The American Century: Literature since 1945 531For others, particularly many women writers and writers from “ethnic” or “nonwhite”
cultures, the engagement with history remains pressing, even painful, although the
terms in which that engagement is expressed may vary from the literal, the direct,
as in the New Journalism and forms of social realism, to the resonantly abstract,
the figurative, or the archaic. Writers may devote themselves, say, to the interrogation
and alteration of verbal structures, in the belief that what we see and think is shaped
by such structures; our social life being grounded in language, in order to change
society it is language that must be changed. Or they may respond to what Clifford
Geertz has called “the international hodgepodge of postmodern culture” by creating
an art of palpable discontinuity: yoking together wildly incongruous elements,
mixing voices and genres, pursuing the inconsistent, the divergent and indeterminate.
They may be inclined to the use of fabulation, magic, or dreams in the conviction
that consciousness shapes history – or the simpler assumption that only a literature
of the strange, the fantastic, can begin to recover the strangeness of contemporary
America. Or they may turn to the oral or other traditions of one of the ancient
cultures that inform American history: not to legitimate that culture (the time for
that, if there ever was one, has long gone) but to explore the meanings of those
traditions for all American society.
What surely all these, and other, forms of writing in contemporary America share
is their condition: their presence in a permeable space where nations and cultures
meet. This is the space that writers in America now inhabit and struggle to repre-
sent. It is a liminal space, the space of postmodernity, post-postmodernity or
radicalized modernity, marked by dissolution and dispersal, mobility and fragmen-
tation, the heterogeneous and the hybrid – all on a global scale. Representing differ-
ent cultures, living between them, and responding to their diverse origins and
experiences, all these writers effectively challenge the notion of a common heritage
and fixed boundaries. In doing so, of course, they challenge the assumptions so
central to the grand narrative of the American state. The country they discover and
describe in their work does not have the older, absolute contours of the American
Eden. It is a place with fluid boundaries, where rival, overlapping, and ultimately
interdependent cultural histories meet, conflict, and perhaps converge. American
writers are still, as much as ever, concerned with the possibles and variables of
American life, the material and mental contours of the American landscape, the
imperatives of American history, and the inspiration of the American dream.
But the possibles of American life have multiplied; the contours of the American
landscape have assumed a more elusive, enigmatic character; the imperatives of
American history are more plural, more polyglot than ever before; and the American
dream now is inspired by what seems a process of accelerated transformation,
insistent reinvention. Responding to these changes, American writers have
changed. What has happened may be measured in a small but significant shifting
of words: American writing is now writing in America. The point is simple but
fundamental. Nationality, at the scene of writing, is less determined and determin-
ing than it ever was previously, more open to other stories and histories. The scene
of writing is one that is now genuinely transnational.GGray_c05.indd 531ray_c 05 .indd 531 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM