Europe and America, Fantasy Projections

Simon Fieldhouse (contemporary Australian artist)

Simon Fieldhouse

North Americans have regarded Europe as a cultural Mecca for a long time and often use their summer vacations to travel there as though on a pilgrimage.  This has been true of a number of American writers, including Mark Twain, Henry James, the ex-patriots of the 1920’s (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein), and T. S. Eliot.  Some, like James and Eliot, even became British citizens.  James’s novels are filled with the tension between old world refinement and new world energy.  

Europeans, meanwhile, have their own set of myths about North America.  

Jason Blake, my Canadian colleague at the University of Ljubljana’s English Department, has been living in Slovenia for some time now and wonders whether the fantasy projections are just that.  But real or not, people from both continents continue to believe in them.

Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana’s English Department

For most of my adult life I’ve lived in Europe, mostly in states that did not exist before I hit the Quebec drinking age. After a few years in Germany, the past decade or so has found me in Slovenia. This means that Cleveland, Pittsburgh and New York are now more exotic to me than Budapest, Vienna and the Adriatic coast are. Does that make me a European expert? Not at all. Europe is a big place, and it is unlikely that I’ll even see all its countries in my lifetime. I am, however, well-positioned to be confused by sweeping statements North Americans make about Europe…and by sweeping statements Europeans make about America.

North American magazines often direct me back to my new continent. The rosy Europe I see depicted in the glossy advertisements, culture pages and – worst by far – travel sections is not the one outside my door. The highbrow weeklies and monthlies intentionally use a distorted mirror that shows the viewer what he or she wants to see. The beauty we seek comes in the form of a Europe that is culturally superior, more stylish and just plain classier.

Even if we acknowledge that advertisers are not going to use riots in Parisian suburbs or Euro-woes to peddle cars, the difference in technique is startling. Audi took out two-page ads in both a recent Walrus magazine issue and a recent Spiegel. The bold English slogan read “The world’s most intelligently designed car.” The clunky German slogan was “Das erfolgreichste Business-Automobil der Welt wird man vor allem mit einer Qualität: Audi Qualität” – roughly, “It is by means of a single quality that one becomes the world’s most successful Business-Automobil: Audi quality.”

Let me break the spell: most Europeans don’t speak seven languages, scrape away in string quartets for kicks, or even know what’s going on two countries to the east. Many newspapers still print ethnic jokes over here, kids flock to Hollywood cinema, and year in, year out the Stephen King-Dan Brown-Danielle Steel triumvirate rules the European bestseller lists.

And yet despite such obvious similarities between European and American cultures, an obsession with difference remains. It’s as if we all got together to determine spheres of influence – “Okay, USA gets innovation and pragmatism, and we keep Culture.” It is no coincidence that Audi opted for the English term “Business” in its advertisement.

The more bullish Europeans claim that North America is culture-poor and lacks history, and I over here regularly hear the absurd statement “America has no culture,” which is the European equivalent of the gushing “Europe has so much more culture” one hears especially among backpacking college students.

Occasionally I teach Jack Hodgins’s hilarious short story “The Concert Stages of Europe,” about an adolescent boy in a British Columbia logging community whose mother thinks he should learn the piano and maybe even conquer London, Paris and Berlin with his Chopin and Liszt. Only after discussing the story a second or third time did I realize that my Slovenian students were missing a crucial element: they were not entirely aware of how much in awe North America remains of European high culture.

Tamas Dobozy’s 2006 short story “The Inert Landscapes of György Ferenc” also focuses on an imagined cultural divide, again with a focus on a young pianist. This time it is the very real Glenn Gould, who (like Van Cliburn at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow) took Europe by storm in the 1950s:

Glenn Gould’s fame … my father was certain, derived entirely from the fact that he was Canadian, because Canada just didn’t have many good artists and so had to elevate to cultural prominence the few mediocrities it produced (in Hungary, he insisted, players of Gould’s calibre were ‘to be found on every street corner’).

The father is obviously a tin-eared bigot, but because the family has left Cold War era Hungary and will never return, his claim can never be verified. It is a classic appeal to ignorance, and like most romanticizing of Europe, it is based on half-truths, misinformation, and exaggerated difference.

North American cultural worshipping of Europe is almost as out of kilter as the common European longing for all things American (though political Americaphilia hit rock-bottom during the Bush years, Obama would win in a landslide if Europeans could vote for him). Having this sort of imaginary other to pine for is probably harmless, but when vague longing limps into pseudo-reasoning there’s a problem. The trump card “They do that in America” is whipped out to argue for – or against – issues as gnarled as private investment in the arts, educational reform, or tweaking state-subsidized medical insurance.

Unless backed up by concrete arguments, this America-card (or, back home, the Europe-card) reminds me of the shipmates’ flexible views on albatross-killing in Coleridge’s poem:

Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay
That made the breeze to blow!

A few lines and some improved weather later:

Twas right, said they, such birds to slay
That bring the fog and mist.

Except that the Ancient Mariner’s mates are superstition incarnate and the argument that things are always “better in Europe” (or “never better in Europe”) is generally presented as an intellectual position. Wine glass in hand, one opines, “Well, they sure don’t do that in Europe” and everyone else is supposed to nod in hasty agreement.

In the spirit of summer holidays, and to avoid ranting about arguments that are based on nothing more than cultural stereotypes, I will focus on European longing for America. This evening, I will go with my wife and daughter to a Slovenian shopping mall. There is no “Gap” at that mall, but there are shops like “Champion,” “New Yorker,” and “Brooklyn Energie.” I believe the last two are German operations wisely tapping into a dated mythology of testing the West – that is, a legitimate desire for freedom from oppressive regimes and a fighting chance at prosperity. It’s all the charming opposite of French or Italian-sounding shop names in North American strip malls.

A more concrete example of this requited cultural longing: a few years ago, a French-owned coffee shop opened in the middle of Ljubljana. Its colors were green, black and white, and it specialized in drinkable coffee to go. It was not Starbucks but an obvious imitation of that Seattle operation, which of course is itself an imitation of European-style cafés. In other words, it was the Europeans imitating the Americans imitating the Europeans. I am glad that Starbucks has since put an end to this caffeinated aping by opening dozens of stores in Europe – though not yet in Slovenia, which already has fine cafés aplenty.

I’ve just finished Erica Johnson Debeljak’s forbidden bread (2009), a sometimes racy memoir about her decision to leave New York for Slovenia and marriage. For my money, it’s the most readable and insightful outsider’s account of life in Slovenia. The memoir begins in 1993 on the Ljubljana castle hill as her “black-haired poet-lover” points out the main streets in Ljubljana, and where they lead:

 “And there,” he makes a quarter turn of the compass, “Celovška [street].” [The Slovenian name for] Klagenfurt, the border town in Austria where Slovenians go to shop for Western goods that are not yet widely available here: Levi’s and Ray-Bans and two-ply toilet paper.

Already in 2000, when I landed here, a description like this seemed incredible and dated.

Although Slovenians still travel to Austria to shop, unless they’re hitting Ikea, they do so more out of a sense of tradition than anything else. As Johnson Debeljak writes in the final chapter of forbidden bread, “Nobody in Slovenia today would dream of driving down to Italy or over the Alps to go shopping, unless it was for a bargain or some chic cosmopolitan outing.”

Three months after I arrived in Slovenia, I asked a young man for directions on the street. We had a ten-word conversation in Slovene then switched to English because we were running short on words and he happened to be American anyway. Back home, he had been warned to expect culture shock and was disappointed when it didn’t come: “You know, except for the missing peanut butter and Doritos in the shops, it’s pretty much the same as my little town in Indiana. I was hoping it would be weirder.”

Johnson Debeljak’s book is very much a (loving) catalogue of complaints about life in a post-Communist state born in 1991. Two pages from the end, she admits, “this story, my story, is also ancient history now. Nearly everything described in these pages no longer applies.” She describes the sleepy district in which she once lived, and notes, with much regret, that “It is the fasting-growing and most vibrant area of Ljubljana, exploding with multiplex cinemas, international clothing stores, Italian furniture stores, discount food stores, health spas, gyms, tennis courts, indoor swimming pools, electronic bowling alleys, and computer arcades.” In other words, not very different at all from a thriving North American community.

In the short story “Dominion,” Richard Ford provides a similar description of Canada, which feels “foreign in [a comfortable, half-mysterious way […]; as if the floors had been tilted three degrees off from what you were used to, and the doors opened from a different side.” Factoring in the sneakily difficult language, let’s say Slovenia is nine degrees off, and on average a few kilograms lighter than most of North America. (The weight gap is closing – especially young people are definitely chunkier here than they were when I arrived.)

In a standard teaching game for second language learners, students have to pretend that a Martian has visited Planet Earth. Students have to explain common object like cars, everyday occurrences like eating breakfast, things that are presumably different. A real Martian would see absolutely no difference between North Americans and Europeans. They are there, but subtly hidden. Over the past decade, I’ve yet to figure out exactly what they are.

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