When I go back to Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes now, looking for a brief sentence that sums up the book, I realize how much I’ve invented my own version. Or maybe I have a clearer idea of what the book is about than Marcus could have. He only wrote it. The book centers around Bob Dylan and The Band and the extraordinarily jumble of tunes and fragments they recorded at an ad hoc studio in Woodstock, New York, during the summer and fall of 1967. Marcus attempts a sort of excavation of the images in the songs—the murder ballads and flood laments, twisted novelty songs and stomped-through blues standards— to figure out where Dylan might have come across them and what they might say about the way that Dylan was thinking about America at that moment.
But what comes out of a reading of the book is the sense that one could build one’s own America. That America is not merely something given at birth but something that changes over one’s lifetime and to which one might contribute. Or more than that, in Marcus’s chapter on Harry Smith’s construction of The Anthology of American Folk Music you get the sense that you could assemble your own America out of the hundred possible versions and all the spare parts, that the American past is a vast sourcebook of images, sounds, ideas, events and decisions, any of which might be an important clue about how to live. I was used to the idea that there is a black America and a white America, a rich America and poor America, red and blue, urban and rural, East and South and West.
But what Marcus shows is that Harry Smith assembled his six disc anthology in such a way as to rework those categories. Smith presents the American past as an odd and uncomfortable jumble of images, black and white performers presented side by side, unified not by race or class but by the basic occasions and themes of American life. He calls the three sets of tracks (two discs for each) “Ballads”, “Social Music”, and “Songs”. Smith’s anthology privileges the grotesque and the tendencies towards tall tales in American music, and invites you to think not about ethnicity or even genre but about ways of inhabiting the American imagination. I would have denied that there might be such a thing as an American imagination before reading Invisible Republic and then going back and spending several months with the Harry Smith anthology. Now “the American imagination” seems to me a useful and optimistic phrase. Of course one can, and should, go beyond national boundaries in exploring and constructing one’s world. But for most of us, the things that have formed our assumptions, desires and sensibilities are American, and so the American past is as much a sort of cultural genetic record as it is a warehouse of spare parts.
But the phrase “American imagination” seems optimistic for a couple of reasons that have to do with much of the rest of my reading of the last year. One has to do with something that Ralph Ellison says in his 1970 essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”. “Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man's value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black… Without the presence of Negro American style, our jokes, our tall tales, even our sports would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace.” This seems true to me. I know that my gait can be distinguished from an Englishman’s at 100 yards: I’ve had it done. I resented it in my Anglophile youth. Then for many years my loose-hipped American stride just seemed a flat fact, like the fact of the slight twist in my spine. It now seems to suggest the openness of human nature.
That is, America really is a mishmash of ethnicities and regional peculiarities. Salad bowl seems not quite right: burrito, maybe. But it also seems true in my experience that, although we may not be converging towards a single ethnicity, Americans mostly share certain elements of a recognizable national sensibility. If we are all, despite our other differences, “also somehow black,” then there must be something about our literature, music and political process that actually shapes us. The working definition of ‘identity’ in America must have to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture. We can work our way towards each other, or towards a fuller version of ourselves, by working with the sourcebook of the American tradition.
Here’s why this matters to me. The circumstances of my childhood presented me—maybe this is true of most of us?—with a number of seemingly unbreachable barriers between myself and the people and traditions around me. I was raised during formative years by a middle class and relatively lettered family in poor, rural Tennessee town called Copperhill. My father was a white collar worker in a mining concern that essentially was the local economy and that almost entirely imported its management from the world outside of Appalachia. Further, this mining concern had a history of union/management conflict that went back nearly a hundred years. Even before that the people who worked in the mines, often at great personal risk and physical expense, were locals; the people who directed the mining and grew wealthy from it were, from the earliest days of industrial production, outsiders. The outside world, for all its promise and importance, was deeply suspect. I was raised up on the weird doubleness of a culture that at once sorts people into definite categories and sends them to the same schools, that at once prizes and disdains wealth and culture. And although it’s not as if I had that much of either, in the context of a town in which many children’s parents were on welfare and functionally illiterate, the marks of relative wealth and culture were ubiquitous in me like a sort of ostentatious over-grooming. My speech, dress, bearing, sense of the seemly and unseemly, sense of the importance of seemliness—all this betrayed me as a foreigner with every gesture.
My response to this was to wear my foreignness with as much defiance and panache as I could muster. And as I reflect on this now, the two—defiance and panache—are very much at odds. I’m sure no one was fooled. At any rate, I played up my odd, invented foreignness, and it suited me in a way. I went to the English and Irish traditions looking for cues about how to think and be, became enamored of the young Yeats, the English Romantics, the tweed jacket, the pentameter line. And everything American, including the flag, reminded me of my quasi-exile in this country that I grew to hate for excluding me. But of course it also formed me. It’s the problem of the anti-Semitic Jew, the misogynist woman, the racist African-American. I’m sure this dissonance isn’t peculiar to America. There must be some self-suspicion and self-loathing wherever there is both social division and the hope of crossing through it. But America makes this sense of being alienated from what is right in front of you common and binding to an unusual degree. The reason is in the word “America”. The country is called The United States of America but we actually use the word “American” to mean something different than “of or relating to the United States.” To be American in some way is something exalted and ideal. At any moment the actual United States only approximates to the ideal of being American. As a boy I was an American without feeling in the slightest American.
But Ellison helps, especially when seen through Dylan as seen through Marcus. Ellison suggests that whatever we are, whether we recognize it or not, we are formed in our sensibility by each other. And Dylan’s growth as a musician suggests that we can participate in our own formation, build our own America and coin our own way of living it. Dylan’s restless movement beyond the walls around his Jewish and mid-Western heritage into the broad, muddy, polyglot, multi-ethnic American voice—itself restlessly moving between high and low culture, between sacred and profane—becomes a kind of self-revision.
Maybe it’s also through Invisible Republic that I see the three big novels that I’ve read lately. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country all make an argument about the extent to which it’s possible to make one’s own America, either in one’s own existential imagination or in one’s external world. Because I’m still reading and thinking through Shadow Country, I’ll start with that.
The central figure of the novel is a farmer and sometime desperado, Edgar A. Watson. His own identity and place in the culture are problematic because he is among the large group of Southern whites who grew up with the grand legend of the antebellum South, the difficult present reality of belonging to an ethnic group that had outlived its economy, and a cabal of Northern whites and freed slaves as the ostensible cause. As Edgar grows up he loses his father to drink and racial vigilantism (his father’s own), his mother to fantasies of the past, his sister to the psychological toll of domestic violence, a black half brother to lynching, his inheritance to debt, his public honor to rumor, and finally his heritage to exile. Watson finds himself forced to flee a corrupt law and reinvent himself again and again, each time with different materials to hand. The central events of the narrative begin when Watson, aged 36 and several times a fugitive, arrives in southern Florida and begins to establish himself.
But actually this is not where the novel begins. The first of its three sections is a series of first-hand accounts of Watson’s life, beginning with the time in Florida when he was already seen as a tyrant and murderer. The second follows one of Watson's sons through an attempt to clear him of much of his rumored brutality, and ends with this son's conclusion that although his father's crimes are greatly exaggerated, they are too great to warrant defense. They are also too entangled in the great history of Southern violence to be told with anything like a moral lesson. There is none.
So while the narrative circles around E.A. Watson the whole time, we arguably never see the man. Ain't that the way of it? The structure of the novel suggests that Matthiessen’s real subject is not so much Watson’s life as the question of why various people think it happened and what various people think it means for the present. By the time Watson is gunned down by a group of locals, most of them his neighbors and associates, the reader is pretty sure that vigilantism is in fact the only possible way deal with people like him. The answer to violence really is violence? Well, no, but the understanding required to reach acceptance may be beyond all but the best of us. In a book that reminds me more accurately and uncomfortably than anything I’ve perhaps ever read of the air of violence of my Tennessee childhood, violence finally comes to seem both piteous and completely human.
Both Watson’s brutality, and the violence finally required to stop him, seem to come out of the same gravitational force of historical violence. This violence first seeks land and and wealth, and then finds its sturdy, enduring orbit around race, class and region, and finally becomes so much a part of every thought and gesture that it is nearly invisible. But then before you show up in Copperhill, Tennessee today and assert such a thing, first you ought to be sure it’s worth fighting about. The mutual hatreds that kept me from my classmates in grade school continue to sweep our worlds farther apart. But that hatred was false: it had to do with our heritage and not ourselves. And with deliberate and soulful effort heritage can be reworked.
