culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

ANDREIA IRINA SUCIU
Englishman who returns into the arms of his mother-nation not because of some
nationalist conviction, but because of habit and ease.
But before giving the verdict in Walker’s case, we shall present the
general picture of the consequences of such an exchange. Any such import
implies a recontextualisation and a reimplantation of the disrooted values and
identities. But the process can be very risky in the case in which this
(re)invention is built on an uncertain foundation or when transfer means just
fragmentation. The haphazard import, the embracing of the new without any
restraining, the total breach with the previous status and values can lead to an
individual or national crisis, to an overturning of hierarchies and loss of the
authentic values through demythicisation. The modern consumerist society has,
perhaps even more obviously, registered these mutations, inventing and then
experiencing the passing from barter to commerce, from conquest to destruction,
from construction/constructivism to deconstruction/ deconstruct-ivism. The
current traffic of goods, people and values has led to the obliteration of tradition;
but then the question that arose was “Whose tradition did America follow?” So
long as the basis was a massive import and progress meant mixture and
incorporation, where did its identity lie? Many have inferred that it lied precisely
in the openness with which everything was absorbed and in the personal manner
of combining them in a more or less homogeneous whole. The only shortcoming
was the need of leaning on tradition, which resulted in what we called the
bidirectional nature of the exchange. America sent its (her) emissaries towards
the East and made its own selection of that which could be imported. The
outcome, felt especially in present-day society, is boomerang-like, for it was not
only America that received what Europe had chosen to send it, but the old lady
also felt the inflow of Americanism in its inner mechanisms. Perhaps this is the
reason why Bradbury used the adjective “dangerous” in the title of the study that
we have quoted so far for illustration. There probably exists a danger of this
transfer whose links and implications cannot be fully controlled and which can
lead to the contamination we were speaking about.
Sometimes, the manner through which authors choose to defend
themselves against the potential tragism of this situation is, as in Bradbury’s
case, that of parody, the sarcastic or ironic note. Bradbury’s hero, lacking the
courage and the capacities to adapt to the new is mocked at and in the end
punished with repatriation and forbiddance of the Promised Land. It is still as a
punishment that the reversed motifs function: the baptism that the hero should
receive when stepping on American soil is replaced by a bath which he takes
before disembarking, and the first thing he buys is a pair of dotted underpants.
Thus, the author shows his anger at his hero’s lack of anger, a new type of
individual that fails to inscribe his name on the list formed by that nucleus of
writers from England’s 1950s of which he was supposed to be part and who
were known for their spite against the socio-political mechanisms of the country,
for the resentment with which they regarded the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the
superior classes of society. But Walker does not seem to manifest any degree of
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