The Outgoing Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 31

of Northern Irish culture (golf, snooker, huge meals, guns, obesity, theme parks, violen-
ce, paramilitaries, puritan values, Evangelical fervour) which closely resemble parts of the
States. Most U.S. presidents with Irish backgrounds have been from Ulster, the northerly
part of the nation.
Innocence and Experience
It is because they are so outgoing that Americans can seem so innocent. However much
experience they accumulate, there can still be a freshness and directness about them which
seems deeply non-European. Whatever great stacks of human life they already have under
their belts, they always seem eager for more, and we associate eagerness with the innocent
rather than with the jaded and overbred. It is not, of course, that all Americans really are
innocent, any more than all Europeans are devious and decadent. It is rather that straight-
ness and openness are childlike qualities, and childhood and innocence, despite the best
efforts of Sigmund Freud, are still thought to be closely allied. Being crafty and deceptive
are complex social practices that children have yet to pick up. The day when a child learns
to dissemble marks a milestone in its progress towards adulthood, though it would seem
strange to celebrate it with a visit to the circus.
Striving to recapture a lost innocence is a staple theme of American culture. Perhaps all
civilisations are nostalgic for Eden, but America has more reason for this hankering than
most. It has never lost its sense that there is something synthetic and unreal about civilisa-
tion. Regaining the happy garden was a constant preoccupation of the early Puritans. There
is, however, a paradox about trying to recapture lost innocence, not least in literature. To
write about childlike innocence is inevitably to betray it, since there is no writing in para-
dise. Language is the sign of a fallen adult world. It signifies that you have been cast out of
the happy garden, and does so in the very act of trying to scramble back into it. You cannot
get behind language in language. The child's innocence is not meaningful to the child it-
self, so that trying to retrieve it is less like trying to unearth a buried state of being than like
trying to remember what happened last night when you were leglessly drunk. The reason
this is so hard is that the brain was probably not laying down memory traces at the time, so
there is really nothing to recall. Just the same is true of the child's spontaneity and lack of
self-consciousness.
America's love affair with innocence thus involves a degree of self-deception. It also in-
volves an erasure of history. History is guilt, which is one reason why children, who do not
languish under the burden of time, seem so guileless. For adults to recreate this condition
means continually wiping out their history and treating every moment as though it were mi-
raculously new. In a well-worn American phrase, it is a matter of being born again, though
this particular rebirth has to happen all the time. The only way you can recapture the inno-
cence of the child, who is out of time, is to move so fast that you live in a perpetual present.