, from wealthy land-owners to servants, pass through his pages, giving us a wonderful sense of the strata of contemporary Pakistan—and a great corrective to the cartoon-like representation of his country in the newspapers today, which has it all to do with fanatics and terrorists and nothing about ordinary, day-to-day life.
Mueenuddin’s Pakistan is populated by seekers and dreamers young and old, the content and the terribly restless, men and women with talent and no vision, visionaries with hopes and no talents. In other words he has given us a country like our own, but different enough in landscape, religion, hopes, dreams, flaws, and fears, so that we can easily contrast our own troubles and triumphs against theirs.
As with the man in the opening story, “Nawabdin Electrician”, about an enterprising provincial handyman who works for a large land-owner named K.K. Harouni, Nawabdin takes pride in his work, and in his new motorcycle. When a violent incident occurs because of his new possession, he discovers more about his own character than he bargained for. As does Saleema, the servant girl in the story named after her, who, in deep Chekhovian fashion, finds the well inside her stirring, “all the sorrows of her life, the sweet thick fluid in that darkness, which always lay at the bottom of her thoughts, from which she pulled up the cool liquid and drank.”
As with the work, among others, of Ha Jin and Li and Lahiri, you recognize as you read this writer that we don’t have to resort to outsourcing to reinvigorate American literature. These new masters write in their first generation native English, and make it beautiful and memorable. We have already been globalized, and cheerful to have had it happen. That’s what our national story happens to be all about. So when through this lens you look back at traditional American literature, you can see that while Melville’s whaling ship in Moby-Dick may be circumnavigating the globe in search of leviathan, the greatest fish stories continue to develop at home, written by the children of immigrants, the children of all our parents.
Alan Cheuse (acheuse@gmu.edu) is Professor in the Department of English (http://english.gmu.edu/) at George Mason University. He is the author of the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers’ Club, The Light Possessed, and To Catch the Lightning, plus several collections of short fiction and a pair of novellas published as The Fires, as well as the nonfiction work Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey. As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
