Lit’s Precondition: People All the Same

Photo from Steichen's Family of Man

Photo from Steichen’s Family of Man

I’ve just come across an illuminating contrast between literature and war.  Theater director Mary Zimmerman is currently staging a version of the Arabian Nights at Washington’s Arena Stage, and in the program notes she responds to the question, “Are you saying that you believe certain feelings are universal, or perhaps that we share an essential common humanity?” Here’s Zimmerman’s reply:

It is a precondition of war that we view other people as fundamentally different from ourselves; it is a precondition of literature that we view other people as fundamentally the same.  All of my life I’ve found myself in the ancient stories of faraway places, and I’ve always drawn comfort from the feeling “it was ever thus” with all of us: that we will experience violent change and loss; that we look for love and betray it; that we will make errors, both serious and trivial that make us feel embarrassed or ashamed all our lives; that certain things will always be funny and others always sad.  Although this seems utterly self-evident, wartime works towards the erosion of empathy, explicitly delimiting the idea that all men are brothers.

It’s interesting how this notion of “fundamentally the same” has circled around. It received a lot of play in the 1950’s as America, having emerged from a period of comparative isolation (in the 1930’s), found itself processing its close-up encounters with countries like France, Germany, Italy, England, Japan and Korea. Out of this new awareness came photographer Edward Steichen’s popular coffee table book, The Family of Man (introduced by Carl Sandburg), which sought to demonstrate that we all share a common humanity, despite superficial differences. This new perspective was important for the Civil Rights movement as well: “We are black and white together, we shall not be moved.”

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, however, disenfranchised groups felt that the emphasis on commonality failed to acknowledge and do justice to important cultural distinctions. Many thought that even well-intentioned white liberal men were guilty of an unconscious imperialism, defining everyone else in their own terms.  Family of Man, after all, was not titled Family of Humankind.

The focus therefore shifted to how people were different. How did African Americans differ from European Americans, how did women differ from men, how did the Middle Ages differ from contemporary times, how did Asians differ from Westerners and, for that matter, from each other? Fascinating new insights opened up as we began seeing the world this way. I fell in love with many of the new works I was discovering by women and African Americans and Indians (both from the U.S. and from India) and elsewhere.  Feminism, meanwhile, liberated me from some of the old sterotypes of masculinity. Then again, as a white privileged male I went around feeling besieged much of the time.

I’ve posted on an illustrative personal example about how one of our African students, wearing a tee-shirt with the words, “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” set off a heated campus-wide discussion and led to a poem by Lucille Clifton. There was truth in the complaints, but in focusing on white insensitivity, our campus somehow failed to address an important follow-up question: “Can we understand if we try?”

In literary studies, if the left cornered much of the energy in the 1970’s as they discovered authors who had been shut out of the official literary canon, the right struck back in the 1980’s. Trumpeting the virtues of “dead white males,” they viewed multiculturalism as a fad that failed to sufficiently honor timeless works. Some even went so far as to claim that Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize because of politically correctness.

On the defense, liberals realized they no longer could afford to fight amongst themselves. Women fighting for abortion rights, blacks and Hispanics fighting to hold on to social welfare programs, gays fighting for civil rights realized that putting primary emphasis on what set them apart was, politically, a no-win solution. Back in the early 1970’s, I remember hearing black militants saying they preferred a KKK member to a white liberal because at least they knew where the KKK member stood.  That kind of thinking was now an indulgence.

And so here we are, back to looking for commonalities between cultures. I like to think we’ve achieved a fairly healthy balance as a result of all this back and forth. I teach the old stuff and the new stuff, works written by dead white men and works written by living black women. With contemporary works, I can’t always predict which ones speak just to the moment and which ones speak so deeply to a common humanity that they will withstand the test of time. (For the record, I think that Toni Morrison is still going strong and has leapfrogged some writers who were canonized when I was in college, like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.) I try to pay attention to whether a new work genuinely opens us up or whether it plays on more evanescent concerns.

A powerful test is to put a work in dialogue with everyday life and see how holds up.  Every day I strive to provide you with a different example.

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