culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU
exchange between countries, or, more importantly, between continents. The
cardinal coordinates have ceased to be mere geographical landmarks and have
become bearers of some cultural specificities or of some cultural determinants.
Thus, the East, through the maternal presence of Europe, has become the
equivalent of tradition, of history and the old. On the other hand, the West has
become associated with the new, innovation, discovery, opportunity, which may
be noticed with Malcolm Bradbury, both as a critic and as a writer.
3. a. East vs. West and/in history
The system of culture can be compared, from a certain perspective, to the
physical or mental system – when it no longer finds in itself answers to recurrent
questions, it tries to search “beyond” the constraints of its own self in order to
attempt enrichment, replenishment (if we are to use here a Barthean term).
Starting from the pragmatic perspective of the economic and demographic
changes, we easily identify one of the main causes which led to a quick and total
opening towards America. The New World offered a territory readily waiting to
be exploited: the natural and territorial resources have lured, seduced and in the
end literally abducted the Europeans (only it was a willing abduction, if we may
call it so). Thus, the forefathers – pilgrims and founders, pioneers and preachers,
planters and slaves, entrepreneurs and immigrants – were attracted to the New
World, fleeing from an old political, social, religious ideology towards a new
opportunism (Brunel 2003: 42–43). In a more or less slow pace the cultural
values were also transferred onto the new territories. At the same time, the
newcomers also contracted the American dynamism, individualism and capitalist
religion when they dreamed of the United States, “the land of opportunity,
freedom, space, jazz, spontaneity and, with luck, even a little sex as well.”
(Bradbury, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, 2000: VIII)
At the beginning the idea of Americanness was equivalent to that of
investigative or investing mirage. This myth of the New World, with its utopian
freedom and new beginnings, determined a unidirectional exchange on the
coordinate East–West. A new emigration, this resettling of the manpower, of the
investors and, finally of the intelligentsia constituted itself in a major wave of
reinvention and expansion. America offered the opportunity of enlarging one’s
horizon of knowledge, exploitation and investment. The Europeans felt that they
were running from an edifice that could not encompass them anymore and that
was collapsing under the burden of its own troubled history. Malcolm Bradbury
tackles this aspect in the “Introduction” to the study Dangerous Pilgrimages.
Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel rendering the contrast between the two
territories and traditions: “If America was the new born child of history, Europe
was the presumed parent. If America was the world’s rising western empire,
Europe must be the falling one. If America was, as Hegel claimed, “the land of
the future”, Europe must be the world of the past. If America was the place
where, as Tocqueville proclaimed, “everything is in constant motion”, Europe
must be the continent of fixity and continuity.” (1995: 7) These are the aspects
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