The Artificial White Man

In a number of chapters I attack those who present themselves as authentic or claim to expose the inauthentic while actually pushing forward a high- or low-quality version of counterfeit. But I do not think the reasons for our obsession with authenticity are simple, nor do I misapprehend the complexity of the moment in which we live on this earth. Ours is a technological era that often defines itself and achieves commercial success by continuing to do a better job at making the unreal seem true. Due to the many-layered rebellion against the pervasiveness of the unreal, we live in a period of great disillusionment; as idols crash, conventions are rejected that upheld various forms of bigotry arriving in the areas of class, ethnicity, religion, color, and sex. The result is that part of our contemporary national paranoia expresses itself in the belief that someone may have put something over on us, that we have too often been duped into believing that the counterfeit is the authentic.

In the bush or somewhere up in somebody's mountains, we assume—or hope—that there are people whose sense of life has not been totally encroached on by the boxed, electronic shadow world of television or the Internet universe in which cyberspace seems as real to many as God, angels, and heaven are to an atheist. If that purportedly innocent existence is what some might consider luck, we haven't had any on this soil in a very, very long time. There is hardly a space of one hundred square miles that has not been defined and redefined by the callous and inspiring nature of modernity.

We have been modern for so long that authenticity is largely a meaningless term, though there are distinct ethnic styles that don't quite tell us what we think they do. One reason is that this nation—long, long ago—switched tracks from the local to the express. So influences come and go at very high speeds. Traditions are remade and abandoned or reimagined, sometimes for the better, sometimes—which is where the blues always makes its move—for the worst. Our country is some kind of a mongrel that is spiritually a chameleon but always remains a bastard. And you can be sure that starting as an American bastard in a world where former European bastards have family lines long enough to make them arrogant is another reason why being authentic might be something of a recurring problem.

Across our democratic vista, for all of its tragic tales, we have seen that the ultimate truth of humanity is fairly simple: no qualities of any sort that have to do with intelligence or will or spirit can be assumed on the basis of our favorite lines of demarcation. Color, sex, religion, class, and point of geographic origin are just more blanks that, even at close range, don't leave powder burns on the target board of Americana. The individual still has to sign on the dotted line for anything to make sense or become specific. (Even though he was not an American, the great Borges, an Argentine, trumped Hemingway in that area of recognition, as I show in "The Novel as Blues Suite.")

The elite version of authenticity used to begin above but now has been discredited. Nothing has survived the holocaust of close, close scrutiny, not government, not business, not religion, not ethnicity, not the upper class, not the family unit, not parenting, not adolescence, not childhood, nothing at all. With the fall of the high, the energy from below has been elevated in our reimagining of traditions. A purity has been projected onto the bottom and that projection has risen to a great influence. Americans now fear, with greater intensity than ever, becoming bloodless, stiff, "uncool." (David Shields is a notable example.) It is very difficult to come in contact with what is considered cool—or achieve the status that comes of surviving the harsher realities of life—if one is born above. The assault on middle-class life in our television shows and our movies allows us to recognize that we are constantly being signaled about authenticity. A blue, despairing cry is coming at us from behind the trends of extreme hairdos, piercings, ethnic getups, aggressively bad taste, nose rings, tattoos, and the fashion collages that draw so badly and so freely from the worlds of the primitive, science fiction, and street gang posturing.

On the lower frequencies of what we call urban America, young men who hope to become hip-hop stars risk imprisonment or death in order to get "street credentials," meaning hoodlum authenticity. So we are now at the place where moving from the inauthentic to the authentic can become a rite of passage allowing a person to become a brand who wears a seal of approval, like the purple stamp on meat that passes inspection.

This book is an argument with all of that, however sympathetic it might be to the search for alternatives to our disappointments. One position it takes is that empty-headed appropriation or assumed membership in a besieged elite, like the "white world," is far different from inspired reactions to influences from outside of one's class and ethnic conventions. It is also true in my mind that ethnic identity, however slippery it can be, should not remove complexity from the natural history of Americana but add more distinctions, a greater variety of nuance, some perspectives that allow the insider and the outsider to be seen more clearly. I hope to present, through unsentimental affirmation, a new form of rebellion in our time of cosmetic dissent. While it is obvious that I do not deny the distinct styles of different ethnic groups, I believe that these preoccupations have made it harder for some people to seek their own individuality because they feel that they should follow a recipe for how to be an acceptable member of their ethnic group. This has had a bad effect on our fiction, since there are ethnic characters that too many writers do not feel free enough to try and imagine into their work. (Besides helping give thematic form to the book, this is why William Faulkner and Go Down, Moses are referred to more than once.) This gussied-up version of segregation also misses the importance of certain domestic art forms because they have not been seen as authentic high art. It has gotten us into a big, fat, spreading mess, and I hope that this collection gives a sizable helping hand to getting us out of it.