Letter from France

For rea­sons I can’t make out, orga­niz­ers of con­gresses and lit­er­ary get-togethers through­out the world appear to have been inspired by a com­mon theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writ­ers are being asked to talk about this far­away place that is either an over­whelm­ing coun­try or an under­de­vel­oped con­ti­nent. This ques­tion amer­i­caine, I believe, is based on a misunderstanding. 

On April 25, 1507, there was printed in the Alsatian town of Saint-Dié, in east­ern France, a book of uni­ver­sal geog­ra­phy by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller, under the mod­est title Cosmographiae intro­duc­tio. In it, the authors pro­posed that the new con­ti­nent dis­cov­ered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus should carry the name not of Columbus him­self, as would have been expected, but of the great sea­farer Amerigo Vespucci, whose let­ters the wily Alsatians appended to their text. Columbus him­self, who had died barely a year before the book was printed, had given less impor­tance to the vast land he had chanced upon than to the fabled Cathay he never reached, and didn’t bother to put for­ward as toponym his own name, which he hoped would one day chris­ten a leg­endary king­dom in Asia. Columbus was a prac­ti­cal man and he took his mythol­ogy seri­ously. Commenting, for instance, on the sight of what he thought was a mer­maid swim­ming in the Caribbean Sea, and was prob­a­bly a man­a­tee, he noted, “Unfortunately, they are not as beau­ti­ful as we have been led to believe.” As we all know, Columbus never reached Cathay and the land he dis­missed became known as America. 

The Native peo­ple, who had lived on the con­ti­nent for thou­sands of years, were, of course, not con­sulted about this change in nomen­cla­ture. In fact, in the eyes of Europeans, the new name seemed to grant the place a clean slate, a brand new begin­ning, a licence to ignore the rights of any pre­vi­ous occu­pant, includ­ing the right to exist. Speaking of this New World, the Vicomte François René de Châteaubriand described it as he would an empty stage, with him­self as the only vis­i­tor. “One evening I lost my way in a for­est, some dis­tance from Niagara Falls; soon day­light faded all around me and I was able to enjoy, in all its soli­tude, the beau­ti­ful spec­ta­cle of night in the deserts of the New World.” 

Even by Châteaubriand’s stan­dards, “the deserts of the New World” would not last long as “deserts,” and very soon every tract of for­est and field would be spo­ken for. In a mar­vel­lously haughty ges­ture, sign­ing the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Pope divided the New World into two halves, one for Portugal, one for Spain, con­sult­ing no one except per­haps the God of Rome. But this re-christening would not last long either. In most of the New World states, the chil­dren of the exploiters of the Natives tried in turn to free them­selves from their Mother Country, which they felt exploited them, and the whole nine­teenth cen­tury is lit­tle more than an effort to reclaim the mean­ing of the name “America.” 

But for all their strug­gles for inde­pen­dence, by the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury it appeared as if the lib­er­ta­dores had done lit­tle more than shake off one yoke for another, caus­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Porfirio Díaz famously to exclaim: “Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!” From early on, the United States had begun to cast an inter­ested eco­nomic eye on its neigh­bours south of the Rio Grande, and dur­ing the tenure of their fifth President, James Monroe, in 1823 (barely seven years after, for instance, the Argentine Declaration of Independence), the so-called Monroe Doctrine came to be for­mu­lated. Its com­mon short form is given as “America for the Americans” and it plays on a clever dou­ble enten­dre: “America,” in the first instance, stands for the con­ti­nent the Alsatian geo­g­ra­phers had sought to name, but “Americans,” in the sec­ond instance, stands exclu­sively for the cit­i­zens of the United States. The pun became pol­icy, or the pol­icy became the pun. In any case, the cit­i­zens of the twenty-seven other coun­tries on the con­ti­nent have wal­lowed ever since in a mix­ture of attrac­tion to and resent­ment of the wicked uncle who appro­pri­ated their com­mon name. 

Some of the trou­ble can be resolved by resort­ing to the plural, “Americas.” But by and large, the name has been co-opted for­ever, and “America the Beautiful” fails to evoke either the Pampas or the Amazon, except in the dreams of Texan indus­tri­al­ists. In Argentina, when we stud­ied his­tory in school, we had to rely on the con­text to tell us whether we were speak­ing of “his­to­ria amer­i­cana” — the his­tory of the con­ti­nent, or “his­to­ria amer­i­cana” — the his­tory of the coun­try. Under CIA–sup­ported mil­i­tary rule, the two con­no­ta­tions became the same. To dis­tin­guish between them, we would spec­ify: “sudamer­i­cano” or “norte-americano” (leav­ing poor Canada as Uncle Sam’s uneasy bed­fel­low). Thus Borges speaks in poem about an early Argentinian mar­tyr to the cause of Independence, of him com­ing to terms with his “des­tino sudamer­i­cano.” Our “des­tino” — our fate, in Argentina (but also in Uruguay, Chile, Mexico and so on) — was, we thought, a philo­soph­i­cal one, even meta­phys­i­cal; we dis­tin­guished it from the “des­tino norteam­er­i­cano,” which we wanted to believe was merely mate­ri­al­is­tic, money-grabbing. We thought the insult was a nov­elty; we didn’t know that by the early nine­teenth cen­tury it was already com­mon­place, and that in his fore­word to the Manuscrits ital­iens Stendhal repeats the tru­ism of “Young America, where all pas­sions are more or less reduced to the wor­ship of the dollar.” 

One won­ders what Stendhal would have thought of a char­ac­ter such as President Bill Clinton. Would he allow that, at least pri­vately, the “wor­ship of the dol­lar” some­times gives way to the “wor­ship” of some­thing else? Here too, as in the incip­i­ent impe­ri­al­ism of the first American for­ages into South America shortly after the Civil War, there are fore­shad­ow­ings: Clinton’s cigar adven­tures curi­ously fol­low the exam­ple of another American pres­i­dent, Ulysses S. Grant. During a state visit to India (accord­ing to a descrip­tion by the British viceroy), Grant “got as drunk as a fid­dle [and] showed that he could be as prof­li­gate as a lord. He fum­bled Mrs A., kissed the shriek­ing Miss B., pinched the plump Mrs C. black and blue — and ran at Miss D. with intent to rav­ish her.” Finally, after throw­ing all the female guests into hys­ter­ics, he was car­ried away by six sailors on board the ship that relieved India of his pres­ence. But that was not the end. When the pres­i­dent was deposited in the pub­lic saloon cabin, where Mrs. Grant was “await­ing him with her cock in her eye, this remark­able man sati­ated there and then his baf­fled last on the unre­sist­ing body of his legit­i­mate spouse, and copi­ously vom­ited dur­ing the oper­a­tion.” The viceroy added: “If you have seen Mrs. Grant you will not think this incredible.” 

The name “America,” then, less con­ti­nen­tal than national, inevitably awakes con­tra­dic­tory pas­sions, trans­form­ing it into a vari­ety of myth­i­cal realms that range from Hell’s Kitchen to the Green Pastures of Eden, from the “America” of anti-Yankee slo­gans to the “Amerika” that for Kafka could still carry the echoes of El Dorado. 

As a Canadian (though born in Argentina), I have an ambigu­ous rela­tion­ship with America (the Americas) and America (the United States). As to the first, Canada is the only coun­try on the con­ti­nent born not from a rev­o­lu­tion but from a counter-revolution. This imploded cre­ative energy is at the root (per­haps) of our uncer­tain and much-debated sense of iden­tity. Apparently, at some CBC com­pe­ti­tion to choose a phrase for Canada’s equiv­a­lent to the well-known “as American as apple pie,” the win­ning entry turned out to be: “as Canadian as pos­si­ble, under the cir­cum­stances.” This mild­ness suits us: among all the coun­tries of the con­ti­nent, we alone have a rep­u­ta­tion, at times unde­served, for laid-back com­mon sense and active human rights. As to our rela­tion­ship with the States, its loom­ing pres­ence wor­ries us no end, though the con­cern is unre­quited. It is said that while a sure-fire best­seller in the States would be a book titled Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, a sure-fire flop would be titled Canada: Sleeping Giant to the North.

What then remains of the vast name our dis­tant Alsatians chose for the land they were never to set eyes on? The thrill of adven­ture, brutish greed, anger, lust and fear, an over­whelm­ing and intru­sive pres­ence, a his­tory in which every­one, Derek Walcott says, is either “scream­ing for par­don or revenge”? Something else remains, espe­cially here on this side of the Atlantic: a seem­ingly end­less space. “America” con­jures up, still, a con­ti­nu­ity of land whose hori­zon is always beyond the place to which we are headed. The gar­gan­tuan novel On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sabato ends with a per­fect image of such a place. The pro­tag­o­nist, a young man who has hitched a ride south from Buenos Aires, stands with the dri­ver by the side of the road, pee­ing into the falling dark­ness, the Patagonian plain extend­ing all around them. The moment becomes infi­nite, like the land they are cross­ing. The reader thinks: “America.”