The United States is worrying: between societal regression and post-democratic fears, the country-continent seems more than ever entangled between nightmare and dream. But the enigma of this irreconcilable America has in reality always existed. American literature is itself one of its names, the endless attempt to define it. How, through his novels, to understand today’s America, constantly fragmented, but more alive than ever?
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Of the misery of agricultural workers masterfully described by Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath (1939) to Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, which recounts the impossible mourning of a former slave after the Civil War, it is the America of medium-sized cities and rurality that gave birth to the greatest American feathers. A cruel, racist America, without illusions.
From this country, Carson McCullers makes the grandiose and sensitive synthesis. We come across, for example, in The Heart is a lone hunter (1940) the unforgettable figures of a young girl from a family of white proletarians in dereliction, an African-American doctor in silent revolt, a revolutionary and alcoholic backpacker. So many fragments of existence ordered with the delicacy of stained glass from which a unique subjectivity will emerge: the choral novel as a possible space of coexistence.
Unhappy like an American in France
To escape this America, American authors have often come to France in search of a curious and more welcoming land. From Ernest Hemingway to Henri Miller, via Fitzgerald, the great names of the lost generation have thus haunted the streets of the capital. From the solar eroticism of Tropic of Cancer (1934) with the irresistible charm of Paris is a party (1964), these burning classics already heralded the heat waves to come. And then the South, that of Provence and the Côte d’Azur, where Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby the magnificent (1926), this fable bling bling whose exuberance barely hides the summer melancholy.
It is the same path that James Baldwin took in 1948; Paris, first, then Provence where he settled, hoping to escape the double curse of an Afro-American and homosexual identity. Harlem Quarteta masterpiece translated in 2003, but published in 1979, is thus one of those novels from which one cannot recover – a gospel of infinite hardness and tenderness, a requiem of an era that one would like quite gone.
He sang for Crunch – to protect Crunch and bring him back, and he sang for me, to protect me and bring me back: he sang to save the universe. And in his voice then penetrated a solitary sweetness of such power of emotion that people remained petrified, metamorphosed: he sang their love and their anxiety, he sang their hope. With his song he confessed to the public at the foot of the throne of mercy, and as his voice rose he knew he was redeemed, at the hands of a power greater than any on earth. His love was his confession, his testimony, his hymn.
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James Baldwin
Harlem Quartet
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cruel apotheosis
But the American fractures are not limited only to the racial question. In his book Price (1984), screenwriter and novelist Steve Tesich thus paints a grandiose and lively portrait of a failed first love in East Chicago, a metaphor for the missed rendezvous between the main character and his city, once an industrial jewel and whose deindustrialization marks the death warrant and forced exoduses.
The catastrophe is not without joy, however, nor without the possibility of – bad – humor. In line with Hubert Selby Junior, Brett Easton Ellis has meanwhile developed a pop, baroque and often bloody work. At worship American Psycho (1991) we will add the collection of short stories Zombies (1994), which describes the youth of Los Angeles in the 1990s, between partying, existential emptiness, scathing humor and snuff movie.
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Generations X, Y, Z: (re)telling the truth
Between town and country, blacks and whites, New York intellectuals and Rust Belt workers, American literatures have thus described realities that rarely overlap. Yet it is in the interstitial spaces that they are in the process of reinventing themselves. At the crossroads of identity themes, whether gender, racial or social, A brief moment of splendor (2021) by Océan Vuong stands out as the ultimate novel of a new generation of American authors.
Océan Vuong indeed signs the novel with a paradox: the book is a long letter addressed to his mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who, not knowing how to read English, will not have access to the language of her son. Last production of the young author, it is perhaps the most contemporary redefinition of America by its literature – and at the same time by its youth. Unsurprisingly, to escape the standardization of creative writingit is that of a poet in love that neither opioids, nor suicides, nor the unbreathable air inside caravans seem to be able to kill.
I am 28 years old, I am 1m63, 51 kg. I’m beautiful from exactly three angles and sinister everywhere else. I write to you from inside a body that once belonged to you. In other words, I am writing to you as a son.
