the Paper

The Expatriate American Dream: A Stream of Consciousness

I have a confession to make: I cannot write a research paper on the American dream. After six straight weeks of research, I still don’t really know what it is. Fitzgerald didn’t know either, nor did Hemingway, Eliot, Ginsberg, Kerouac, or William S. Burroughs. They only knew how to poke holes in it, and that’s all I know how to do.

Freud made this mistake, trying to research dreams. He should have known, as I should know, that the very fact that they’re called dreams exempts them from study – because they are part of the subconscious, whether it be the individual subconscious of the human mind or the collective subconscious of a nation. I cannot attest to the subconscious of this particular nation. There are other people who can, however, and for the past few weeks I have done nothing but study them, and at the end of it all, though they have more to say than I on the subject, their conclusion seems to be the same.

The American Dream is a dream of mor - everlasting more. In an episode of Seinfeld, one of the most American of all American sitcoms, Jerry relates to Kramer a conversation between he and George, during which they discovered the were not grown-ups, but rather large children. “And you thought, there has to be more to life than this?” Kramer interrupts. “Yes!” Jerry exclaims. “Well, I’ve got news for you,” Kramer replies. “There isn’t!”

I have a few thoughts on the American dream: first of all, I think it seems like an awful fucking lot to expect out of a nation, for it to fulfill your dreams. I think Thomas Jefferson was somewhat moronic for including “the pursuit of happiness” in the preamble to the constitution (though at least he thought ahead by adding the disclaimer in the form of the word “pursuit”). Now, for two hundred years, Americans have been looking at happiness as their birthright. Happiness is not a birthright, nor can you really pursue it without defeating its point entirely. There is a reason that the moment most Americans gain whatever dream they slapped the title on, they find themselves strangely dissatisfied. “It hurts to find out that what you wanted doesn’t match what you dreamed it would be,” Brett Butler said. Yes Brett, it does indeed. I, for instance, expected more out of this class, but instead I know no more than I did before it started and am stuck inside on a beautiful Sunday afternoon writing what amounts to no more than a string of obscenities.

But, you say, what about the immigrants? The one who cite living out the very American dream advertised by Ellis Island? To which I would tell you, these immigrants were not pursuing happiness. They were pursuing goodness – a good work, a good environment in which to raise their family, good salary, and a good life. You can demand goodness from your government, but you cannot ask for happiness.

I am tired of studying the endless disillusionments of men who were asking for too much in the first place. I am tired of reading the complaints of people who have it good, and I’m tired of observing the manipulation by this government of the people who come looking for the dream it’s advertising. And besides, I am not writing a research paper on immigrants. I am writing a paper on emigrants.

I am writing about the dream as it concerns expatriates. Does one really need an entire research paper on that to know that the dream, as it concerns expatriates, does not exist? Why else would they have run away from it?

Yes, you do. Because of course, it is important to understand just why American expatriates are just that – choosing to be “out of country,” as the original Greek states, or “ex-patriots” as everyone else assumes.

So here goes:

In every society, in every era, there is always a group of people who refuse to play by the rules. They go by different names: rebels, activists, misfits, nonconformists, revolutionaries, sometimes even heretics. They hold different roles: artists, writers, scientists, philosophers. But they remain consistently necessary, because they are the ones who force change, promoting it among their respective societies and therefore compelling it forward. Look in any civilization in the history of the world, and you will find them.

In American society particularly these men and women must be esteemed, because revolution is the basis on which its entire nation is founded. Creative revolutionaries are the people who have built this country from conception to constant improvement. Often they build by first tearing down, deconstructing in order to reconstruct.

In modern American history, there have been many significant groups of these innovators that have undertaken the abstract philosophies of Americanism, dissecting them in order to make sense of them, deriding them in order to better understand them, tearing them full of holes in the blind hope that the pieces may be basted together to become a stronger fabric of thought. “To form a more perfect union…”

In the twentieth century, there were two groups of artists who made significant literary contributions to the disenchantment of their respective cultural outlooks, bringing American society as a whole to a higher level of enlightenment. So influential were they to their current society, that they were both referred to separately from their culture, not just as “groups”, but as “generations.” They were, and still are, the visionaries: the Lost Generation, and the Beat Generation.

Both the Lost and the Beat Generations were founded on a similar principle; that of the cynicism of the societal ideals upheld by the majourity of their citizenry. In both cases, this cynicism was manifested in the same way – in writing, and when that didn’t work, in substance abuse.

The Lost Generation was a term allegedly coined by Gertrude Stein, but introduced into wider consciousness by Ernest Hemingway in his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast. It referred to a group of artistic and literary minds who fled the constructs of America to a freer and more creatively opportunistic Paris. It was made up of many members, but among the most influential were Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein.

The Beat Generation took a slightly different approach. They were expatriates in their own country, distancing themselves from their countrymen in their ideals, but choosing to shout those ideals not from opposing mountaintops, as had their predecessors, but within the city square.

The two generations were separated only by about a decade, the Lost Generation occupying the twenties and thirties, and the Beat Generation taking over the fifties to make them into the sixties. The Lost Generation was fueled by the depression of the era. Beleaguered by the stunning number of casualties in the first World War, they incited themselves, banding together and organizing their mutual disillusionment into ranks imitating the military echelon in which their lives were so embroiled. The inescapability of war translated itself into the inevitability of failure in their works, which featured in singular detail the quiet agony of disappointment. The characters written of by these authours were mirroured in the haunted faces of their comrades. Sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, either way defeat seemed unavoidable. Gatsby’s body facedown in a pool paralleled the abrupt death of a charismatic soldier towards the end of the war. Hemingway’s Old Man in the Sea may as well have been a veteran, still frequented in his old age by the quiet nightmares of the faded horrours of war.

In contrast, the members of the Beat Generation defied their cultural surroundings instead of absorbing it, hijacking the conservative fifties and commandeering it into the wild, dizzy sixties. Said poet Allen Ginsberg in his beatnik manifesto and war cry of a thousand strung out misfits, Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…(Ginsberg, 1).” It should come as no great surprise that most of the defining works of this generation were censored until recently. In fact, William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch was the subject of the last majour literary censorship battle United States. The book was banned by Boston courts in 1962, but the ban was overturned in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The hearing was attended by two of Burroughs’ beat generation brothers, Normal Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom testified in the book’s defense (Tytell, 134).

To many of their time, the men and women of both the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation were seen as reprobates, heretics to the optimism of the American way. However, the writings produced by both have remained a barometer for social awareness, a call for change that resounds even after the members of both generations have passed, either by death or self-imposed destruction. Through their pessimism, they inspired.

That was supposed to be my introduction. From there, we would have gone through a methodical historical study of the members of both generations, studied their effects on each other, and their effect on the American nation. But can I be honest? I don’t see how helpful that would have been to a broader understanding of the American dream. There have been many books and articles written on both generations. I’ve read quite a few of them in the past couple of weeks. However, it does not make sense to quote other people’s thoughts on the subjects in question, when one can simply quote the subject themselves. So below you will find not an outlined research paper, full of historical information organized chronologically leading to an ultimate conclusion, but the thoughts of the men and women who made up both the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation – their thoughts, and mine. For if we are to truly study dreams, we must take it directly from the source, else we will be guilty of wasting a spectacular amount of time and speculation.

“All things truly wicked start from innocence.” –Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

There is really no such thing as a rebel without a cause. There are rebels for the sake of rebellion (rebels with a cause, and that cause is coolness), but there is no such thing as a truly purposeless rebel. Rebellion is simply too arduous of an undertaking to do it without cause.

If it is the cause of these misfits to poke holes in the accepted logic, to prompt change by bucking tradition, and to find answers by asking too many questions, than it can also be assumed that they had some reason for doing this other than the hell of it.

“All things truly wicked start from innocence,” Hemingway said in his memoir. And he may as well be referring to America itself. America began as a wide-eyed youth, eager for the freedom of social revolution. The writings of early pilgrims, such as John Winthrop and Crevecouer, serve as proof of the rampant naivety of building a new nation. It was an age of innocence, and age where people still believed government could be a balancing force for good of its people. But the government got bigger, and men did wicked things to preserve the way of life it advertised. The disillusionment of men came about from one too many wars, from the perceived failure of their government in the Great Depression, from the carpet of blood that was left in the wake of two world wars, and the holes in the fabric of American society that were rent by the deaths of their best and brightest. “See that little stream, we could walk to it in two minutes,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Nial Ferguson. “It took the British a whole month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.”

Innocence, by its very nature, must eventually give way to human nature, and by extension the nature of human government. “Pride goeth before the fall,” says a popular Biblical proverb. It is, however, common in the case of human government for this fall from grace to go unnoticed, so gradually does it usually happen. It then becomes the job for those close observers who would dare, to brave public disdain and call out their government and their people. In this way, if not actually “out of country” according to the Greek meaning of the word expatriate, they become expatriates all the same. Often primarily because they are labeled that by their countrymen, they become “ex-patriots.” "I'm tired of being labelled anti-American because I ask questions,” said Susan Sarandon. But what Susan doesn’t realize is that this is the trend of empires, and it goes back far longer than her career. To speak up against any majourity-held philosophy is to expose yourself to accusations of heresy. It was that way with the Catholic empire. It is that way with the American empire. They may not burn people at stakes – part of what makes this country attractive to many around the world, and much of what made it great in the first place – but they will burn what they can – they will set fire to reputations. One has only to look at any political campaign of the past twenty years to see that this is true.

On that note, as Susan Sarandon has no doubt found in her tireless effort to call out the Iraq war as an immoral one – the call for change is a desperate one. "Desperation is the raw material of drastic change,” William S. Burroughs said. “Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."

Tyler Durden had a simpler way of saying this in the American postmodern movie manifesto, Fight Club: “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” Somewhat more belligerently, the antonym of this concept can be heard by middle Americans everywhere speaking out on anti-Americanism: “If you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.” And the people who say it, though often seen as irritating and more often than not incredibly unintelligent for saying it, have a point. Because until men get desperate enough to leave behind the reality and the ideals of the way of life they have found inadequate, they will never force change, and change must be forced for it to earn its name.

Change is life. Everything else is apathy. History is not a line, it is an EKG, full of peaks and valleys that represent nothing if not the changing hearts of its people, and their actions as a result of it. In the twenties, there was a Depression. In the thirties, there was a war. In the forties, there was disenchantment and emigration of some of its most intellectually gifted citizens as a result of both of these things. There was also another war, and in the fifties, as a result of this newest and propaganda-driven war, there was a manufactured dream, chugging out on assembly lines at the same rate as the factories. But there were also ingrates who refused to fall in line, and they forced 1959 to turn into nineteen sixty, letting loose a dizzy cycle of drugs and lust confused for love of life. They sunk deeper into the haze during the seventies, coming out in the eighties with only some of their minds intact, but still all of the selfishness. In the nineties, they looked for something new to fight for, and finding nothing, continue to fight blindly, with each other, against the government, in Iraq, on the television, within our own minds.

Tyler Durden said something else: "Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

The natives are angry. The riots, the smear campaigns, the bad emo music, the Sundance audience favourites, the blogs, the school shootings – all conspire to prove this point. One such native is my friend Chad. Chad is a broadcast news producer for one of the largest and most respected news organizations in the world. John O’Hare said of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “He was a better just plain writer than all of us combined.” Chad is a better just plain writer than all the current kings of literature. He writes effortlessly, aggressively, with an arrogance that would be called charm were it not for its oft-caused offense. He has what F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to as “the wise and tragic sense of life.” He would be the section of the library that high school seniors study and have their life changed by sixty years in the future, if it weren’t for the fact that he has to pay the rent.

He hates his job because the news media organization is has been corrupted by fear-mongering, celebrity-pandering, and the prioritizing of ratings and ad dollars over the education of the people. But he doesn’t quit, because he has a city-sized rent to pay on his New York flat. “I’m idealistic, not fucking stupid,” he said, rationalizing. His hero is Edward R. Murrow, and Goodnight and Good Luck was his favourite movie of 2005. But the necessities of life prevent him from ever truly achieving the same idealistic success as his hero. For ours is not an age of heroism, it is an age of incredible lethargy. “Ours is a tragic age,” D.H. Lawrence said in his novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, “so we refuse to take it tragically.” We take it sarcastically, we take it on the chin, we take it lying down, but we do not take it as it is – an age of tragedy. The tragedy, as Florence King puts it, of human errour. "People are so busy dreaming of the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch,” she says. “Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Errour."

“I feel it is your duty,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a lettre to his daughter Frances, “to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in, with a certain esprit (Fitzgerald, 11).”

“There are no second acts in American lives,” he said. It is obvious in his portrayal of the Great Gatsby, poster boy for all that is the American dream and in his sudden burn-out, that this was not only a catchphrase but a strongly observed belief. The possibility that this statement could apply not only to American lives but also by extension to America itself is an interesting one to ponder. I believe this may be one of those quotes that people often reference with no clear idea what it actually means. For my part, I am inclined to pair it with another statement attributed to Fitzgerald “Vitality,” he said, “shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

If indeed there are no second acts in America, then it appears we are left with only options: we retire after the first act, or we move onto another play entirely. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again,” William S. Burroughs said in his novel Naked Lunch, illustrating which option he chose. “We had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

Though this is commonly considered the lethargic motto of the Beat Movement, in reality, it’s also the trend of human history. Our battered history is piled on the sidewalk again with every war, and every generation we have an even longer way to go. With all our technology and politicians, and organizations for the progression of human rights, it seems we never get any closer to our destination, and it is perhaps because we do not know what our destination is. Is it utopia? Perhaps. But utopia seems a long way off, so in the meantime, the road is life. We move along. With every birth and death, of every individual and every generation, we move along.

Jack Kerouac is the world’s greatest expert on this concept, the concept of moving on down the road. He authored the Beat Generation Bible, which still echoes with the young and disaffected today, On the Road.

“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? —it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies… why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?...The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great that I thought I was in a dream…”

America was built on change, or more accurately, on the backs of men who were working towards change. Every significant act in American history was brought on by some person’s or some group of people’s desire for change, for progression, for moving forward. It is why America remains as a beacon of hope. But for those who have lost hope, there is no recourse but to move on down the road, whether that road leads to the West Coast or to Paris.

T.S. Eliot, resident poet of the Lost Generation, said of his fellow expatriates, in his poem the Wasteland:

“The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.”

There will always be misfits. Sometimes they are revolutionaries who fight wars for independence, sometimes they are pioneers who explore uncharted territory and claim it for their own adventure, sometimes they are strung-out beatniks or disenchanted writers who move to Paris or go on an endless road trip in pursuit, not of happiness, but of hope. Of change. Of progress, of revolution, and of all that is new and thrilling and alive. And someday they will probably run out of places (you can’t even smoke in public in Paris anymore, so that’s out), and then they will die hoping for more adventure still. Jack Kerouac explored America, paying attention to it in manic detail, and came up only with this. “In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom,” Burroughs said.

You can call it a dream if you want. You’d be wrong, but you could. Because the truth is, it’s not so much a dream as it is a reality of life. A professor I had a long time ago once told me, “you just have to find a method of survival.” For some people that is dreaming, and maybe that’s the point of the American dream – not its fruition, but the act of dreaming itself. Maybe it’s what makes its citizens hard workers, or its entrepreneurs more creative, maybe it’s what makes the job market flourish and the economy thrive. But for some, the dream isn’t enough. For some, it’s travel. For some, it’s the comforting routine of work. For some, it’s money. For some, it’s bourbon. For some it’s a belt and a syringe. For some, it’s a family. For some, it’s land. For some, it’s religion. But these are all, all of them, simple methods of survival, acts of living that make life better. Rations to take along on our pursuit of happiness.

I can’t quite figure out if Thomas Jefferson was smart to include the pursuit of happiness in his preamble, or if he was just hopefully naive. There’s no point pursuing happiness, because happiness cannot be caught, and the pursuit, after awhile, becomes tiring. It’s like love – to some extent, if you have to work at it, it becomes pointless and self-defeating. “Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me,” Kerouac said. Whether or not he ever did is doubtful; he went on to say, “The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”

So what is to be done while waiting? We dream or we fight, but always we survive. And some of us, by word or deed, do our best to try to make the world a better place before leaving it. “The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does,” Allen Ginsberg said. Unfortunately, his poetry often found itself censored from the American public, and thus at a disadvantage towards saving the world. It is often this way for those who seek change. Revolutionaries are destined to be persecuted, from Christ, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King as well as John Lennon, who said in his Ballad of John and Yoko, “Christ, you know it ain’t easy. You know how hard it can be. The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me.”

Edward R. Murrow once said, “I have always been on the side of the heretics against those who burned them because the heretics so often turned out to be right. . Dead, but right.” Murrow, of course, underwent the crucifixion of his reputation by his arch nemesis and representative of the American paranoid, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It didn’t quite take, but it is proof that heretics and those who support them often get burnt.

So where does this leave these generations of expatriates, and us their ancestors? What is their American Dream? Do they even get one? General Douglas MacArthur once said, “Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.” Perhaps this means that the members of these generations must contend with the consequences of being an expatriate – being also, in ex-patriot according to the abstract theory of the American dream, and therefore undeserving.

In the end, it doesn’t quite matter anyway, for it is perhaps William S. Burroughs who summed it up best, saying, "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

What else do you need to know? The Lost Generation, The Beat Movement – all these men and women sought simply to illustrate that the dream is not dead, it was never alive in the first place. There was opportunity, sure, but it was never unique. There was a democracy, but it was never incorruptible. There was freedom, but it was never, ever free.

We poke holes in these things so that we can display their inadequacy. The American is not inadequate because it is American, it is inadequate because it is not a dream. It is an advertisement, a controlled ideal of a philosophy that will die with the rest, and history will take from it what is learned, and leave behind what becomes irrelevantl; and it will move along.

“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness,” F. Scott said. And he’s right, but that’s not the point. The point is that they looked. Maybe we won’t be happy running after the illusive something, but at least we’ll be alive. That’s the thought. Did these generations of men and women make up their own minds to be contrary? Or were they born that way? Or is everyone born that way, only some of us channel their dissatisfaction into a government-provided dream, while others of us defy, boats against the current who were never quite able to turn around and thought, as long as we’re out here, we might as well see what we can find? As long as we’re lost, we may as well explore. As long as we’re dying, we may as well live.

The dream, then, becomes reality in the way all dreams do – we wake up. We get up. We eat breakfast. We go to work. We build a life. Sometimes, we do crazy things. Sometimes, we leave town. Every day, we change. Every day, we are changed. And we move on down the road, sometimes running with youthful energy and sometimes having to be pushed down it, but always, always moving towards the ultimate goal. As far as what the ultimate goal is, well, that’s the dream. And you know what Cinderella said to Jacques about dreams: you can’t tell, or it won’t come true.

the Explanation

This blog was set up as a partner to my main blog, the American Dream According to Me...and Some Other People. The main blog was set up as a project for a class on the American dream. This page was set up for viewing the partner to the conceptual map, which was a final paper. The topic of my final paper was the Expatriate American Dream, which is presented in a stream of consciousness style and explores, in a windy fashion, the thoughts and dreams of America's most famous expatriates: the Lost Generation (focusing mainly on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot), and the Beat Movement (featuring the trifecta of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg - Kerouac's On the Road served as inspiration for the style of the following paper).

Happy Reading.