Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton Read Free Book Online Page B

even if it is not always best suited to establishing the truth. The genuine niceness of some Americans can be hard to distinguish from a certain blandness. The difference between radicals and others is that radicals suspect that the truth is generally discreditable. It is thus rarely in the open, and a degree of abrasiveness is required to dig it out. What you see is highly unlikely to be what you get.
    Blandness, however, hardly characterizes the nation as a whole. On my first visit to New York, where I had come on the audacious mission of teaching two hundred nuns, I wandered into a gift store, browsed a little and then headed for the door. My exit was blocked by a large man with a drooping moustache who was standing with his back to the door. “Okay, so what ya gonna buy?” he asked. I realised after a moment that this was the proprietor and gave him a feeble, English-upper-class-idiot sort of smile. “Come on, what ya gonna buy for Christsakes?” he repeated menacingly, refusing to shift from the door. It was not until some time later that I realised that this visceral aggression was what some New Yorkers regard as humour. It is certainly a lot preferable to arch banter, self-conscious joshing and Boy Scout heartiness.
    Being inept at satire or irony does not of course mean lacking a sense of humour. On the contrary, the United States is marvellously rich in comedy. It represents one of its major contributions to world civilisation. The British are thought to be a humorous bunch, but nothing in their media today can outshine Seinfeld , Family Guy , Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office or the early episodes of The Simpsons . The British, however, excel at whimsy, which is less common in the States. Because they value eccentricity, they enjoy a vein of humour which is quaint, fanciful and capricious. Some years ago, there flourished briefly in Britain a Gnomes Liberation Movement, whose project was to abduct ornamental gnomes from people’s gardens and return them to their owners on the payment of a ransom of candy. Owners who refused this blackmail would sometimes find their kidnapped gnomes lying decapitated on their doorstops, a sinister rim of red around their severed necks.
    There are other instances of such humour. The Guardian newspaper usually conceals a spoof in its pages on April Fool’s Day, which one year appeared in the “Help Wanted” advertisements. There were job ads such as “Dynamic coordinator required for forward-looking project delivering quality service for supervision of progressive resources redistribution,” which turned out on closer inspection to mean nothing at all. It would be hard to imagine a quality U.S. newspaper engaging in this practice. Work in the States is a serious business.

TWO
    The Outgoing Spirit
    Angels and Demons
    There is a kind of American speech which sounds too inflated to Europeans. At its least inspired, American English is a language soggy with superlatives: great, fantastic, awesome, amazing, wonderful, incredible (but not, on the whole, superb, formidable, splendid, or magnificent). One sometimes wonders if there has ever been an American who was not a very wonderful person, with the possible exception of Charles Manson.
    The novelist Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting of a vision of the world he calls angelic—or, somewhat less politely, “shitless.” This way of seeing is full of beams, smiles and high-minded platitudes, averse to all that is dark-tinged, recalcitrant or disagreeable. The angelic march cheerfully forward into an ever rosier future, radiant and wide-eyed, disowning all complexity and ambiguity in their triumphalist self-conviction. Kundera is thinking of the ideological rhetoric of the East European Communist states, which were still alive and kicking at the time he was writing, but the point has a bearing on the world’s most powerful capitalist nation as well. To the European mind, high-pitched rhetoric suggests among