In Search of America, a Bildungsroman & Social Critique

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While reading Asch's In Search of America I was immediately struck by its similarities to Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory, the Simon and Garfunkel song "America," Kerouac's "On The Road" or "Dharma Bums" and the film Easy Rider. Its inclusion with this set of works allows me to consider it a Bildungsroman, or a coming of age narrative. This label seems mutually inclusive and this is a good text to show the diverse nature of this type of story; Asch's text capable of being considered other types of story.

The coming of age tale is a lasting style that has shown its brilliance from the quests of Perceval for the Holy Grail through Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced to the story of Alexander Supertramp of Into the Wild. The deaths of all of these characters (and Easy Rider) at the end of their tale (Troyes' dying 'in the midst' of writing Perceval, Kerouac) is death. At some point, everyone dies.

(Barthes/Foucoult on the Author. Writing as self-sacrifice/death. Are we stuck in life? Or is this 'stuck' feeling the symptom of social wrong?)

The 'coming of age' tale is ubiquitous, it speaks from the heart of the human experience finding itself within the given society which produced both the experience and the narrative. In this way it functions as a social window ripe for critique. As a specific character grows and experiences new ways of life and is exposed to different perspectives than their own naive set, the narrator shifts and their perspective comes full circle. The distance between these two points--that of a naive click, and that of the retrospective glance is a bildungsroman; where by a character learn something about him or herself in relationship to their surroundings.

The interesting part of Asch's writing is his perspective, as his knowledge of his country changes rapidly based on the experiences outside of himself that people are willing to share. One of the most striking moments of shared perspective in the story is the conversation with the African American who tells Asch... "I was trained by Southern white folks, and I know my place. Maybe if I had been trained up North, I'd have been different. But I'm here. And I know my place and I keep it" (288). This raises an interesting question about the relationship of 'place,' movement and self growth in the bildungsroman. I ask this as all of the other works I have chosen to include with Asch's writing involve an epic movement across the country. Asch is moving across the country in search of the country (like Easy Rider/On the Road) whereas this man and his family have likely stayed in the same place since slavery ended. What can be inferred by this? That movement yields greater experience, thus more self-knowledge through knowing one's surroundings better?

It seems that the workers in Asch's story are stuck, and they are not all happy about where and how they are stuck, as the conditions seem pretty horrible. The first character introduced in this excerpt has a broken axle and no money. He is stuck. Next episode involves the dust storm in Oklahoma--Asch is stuck. Mexican bar; non-married/Asch stuck. The union workers and the migrant/native workers are all stuck. This makes me ask, how does this sensation of being stuck in a sea of labeled freedom tie into the Bildungsroman?

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This narrative is different from many of the more personal coming of age stories as the narrator is only ever in the shadows of what is happening around him, recording it. Having spent time doing journalism work I know that this is difficult, because the people who know you are a journalist treat you like a journalist. This is shown in the text when the African American share-crop families show their distrust of the man, refusing to tell him anything, fearing he would charge them something.

The perspective of this story is the first hint that this is not a straightforward Bildungsroman, showing that it is written by way of the (first) third person--who falls short of the fourth-person-singular (term for mutually inclusive stylistic bildungsroman, by way of Lawrence Ferlighetti--see What is Poetry). Though due to the malleability or openness of Asch as a receiver allows him to see into and begin to display many different perspectives, united by one nation and a handful of hardship.

Here it is important to note that though this bildungsroman is not of first person experience, it still retains agency because Asch is out listening to the people in order to share their stories and produce tangible change in the American way of life.

The next issue of this text against the Bildungsroman template is that the text is titled "In Search of America" inferring that it is about the sociopolitical conditions of America in the 1930's, not the growth of some specific character. Much like Easy Rider and the Simon and Garfunkel song here we have a sense that this is about a greater understanding of our nation and the wealth of opportunity or lack thereof in existence on a given day in a given place and how that affects the human condition, and ultimately one's perspective.

To tie this together again, all of the other texts mentioned above fit under the umbrella of the migration narrative,' as they are all moving very fast through time and space--see Hendrix. They are also in search of an illumining something--what makes Asch's work interesting in this set of pieces is that the narrator is a journalist who nods the piece into the domain of meta-non-fictional migration narrative.

This migratory nature opposes the stuck sensation of many of the sharecroppers, as its movements take it beyond the cycles of exploitation the farmer and his workers are kept in by the larger companies.

"He (the farmer) owned the house he lived in and the land he planted, but the bank in which the mortgage on these chattels lay was controlled by the sugar company, and the company set the price for beets, arbitrarily, without the semblance of an open market, of competition. he could accept the price that was offered by this one company, or his beets could rot"(294).

The bit about the burning of natural gas and the sense of complete waste in the broken down oil well scene was just a terrible omen of the waste to come from such horrible foresight. This utter lack of foresight was also exhibited in reference to the 'shipping' of Mexican families into the states for work on the Beet farms, only to threaten them with deportation if they refused to sign contracts of diminishing returns.

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A lot like Woody Guthrie, this text was very illuminating in terms of depression era politics and society--standing on the farthest edge of it all organizing unions to stand up for worker's rights, regardless of their heritage or social stratification. The recognition that you and I and that group over there are, at the end of it all, just being human is an overarching truth and is very important to the Bildungsroman, as this realization is a key part of self growth and prosperity without (or growing up from) excessive suffering. It is also important to remember that everyone dies. We live, we live in a society, it affects our experience, we grow or recede and then we die--the Bildungsroman is a snapshot of the greatest leaps that occur in between these places.

This text immediately drew my interest as my grandfather was born on Dec 25, 1924 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He would tell me he had nothing to play with as a child beyond a stick and the mud--when I knew him, he drove a Lincoln Towncar and had recently moved to Northern Indiana from Chicago. My grandfather must have come of age by way of the Marines and his time in San Diego, California--texts like Asch's help fill in the sociopolitical context for this growth.

For now,