By PANKAJ MISHRA and FRANCINE PROSE JULY 1, 2014
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Pankaj Mishra and Francine Prose discuss whether categories like immigrant fiction are useful or meaningful labels.
By Pankaj Mishra
Many of the writers who have revitalized American literature in recent years neither disown nor reclaim the past.
“I am an American, Chicago born,” Augie March declares in Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” “The Adventures of Augie March” was the clearest sign that those who had grown up hearing Yiddish at home would redefine the traditions of American idealism and romanticism. March’s resonant claim seems, in retrospect, not only to have released novels by Jewish-Americans from the ghetto of “immigrant fiction”; it also announced that postwar American literature (and intellectual and political life in general) would be periodically renewed by the fresh stock of experience that people from other countries brought to a nation of immigrants — the sufferings of the old world, the intellectual and emotional awakening in the new, and the complex negotiation between the claims of the community and the temptations of individualism.
Pankaj Mishra Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Not everyone among the sentinels of Anglo-American culture was impressed by the greatest stylistic innovation since Hemingway. As late as 1965, Katherine Anne Porter denounced the new prose as “a curious kind of argot, . . . a deadly mixture of academic, guttersnipe, gangster, fake-Yiddish and dull old worn-out dirty words — an appalling bankruptcy in language.” But gentile resistance to swarthy barbarians at the gates has gradually broken down. Bellow’s claim to American-ness coincided with a general expansion, after World War II, of the category of whiteness, which came to include Irish, Italians, Slavs and Greeks, if not Chinese, Hispanics, Native Americans and African-Americans. Indeed, assimilation appeared so successful that critics as various as Leslie Fiedler and Vivian Gornick worried that fiction by Jewish-Americans had lost its primary stimulus, its “existential outsiderness,” as Gornick put it. Irving Howe even went on to attack what he called “immigrant chic” and the “wistful bewilderment” of Jewish writers who were “nostalgic for the nostalgia of other people.”