This essay continues the reflections begun in the previous post, “Of lager beer and an Ohio German Catholic Bigot”.
By Christopher Zehnder
Washington Irving
In traveling about our motley country, I am often reminded of Ariosto’s account of the moon, in which the good paladin Astolpho found everything garnered up that had been lost on earth. So I am apt to imagine, that many things lost in the old world are treasured up in the new; having been handed down from generation to generation, since the early days of the colonies. A European antiquary, therefore, curious in his researches after the ancient and almost obliterated customs and usages of his country, would do well to put himself upon the track of some early band of emigrants, follow them across the Atlantic, and rummage among their descendants on our shores.
So wrote the 19th-century American author, Washington Irving, in a short essay, “The Creole Village.” When I first read this essay over 25 years ago, I was intrigued. I had been raised with the metaphor of America as a melting pot in which national cultural distinctions were boiled down into a homogeneous brew that hardly savored of any of the original ingredients. One could detect trace elements of them to be sure – borrowed foreign words and phrases, for instance, or remnants of ethnic styles in our plastic art, music, and cookery. Yet, such elements merely made our national cultural stew a bit more interesting than it would otherwise have been; they do not make it discernibly French, German, Jewish, Italian, African, or Japanese. It remains peculiarly American soup – rather bland. We are a mixture of these cultures, and yet none of them. Continue reading
