A Note on American Identity

In one chapter of his most interesting book Radical Discontinuities: American Romanticism and Christian Consciousness (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1983), Harold P. Simonson writes of Per Hansa and Beret, a Norwegian immigrant couple on the northern plains of this country in the later 1800s in Ole Rol­vaag’s novel Giants in the Earth:

"When Per Hansa speaks repeatedly of “my King­dom,” it is not merely the few acres of land, the house, barn, and crops that he envisions but the power to possess and control these things, to claim owner­ship of them, and eventu­ally to see them and all nature as extensions of his being. Freed from time and its impinge­ments, he interprets space as total possibi­lity. By contrast, Beret thinks of herself as an inheritor, and all people as indebted to the past and rooted in it, dependent upon it for their well-being. She looks upon reality not as spatial exten­sion of ego, imagina­tion, and vision but as an already created world in which humans take their place as creatures. Insofar as they create any­thing, they do so within a creation already given and with origins deeper than what the mind imagines."

Simonson, I think, is acute in his as­sessment of these types manifest in the characters, Per Hansa and Beret. Speaking of Per Hansa, Simonson typi­fies what may be called the American perspec­tive in this way: “Freed from time and its im­pinge­ments, he interprets space as total possi­bility.” Then in relation to Beret, Simonson typifies what may be called the Euro­pean per­spective as “in­heri­tor...as indebted to the past and rooted in it, depen­dent upon it for...­well-being.” It seems to me that one could see in these types the peculiar dilemma of the American Chris­tian, the peculiar ambiguity within which the American Christian must work out salvation in fear and trem­bling. Consider the follow­ing.

The Puritans came from England to this continent, where, as if shocked into new and startled aware­ness by diving into the cold waters of the Atlan­tic, they emer­ged on these shores with a consciousness of passage from one place and time to a new place and time. But the newness was itself new, and so the difficulty was in foreseeing the implications of this new place and time for the consciousness of an American self. They stood at the brink of an American self wrestling with identity, but as yet they were not consciously “American.” Certainly, the conditions for ambiguity and ambivalence in identity were incipient: they foresaw the possibilities of new directions and forms open to them in this stran­ge and wondrous land; but they still looked back to their roots in Europe in various ways, and so for long con­sidered themselves part of a trans-Atlan­tic community. Yet, as indicated, the newness was itself new, and in the early colonial decades they were only coming to a sense of being “American.” Besides which, certain controlling religious concepts no doubt gave them a relatively clear and strong identity. For example, with their sense of historical type and anti-type within the provi­dence of God, they were not concerned to jet­tison all time past (history) in favor of space as limit­less possibility. Moreover, a sense of mis­sion or “er­rand” to the New and the Old Worlds may have muted the ambi­valence they might other­wise have felt over the diver­gent pulls of the old (history, tradition, cultural heri­tage, time and space as neces­sity, esta­blished forms) and the new (time and land as space, space as freedom and possibility, open­ness and indeed pressure for change of established for­ms). Still, it must be seen that the conditions for the peculiar dilemma, the peculiar ambiguity, of the American Christian were incipient with the first steps of these European emigrants on the western shores of the cold Atlantic.

But the American romantics – for example, Whitman in his Preface to “Leaves of Grass” (1855) and in “Demo­cratic Vistas” – sought to resolve the ambiguity and ambi­valence of American iden­tity by elimi­nating such. How? By severing the pull of the old. Their imperative: exalt the American self; loose it from its old ties; set it sail­ing on the vast expanse of the new. Declare this self as new and limit­less, as seemed the very land in which the American dwelt. Exhort it to slough off the stuff of the old and revel in the inexpressible glories of its capa­cious new environment.

However, Ameri­can romanticism could do so only insofar as it diverged from traditional Christianity, for this Christi­anity knew and preached that the self and human life had limits, constraints, neces­sities. It taught that exis­tence, more vast than and prior to any individual or aggre­gate self, was not compre­hensible or imaginable by the self, American or otherwise. Indeed, this Christianity admonished the self against the fundamental sin – namely, pride, the attempted usurpation of the divine being and acting. Furthermore, it grounded truth and “authentic” being in history – in the incarnation, cruci­fixion, resurrection, ascension, and parousia of Jesus. It forced the Christian to hold firmly to both poles, past and future.

Hence, the peculiar dilemma, the peculiar ambiguity, of the American Chris­tian. To cut loose from the past electrifies with the promise of the pos­sible, of the new. The spaciousness of the land is indeed inbred. There it pos­sesses and shapes the very form of the soul. To cut loose; to dive into the cold waters and emerge with spanking new awareness in the land of promise; to shake off the old and find the light bright and swept free of motes of dust: these possibilities vivify the very core of the American self. Yet the Chris­tian in America cannot unam­big­uously or unambiva­lently be this American self, for the Chris­tian knows the significance of the past – Cal­vary catches up and tran­scends the Rocky Mountains. The Christian knows that the new offers peril as well as promise. The Chris­tian knows the penultimate and the ulti­mate pangs and losses in the jettisoning of the past. The Christian knows the ambiguity of time and space: together and separately, they offer promise and threat­; they signify gain and loss, inextricably mixed. Time and space are both blessing and curse. To move on is to leave behind. To stay behind is never to move. Time and space invigorate and pull with the promise of possi­bility. Just as surely, they weaken structure and deliver longing and loneli­ness. The Ameri­can Christian can do no other than grasp – as one would grasp a plow, or a cross – the ambiguity, the peculiar dilemma, the hard glory.