ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTWAR novels about Americans abroad, Don DeLillo’s The Names, takes place in Greece, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when the Vietnam War and the Iran hostage affair brought about an unprecedented crisis of faith in American power. The novel is set in Athens, the expat characters’ latest stop on their tour of an unacknowledged empire connected by mysterious corporate postings: in Egypt and Nigeria; Panama and Turkey; East Africa, the Sudan, Lebanon, and finally Greece. When it was published in 1982, the British critic Michael Wood observed that for American writers, America “is not a place or a nation but a condition of the soul tied to a habit of the possession of power.” DeLillo’s novel might have come too early in the spread of the empire for individual Americans to grasp the ways in which their own identities were connected to this possession. I could only begin to understand the novel now that I lived in Turkey.
The Names, in fact, is a study in American ignorance; then as now, few Americans knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or how to pronounce Iran (“E-ron”). DeLillo’s protagonist, Axton, is a risk analyst for an insurance company that counsels multinational corporations on pressing questions about the world. Which country is risky? Where will the next bomb go off? Who creates the risk? Axton is also, as my Turkish friends liked to imagine I was, an unwitting agent for the CIA, the spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy. “Are they killing Americans?” is his main question. Axton and the Americans abroad can’t make sense of the world, can’t grab onto anything. They are not so much arrogant as confused. They perceive their vulnerability, their noses wrinkling at smells in the air: “Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?”
A Greek man named Eliades, with the aspect of a grumpy sage, says to the Americans:
I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves.
DeLillo’s expatriates exaggerate their shame, apologize for not speaking languages, for not being able to figure out their own addresses or phone numbers in a foreign land. They survive on the “humor of personal humiliation,” but there are worse humiliations. “‘All countries where the United States has strong interests stand in line to undergo a terrible crisis so that at last the Americans will see them,’ Eliades says. ‘This is very touching.’”
I wonder now how deliberately DeLillo chose Greece as the setting for his novel about the American empire. In the late 1940s, Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that he considered what was happening in Greece under the Americans worse than what was happening in Czechoslovakia under the Soviets. To me, Greece would come to seem like the beginning and the end of everything.
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WHEN MY FELLOWSHIP finished in 2009, the financial crisis whittled away any desire of mine to go home either in the short term—there were no jobs—or in the long term. The financial crisis made me stop looking at my future as I once had. My generation, somewhere between delayed adolescence and starting a family, felt the new economic limits in America acutely; it was no longer clear that our lives would get exponentially better, as our country had always promised us. It is a testament to how deeply capitalism had sunk into the Americans’ consciousness that the financial crisis—the failure of capitalism—seemed to undo us more than September 11. If the economy was a sham, if the money was a sham, if the dream was a sham, then was anything they ever told us about ourselves true?
I stayed in Istanbul, where it was cheaper, and where, oddly enough, things were flourishing financially, because after the collapse of so many economies throughout the world, investors began directing their money to Turkey. The country, however, was still one that few magazines wanted to know about. I spent the last months of my fellowship studying the international activities of the Gülen movement. Just like the American missionaries of the nineteenth century, the Gülenists had built schools everywhere from Kabul to Nairobi, Japan to Indonesia, Mexico City and across the United States of America: Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. Many American policy makers embraced the Gülenists as a necessary moderating Islamic force in a world besieged by Islamic terrorism. I wanted to know whether the West’s preoccupation with terrorism might have made them blind to the Gülenists’ normal human flaws: destructive ambition, a desire for state power. But few editors were curious about Gülen, the imam who lived in America. One told me that he couldn’t see why the Gülen movement, being peaceful and nonthreatening, had anything to do with American interests.
So I went to Greece. The financial crisis had gotten stuck there, drawing strength from the country’s many dysfunctions. Everyone, at the time, looked down on Greece. Pundits scoffed that the Greeks had brought their stupendous crisis upon themselves, as if some deficit in their collective southern character, some deeply embedded depravity, had compelled them to destroy Europe. Just as with the investment bankers who couldn’t muster any empathy for Americans who had lost their houses to bum mortgages, there was an international assumption that only an inferior (crazy, irrational, corrupt) people would have allowed such a calamity to befall them, not that the calamity might have been part of a larger calamity, and certainly not that the calamity might have begun, at least somewhat, in the United States. This was the strange way our sense of identity worked; we were omnipotent, and yet when a global financial crisis happened, we contemptuously shifted the blame onto other people, other countries. I didn’t know much about Greeks, except for the remnants of the community in Istanbul, and I knew few growing up. It might have been their insignificance in my imagination that led me—perhaps unconsciously—to imbibe the spectacularly insidious prejudice of the time: the lazy, crazy Greeks. This silly tiny country. I arrived in Athens expecting a circus.