Returning to the Matter of America
I think of Cahokia Jazz as me coming back to the subject I was dealing with in Golden Hill: 'the Matter of America'.
The analogy is with 'the Matter of Britain', the old name for the cycle of stories about King Arthur and his knights. To begin with, 'matter' was just being used to mean the same as 'material'. Stuff pertaining to. You had, in the medieval classification, these stories about King Arthur which were the British stuff, these about Charlemagne which made up the French stuff, and these other ones about Julius Caesar and co. which were the Roman stuff. But quickly the Arthur stories' status as 'the Matter of Britain' picked up another meaning. The suggestion grew that these stories somehow told you something defining about what Britain the place was, and meant. That these stories, in a shadowy way, constituted Britain. It was maybe a little hard to see how the romance of a mythic, perfect, doomed king told you the essential truth about the mixture of mud and blood, class war and deference, idealism and imperialism, industrial take-off and poems about daffodils that followed over the centuries. But a structure of feeling doesn't have to justify itself in the abstract. It just has to produce itself in people's minds when sunlight falls through oak leaves, when a distant castle looks like Camelot.
In the case of America, though, there's a good case for saying that something much less arbitrary is going on. As a country defined explicitly by ideas as well as by accidents of historical continuity, the United States really does have a Matter, a set of constituting legends or myths or stories that have central power in its history. They run alongside the grubby course of events, sometimes acting to change them, always existing in ironic tension with them. In Golden Hill, I was engaging with that part of the Matter that deals with the United States' heroic founding: the story-cluster to do with independence, with liberty, with the separation from Britain. Now I'm moving on. Cahokia Jazz, with its setting in a version of American history where Native Americans haven't been and can't be pushed to the margins of the story, is about the West. It's about settlers' and indigenes' different kinds of claims on the land. It's about naming; about seeing old landscapes as new. It's about slavery (again). It's about the Civil War and Reconstruction. It's about the contingency and path dependency of the ethnic conflicts that have defined the America we know. Last of all it's about music – which has always been more than soundtrack to American history; which is in fact its rhythm and pulse.
The analogy is with 'the Matter of Britain', the old name for the cycle of stories about King Arthur and his knights. To begin with, 'matter' was just being used to mean the same as 'material'. Stuff pertaining to. You had, in the medieval classification, these stories about King Arthur which were the British stuff, these about Charlemagne which made up the French stuff, and these other ones about Julius Caesar and co. which were the Roman stuff. But quickly the Arthur stories' status as 'the Matter of Britain' picked up another meaning. The suggestion grew that these stories somehow told you something defining about what Britain the place was, and meant. That these stories, in a shadowy way, constituted Britain. It was maybe a little hard to see how the romance of a mythic, perfect, doomed king told you the essential truth about the mixture of mud and blood, class war and deference, idealism and imperialism, industrial take-off and poems about daffodils that followed over the centuries. But a structure of feeling doesn't have to justify itself in the abstract. It just has to produce itself in people's minds when sunlight falls through oak leaves, when a distant castle looks like Camelot.
In the case of America, though, there's a good case for saying that something much less arbitrary is going on. As a country defined explicitly by ideas as well as by accidents of historical continuity, the United States really does have a Matter, a set of constituting legends or myths or stories that have central power in its history. They run alongside the grubby course of events, sometimes acting to change them, always existing in ironic tension with them. In Golden Hill, I was engaging with that part of the Matter that deals with the United States' heroic founding: the story-cluster to do with independence, with liberty, with the separation from Britain. Now I'm moving on. Cahokia Jazz, with its setting in a version of American history where Native Americans haven't been and can't be pushed to the margins of the story, is about the West. It's about settlers' and indigenes' different kinds of claims on the land. It's about naming; about seeing old landscapes as new. It's about slavery (again). It's about the Civil War and Reconstruction. It's about the contingency and path dependency of the ethnic conflicts that have defined the America we know. Last of all it's about music – which has always been more than soundtrack to American history; which is in fact its rhythm and pulse.
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