Cultural Decoding: A Puzzle
I was puzzled by a recent essay in the Guardian about the future of American literature. Pankaj Mishra predicts that its influence will wane as the U.S. loses its economic clout and glamorous reputation. For him, this decline would come none too soon.
“The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation,” he writes. “The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
When I recently compiled a reading list of modern fiction for a very young aspiring writer in an Indian small town, I found myself excluding the best-known American novels on the grounds that their main preoccupations – angst and adultery in suburbs or university campuses, the sexual-spiritual torments of second-generation immigrants – would appear too abstract to a reader living in India’s poorest and most violent state. When he insisted on a separate recommendation of American fiction, the list I compiled leaned heavily towards novels of the late 19th and early 20th century.
By this argument, most of the books on this blog should alienate a modern reader even more. Cloistered Heian courtiers judge a man by his penmanship (Tale of Genji), middle-class daughters in the 1930s meet a prospective groom at a miai (The Makioka Sisters). Outlaws, wandering cloud-demons, scholars seduced by foxes: whose concerns do they reflect?
Well out of their original contexts, they remain compelling texts. They tackle questions of vengeance, power, and desire that remain, as such questions do, unanswered. Do I read these books because their concerns are somehow more “timeless” and “universal” than navel-gazing identity quests and failures to communicate, than “angst and adultery in suburbs”?
Granted, I don’t find the “Glory Days” or “American Beauty” problems of prosperity particularly gripping. While the concerns of Rabbit Angstrom do seem abstract to me, this has nothing to do with a need for “cultural decoding.” What does that mean, anyway, when every act of reading is a kind of decoding? To grow up in America is not to be every American. I’m not, among other things, a white male suburbanite of the 1950s whose wife brings him a brandy with the evening paper.
This is why Mishra’s essay puzzles me: He seems to think the young writer lacks the imagination or critical acumen to grapple with an author whose concerns he does not share.
