Excerpt
April 26, 2011
The new American people might have been through a fundamental rite of passage, an Atlantic death and rebirth, a physical and now a political severance, from which had been created a new society, a new identity, a new psychology, a new history. But all this depended on contrast and complementarity, on Oedipal formation, on measuring out the way the child differed from the parent or the New World from the Old. Americans, looking westward, had to think of Europe to triangulate their own situation against the wilderness, the savage, the Pacific. Newly positioned in history, they required the credit of origins and a past, and these they ascribed back to Europe, therefore reserving the new life and the great historical future for themselves. The Europe they imagined was not so much a nation, or even a complex of nations. It was an idea, an opposite, a polar contrast. If America was the newborn child of history, Europe was the presumed parent. If America was the world's rising western empire, Europe must be the falling one. If America was, as Gee claimed, ``the land of the future,'' Europe must be the world of the past. If America was the place where, as Tocqueville proclaimed, ``everything is in constant motion,'' Europe must be the continent of fixity and continuity. In the transatlantic narrative, Europe thus became past to America's present, civilized to America's primitive and pristine, poetic to America's practicality, decadent to America's promise, experienced, or even corrupt, to America's innocence.
