Is the First-Person Narrator a Uniquely Usonian Idea?
Sheesh. [Sometimes, I think that Conor Gallagher adds certain links just to provoke me. Uh, oh, I’m getting all first-person-y.}
I have great respect for a number of the writers mentioned: Hemingway (yes, The Sun Also Rises). Whitman. Ralph Ellison. Chandler.
But there’s this, too, as if to rub in how deeply shallow Simon’s essay is: “What all of these authors share, from Twain to Plath, Bellow to Morrison, whether they speak ironically or angrily, hopefully or assertively, is that sense of cool which is so inexplicably American.”
I recommend seeking out Cool Rules by Dick Pountain and David Robins. They consider “cool” to be psychological damage and make a good case. After all, the coolest of the cool was William Burroughs, typewriter heir, eccentric, and attempted murderer of his wife. Inexplicable how Burroughs managed to get off the hook for that.
I also find it curious the Simon doesn’t mention Emily Dickinson. If one wants to understand the modern U.S. personality, one has to start with Dickinson and Whitman (as I advise my Italians, who are also fond of the wonderful Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, now thoroughly neglected in the U S of A).
Countermeasures. Well, heeeeere’s Dante (in Allen Mandelbaum’s excellent translation):
When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter-death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I’ll also tell the other things I saw.
And that’s, what, 700 years ago? And there is an argument that the “first person” point of view goes all the way back to the Odyssey. (I won’t touch the current controversy over oh-so-cool and woke casting.)
In Italy, there are some first-person narrations that are the equal to Bellow (who is kind of snoozy and self-pitying and adulteryish). Zeno, in La Coscienza di Zeno by Italo Svevo. Silvestro, in Conversazione in Sicilia by Elio Vittorini. Both of these books are available in English, although the translations are likely to be creaky.
And the oracular, miraculous, and mad (very mad), Alda Merini.
And I won’t even mention the highly amusing Lucius in The Golden Ass, now two thousand years old. He’s like someone out of Mark Twain.
Poor Simon. What I am noting a great deal of these days is how U.S. culture simply goes along with colonialism and imperialism, in particular in trying to export the absurdity of U.S. racial categories. No, punkinhead, Cleopatra wasn’t “really” “black.”
