American Lit vs. Euro Lit

I have finally found what has been wrong with my English literature experience. It was all written by Americans. I can't count how many times I fell asleep reading Moby Dick. Melville, who is considered the greatest American writer of our time, could put me to sleep at noon and at 8pm. I completely Cliff Noted my way through Hawthorn, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. I wanted to slit my wrist after The Awakening not for sympathizing but from utter boredom. I had come under the impression that I hated reading (which is strange since I got interested in English because of my love of reading).

Then I took Continental Novels in Translation. There isn't an amazing professor who has changed my life or anything. Class is dreadfully boring (and I unfortunately have to spend three hours there tonight). But I have never fallen asleep trying to read Kundera or De Beauvoir. I even managed through Proust and kind of enjoyed it (though Calvino is pushing it). And I realized that my favorite two authors were already not American--Agatha Christie and Maeve Binchy (do not laugh).

And I began thinking about the difference.



What is the difference between American and European writers?




Europeans are able to write with feeling about feeling. Because they had real shit happen to them. Even if they didn't live through it, it has sunk into the soil and grows in the food. It pollutes the water and chokes the air. Pain, blood, tears, fresh and old, surround them. Kundera wrote about communism dicatorship and censorship through body and sexual metaphors, through laughter and memory. De Beauvoir addressed the ridiculousness of the "Female Condition" with hyperbole and yet raw emotion. Better than Melville's whale and religion convoluted myth building and Chopin's stereotypical feminist awakening.

American writers are generally struck with an overwhelming malaise. As though they sat down one day and realized they had no more indigenious people to kill and enslaved races to oppress. What shall we do next? Vex future generations of scholars with dry writing about The Dust Bowl and crazy farmer families. Or wars that only sort of kind of effected them but not really because they let the rest of the world destroy itself before getting involved. Characters languish in their basically boring existence under crushing middle class apathy and melancholy.

I already live in that world. Welcome to America. Tell me something real. Make me feel something real. Don't bore me to death with whale biology or turtles crossing the road. Don't call everyone phonies and expected me to sympathize or identify with you. Let me live in a magical world where laughter lifts you up into heaven and your very identity can be called into question by years of world wars and civil unrest. The experience may or may not be real but the emotion always is. And that is what American literature is missing.