On two sprawling novels that’ll take you very far into other American
settings—and our shared history.
Both Charlottesville,
Virginia (where I spent my first 18 years of life) and the Northeast (where
I’ve spent the subsequent 17) are, in their own ways, pretty
diverse—Charlottesville first in its heavily bi-racial community and then
second in all the communities and cultures that the University of Virginia
brings to town (and third, more and more since I left, in all the refugee and
migrant communities that have come as well); and the Northeast (Boston and
Philly specifically) in most every way that big urban American centers are in
this 21st century moment. Yet for various but interconnected
reasons, I would argue that both places allow their present inhabitants to
imagine a relatively stable and static, Anglo-centric, English-speaking local
and (at least implicitly) national starting point and past, and then to add
other racial and ethnic groups and cultures onto that imagined point of origin:
Virginia’s narrative begins with Jamestown
and John Smith, Boston’s with the
Puritans, Philly’s with William Penn and the Quakers, that sort of thing.
Having spent almost all of my life in those places, it has
thus come as a particularly significant and much-appreciated shock when I have
traveled to places where it is literally impossible not to recognize a much
more multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and even multi-lingual American past and
point of origin. No place in our country forces that recognition more than New Orleans,
but I think the whole Southwest is similarly impossible to narrate without
locating Mexican and Native Americans alongside European/Anglo ones at every
moment. And it’s thus no coincidence that two of the most multi-lingual and
–vocal American novels center on precisely those two settings, although it is
at least somewhat coincidental that they were published within only a few years
of one another: George
Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes
(1881) and Maria
Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The
Squatter and the Don (1885). Cable’s multi-generational novel of New
Orleans in the years after the Louisiana Purchase features almost as many
languages and dialects as it does main characters; for example, its central
perspective character is a German-American immigrant who befriends a white New
Orleans doctor, a Creole street artist, and a mixed-race businessman within the
first few chapters, and then falls in love with a French Creole girl who is
lifelong friends with an African American slave (I could go on, but you get the
idea). Burton’s novel focuses in a bit more specifically, on a couple of
families (one Mexican-American, one Anglo-American) in a California dealing
with (among other things) the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo,
gradual annexation into the United States, and continued battles between
Mexican-American landowners, Anglo-American arrivals, the US army, and Native
Americans over the region’s land; despite the somewhat shorter list of main
characters, that plethora of contexts forces Burton to include a wide range of
voices, including ones that speak English, Spanish, a mixture of both, and a
number of Native languages (all, as with Cable, partly translated and partly
reproduced in various dialect forms).
Both novels are huge and far from perfect in structure or
style—both rely heavily on love triangles and sentimental romance, for example,
to drive their plots and bring their culturally and linguistically divided and
even opposed characters and communities together. And we’re talking 19th-century
love triangles and romance; which is to say, neither book would qualify for the
Beach Read series. But the things that make them difficult and long-winded also
make them so American and so great, and at the top of that list would be their
very multi-vocality, their inclusion of so many languages and voices and
stories and perspectives to construct these communities (past and present) that
are at the heart of our national identity. Both do so in part to force their
audiences to engage with some of the darkest realities of America’s history:
“the shadow of the African,” as one of Cable’s mixed-race characters defines
it; the legacy of land theft and cultural discrimination and abuse; and many
others. Yet both also believe in and embody the ways in which listening to each
other’s voices and stories, languages and experiences, can precisely connect
across our divided communities and cultures, and create more truly United
States as a result.
Next Winter Reads tomorrow,
Ben
PS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads,
please!
12/10 Memory Day nominee: Emily
Dickinson!
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