Sort of political, sort of antipolitical, and spoiler-free
3:55 PM PDT, May 20, 2007
It occurred to me that I could give you a little bit of a sample that stands pretty well on its own from my now-available as an e-book "lost" novel, Payback City (see my post prior to this one). This is from the introduction, and it's most of the section titled "Ten Years After, " and it does a fair job of explaining what I think about the political (or rather the anti-political) role of fiction writers. I think it stands fairly well on its own. Probably in a few more weeks I'll post an excerpt from the actual fiction, if I can think of one that works well on its own (or you can read the first few pages at my collector's blog, in the comments to the annnouncement). Meanwhile, political folk, here's why you probably find me a bit unsatisfying, and apolitical folk, here's what I think fiction that touches on politics ought to do. Comments emphatically welcome ...
And now, from the 2007 intro to the unpublished till now 1997 novel Payback City -- without further ado -- Ten Years After In political history, ten years can be an eternity—consider 1913-1923, for an extreme example—and yet life is lived a day at a time, not in eras or in turning points. One day we turn back and see how far we have come, how much has changed, how wrong (and right) we were, and perhaps we say "I should have been paying attention to that all along." So what follows are some thoughts I had along the way, as, for the first time in almost ten years, I read through Payback City. First of all, in 1997 the American sense of security, the feeling that we were basically okay and safe, was what I will call Blue Security, as in the blue states of the election maps. (I might as easily have dubbed my two "securities" Clinton and Bush, Democrat and Republican, or liberal and conservative, but I think the differences are more cultural than they are political, partisan, or personal.) The people who felt secure (and not everyone did) felt so because they thought prosperity was conquering the world and propagating democracy, and that terrorism in essence was a police problem. The Blue Security advocates told us that if we could arrange for most people to get some of the good stuff, ignoring as we traditionally do that a fairly small "some people" owned most of the significant good stuff, the world would become more peaceful and freer over time. In case of terrorism, for the short run, call the cops, and for the long run, build malls and make movies. Now, looking back, it is manifest that we were not secure, but that is not what matters in our present politics. Politicians of all parties, and even more so their bureaucratic handlers and flunkies, seldom deliver what is promised (peace, justice, security, prosperity, you know, all that stuff). But in this democratic age, the public holds them accountable, and since they really can't seem to deliver what they're promising, they've got to give us something in its place. What we get, instead, then, is things that ought to work (programs, legislation, campaigns, and so forth). Ought to is of course relative to the voter/consumer/citizen; when your side is in, they will do things that don't fix the problem but do allow you to feel that the people in charge are doing things that ought to work. So in 1997, with the Blue part of American culture running the show, we got Blue Security—not security, about which people were very justifiably worried after events like the World Trade Center attack of 1993, but Blue Security, the warm feeling that, for people with a Blue worldview, Blue things were being done about their fear of being abruptly murdered, and Blue things ought to work. You have no doubt figured out where I am going with this, either due to the sheer obviousness of the point, or by skimming down. Here, in 2007, we are instead living in Red Security, in which civilizations are clashing, Europeans are sissies and millions of Americans are closeted Europeans, the short run response to terrorism is to send marines and paratroops, and the long run response is to make sure we always have more marines and paratroops. Red Security allows a different group of people—roughly, conservative Americans, Republicans, business people, and people outside the major urban centers—to feel since Red things are being done, by people on the Red team, it ought to work. Neither Blue Security nor Red Security is wholly unrealistic; indeed, to be fair about it, something very like Blue Security is the way in which Reagan and Bush brought down Soviet Communism, and something very like Red Security is the way in which FDR and Truman brought down Fascism. But we aren't facing Brezhnev or Hitler again, and the voices of both Blue Security and Red Security have acquired a certain desperate quaver, as even Red Security pundits say that another large-scale attack on the US is all but inevitable, and Blue Security pundits darkly hint that by the time their team gets back in and re-launch Blue Security, it may be too late. Neither side, anymore, is actually saying they will prevent your getting blown up; they're only saying that when you are blown up, it will be the other side's fault, for not having done (or acceded to) the things that ought to work. Though I don't trust either Red Security or Blue Security, I have very few solutions of my own. I could say, "I'm a novelist, not a political scientist," but I did earn a grad degree in political science back in the early 80s, and spend a portion of my twenties as a political activist, so perhaps that excuse isn't available. Nonetheless, for me, politics has faded as writing has taken over my life, till, around thirty books later, I vote mostly because old friends hassle me if I don't, and I pay attention to politics because politics involves people and people are interesting, not because I find it personally important. The habits of mind required for a novelist are antithetical to those required for political participation. A hard-working, competent politician will open a can of worms only as a last resort, and then try to discard the bad worms, make the good worms line up straight, and ultimately put all the good worms back into a better can. A fiction writer who is serious about writing good fiction will open the same can just for the hell of it, with a joyous shout of "Wow! Cool! Worms!" in order to play with the worms, show the worms to friends, give the worms names, dress the worms up in costumes, attempt to interview the worms, and perhaps try to become a worm. Naturally the can is thrown away at once, because the worms need room to tangle and copulate and make more worms; if the worms are to be put into anything, it will be something more interesting than a can, perhaps a flower pot, bathtub, or gravy boat. It is vital to see and express all the things that make issues more complex—all the bad worms, all the can-caused-damage, all the alternatives—to make a better story. Ordinarily, then, a novel is an anti-political act, an assertion that things don't split into sides and people matter more than ideas or policies. As a reader of thrillers, I enjoy Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and other righties, just as conservative thriller enthusiasts I know enjoy the old lefty thrillers by Fletcher Knebel or James Grady. But in less ordinary times, fiction is our chance to open up whole realms of ignored possibilities—cans labeled "very old worms, irrelevant"—and restart debates that have gone down sterile dead ends. This is what Euripides was doing, I think, in The Trojan Women. He had been identified with the radical-democratic faction whose policies had resulted in the Melian Massacre. He threw the brutal consequences of his own side's policies back into their faces, and thus opened several more cans of worms. But even as he did so, he undercut his own point with his observation of what was human and what was obstinately true. Hekuba's hatred of the Greeks is so deep that though what they do is horrible, they cannot let her go, especially not with her grandson; it is awful that they murder a young boy solely because he is a potential rallying point for a new Troy, but it is also true that that is exactly what Hekuba wants him to live to become. It doesn't make Euripides much of a polemicist for either side—but it makes The Trojan Women work as a play, possibly the saddest play ever written. Similarly, Dickens's novels ooze with the misery of the poor in the nineteenth century, Laurence Sterne's bracing derision for human folly is unmatched, and so forth, yet Dickens also gives us kind and decent rich people and Sterne's warm affection for his gallery of ninnies is what makes Tristram Shandy a hoot after two centuries. Like it or not, the job of the fiction writer is to draw all the sides as they are, according to the vision and skills of the fiction writer; not as they would be if the fiction writer's favorite political gang were right about the world, and most assuredly not in order to make the fiction writer's favorite point. Most of us fiction writers are blind to some or most of our presuppositions—that is one of many reasons why there are so few great fiction writers. Nonetheless, if we can't see what we're not equipped to see, we can at least be honest about what we do see. So here we are: with security a painfully real issue, we have two, and just two, visions of security, Red Security and Blue Security, and even the paid partisans of each seem to have little faith in them. Before we can get out of our present perplex, we will have to look at many things that are not part of the current debates, and consider that the answer might not be Red or Blue—it might be Salty, or Autumn. |
Bio
I used to teach in the Communication and Theatre program at Western State College. I got my PhD at Pitt in the early 90s, masters degrees at U of Montana in the mid 80s, bachelors at Washington University in the 70s; worked for Middle South Services in New Orleans in the early 80s, so yes, I'm THAT John Barnes. There are also many John Barneses I am not. I am not the British footballer, the Tory MP, the expert on ADA programming, the biographer of Eva Peron, the authority on Dante, the mycologist, the travel writer, the film historian, or that guy that Mom said was my father. Wish I'd written the book on titmice, though.
I used to think I was the only paid consulting statistical semiotician for business and industry in the world, but I recently met another one. So now I have a large market share of a growing field. Semiotics is pretty much what Louis Armstrong said about jazz, except jazz paid a lot better for him than semiotics does for me. |
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