CULTURE IS NOT FATE: THE INDEPENDENT IN CONTRAST TO THE INTERDEPENDENT

Gish Jen, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, 2012) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("A note about terminology: I have not used the word 'independent' as it is popularly used, to mean self-sufficient or free from outside control; neither have I used the word 'interdependent' to mean interconnected or mutually dependent. Rather I have used these words as cross-cultural psychologists do, as a way of describing two very different models of self-construal. The first--the 'independent,' individualistic self--stresses uniqueness, defines itself via inherent attribute such as its traits, abilities, values, and preferences, and tends to see things in isolation. The second--the 'interdependent,' collectivist self--stresses commonality, defines itself via its place, roles, loyalties, and duties, and tend to see things in context. Naturally, between these two very different self-construals lies a continuum along which most people are located, and along which they move, too, over the course of their lives or even over the course of a moment. Culture is not fate; it only offers templates, which individual can finally accept, reject, or modify, and do." Id. at 6-7. Unfortunately, I think, most of us do think cultural is fate. And, as a consequence, we lock ourselves into our culture or subculture, rarely exploring beyond it. We create, in the words of Doris Lessing, prison in which we choose to live. "For me, the most disconcerting of the Massey Lectures to date may well have been Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow, which showed the founding of such cherished institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston to have been a reaction against the immigrant hordes. So, too it seems, was the emergence of cultural hierarchy in America--the distinction between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow that, for all its postmodern blurring, continues a cornerstone of art-making today. The late nineteenth-century drive for political order was paralleled, Levine demonstrates, by a drive for cultural order--and this is hardly the only time artistic felicities have turned out complicities. Were we writers to take to heart the reams of theory that have in recent decades shone such a hard light on our best intentions, not to say our best lines, we writers would all have to put our computers up for sale." "That we don't is testimony, I think, to just how powerfully embedded individualism is in our culture, and how much the novel is tied into that, starting with its modus operandi--which, for all its old confronting of society is, in its own way, determinedly oblique. In keeping with the dominant Western view of 'art-art' as proudly, rightly, and essentially useless... That things--even literature--should be useful is a given for most Chinese." Id. at 93-95.).