PHBW blog
July 28, 2012
THE SHAPING OF AMERICANS
By listing
88 books published between 1751 and 2002, the Library of Congress seeks to
begin “a national conversation on books written by Americans that have
influenced our lives whether they appear on this initial list or not” (See http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/07/88-books-that-shaped-america
). You can take an online survey on the list at http://www.loc.gov and nominate other titles for inclusion. It is likely much of the conversation will be
conducted in social networks, in media that encourage rants or snippets of
opinion more than sustainable conversations.
Conversation in twenty-first century America is a fossil, one of the
lost human arts.
To
begin on the good foot a la James Brown, you must notice that books alone do
not shape a nation. People shape a nation. Everyone knows the United States of
America has been shaped by the tragic fate of indigenous peoples and religion-haunted
Puritans and the blues-agonies of enslaved peoples and joy-drunk Cavaliers and
savage misinterpretations of the Bible and a motley crew of besotted
politicians, many of them not exceptionally literate. Violence, spectacle and
visual representation, and music compete with the book for the gold medal of
what has most influenced our lives, our habits of thought and heart.
Books do, however, shape a people’s
deepest prejudices and passions. Books inculcate divergent values. Despite the vast amount of publishing done in
the United States, large numbers of Americans choose to be aliterate. Our smart, profit-greedy publishing industry exploits
what is central in the American character: the authentic will to be confused
and confusing.
Can the conversation proposed by
the Library of Congress liberate a few Americans from philosophical caves,
forcing them to see “reality” in the bitter light of “actuality”?
Perhaps not.
How have Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (19 77), Allan Bloom’s Closing
of the American Mind (1987), Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens ( 1983), Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962), Ishmael Reed’s Shrovetide in Old
New Orleans (1978), Rebecca Sklott’s The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2011) John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), and Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
by James Agee and Walker Evans influenced our lives? It is tremendously difficult for the majority
of Americans to understand the nature of that question.
As the conversation on books inches
forward, we may find Americans in agreement that David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; together with A
Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very
expressly, to those of The United States of America (1829) and Thomas F.
Dixon, Jr.’s Ku Klux Klan trilogy ----The
Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman
(1905), and The Traitor (1907) have
essential influence. How could a people
who are confused and confusing have the bloody audacity to deny the centrality
of these texts?
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
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