Notes on re-reading Home

After re-reading Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, I have meanwhile also re-read her Home, the second novel of what has, with the publication this year of Lila, turned out to be a trilogy of sorts. And I'm reminded of a few other points. First, before even beginning to re-read Home, I remembered the sinking feeling I'd had when I began reading it the first time. Gilead, as noted, takes the form of an elderly preacher's notebook, intended to be read by his now seven year-old son when he is an adult; thus it is a document that as such seems to justify its own existence. Home, on the other hand, is a third person narrative primarily from the point of view of one of the barely mentioned characters in Gilead. Gilead is open, whereas Home appeared at first glance to be . . . just another novel. Having now finished my re-read of it as well, the novel definitely overcomes my initial apprehension, though I can see how it would be taken, still, for just another novel, albeit a very good one. But I think it's more than that.

Though I don't plan a major treatment here, I find it useful to think of these books in the terms used by Josipovici in his essay "The Bible Open and Closed", which can be found in his collection, The Singer on the Shore (and which I previously wrote about here). He says in that essay that

we in our culture have a problem with narrative. What does it mean? we ask. What is the guy trying to say? And if the book in question is a sacred text the problems grow even more acute. For then it is even more important to understand clearly what it is saying, since our very lives may depend upon it. We need to feel we are dealing with a text that is closed, in the sense that its meaning can be clearly understood and translated into other terms; yet the Bible, like all narratives, but, as I hope to show, even more than most, is open, that is, it resists translation into other terms and asks not so much to be understood as lived with, however puzzling and ambiguous it may seem.

It is perhaps fortuitous for my purposes here that Robinson's novels are deeply concerned with religious life and even the Bible (which facts seem to put too many people off of reading, or appreciating, them), so we might well ask, what is she trying to say, what does it all mean? While Home might come across as a conventional "realist" novel, it seems to me that the narrative remains very much open. It occurs to me that this is a milder version of the argument advanced by Ethan in his recent post, discussing Agota Kristof's great sequence of novels alongside Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. The first books in each of those trilogies (The Notebook and Annihilation, respectively) are

both open wounds. But though both trilogies depart from their notebooks for a kind of "broader view" once the first volume is done with, they do so in dramatically different ways; and where in the remainder of her trilogy Kristof insists on keeping the wound open (not least by bringing out the implications of the verb "present" in my previous sentence), VanderMeer seems almost frantic in his rush to patch the wound up — without regard for what "the condition for a cure" might be.

I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to use the word wound to describe Gilead, but certainly it is open. And with Home, at any rate, Robinson does not seem to be "frantically rushing to patch the wound up" (not least because her books have appeared over the course of ten years, rather than all in the same year, as with VanderMeer's), or to especially be filling in the blanks of that openness. Home intersects with Gilead at an angle, and remains off-kilter from it, as far as our childish desire to have more information about certain events goes. Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize liking a novel that is really more conservative than I want to admit.

Short Note on Re-reading Gilead

This week I have re-read Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead, in part in anticipation of reading her recently published new novel, and also just because. It's a great book. Of course, I'm hardly alone in saying this. It did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize, and was, I gather, fairly widely read, for a literary novel. And yet it strikes me that the book is under-appreciated. I suspect that the religious content throws many readers. (The book takes the form of an elderly preacher writing to his now seven year-old son, words he expects the boy to read when he is an adult.) Certainly I have encountered numerous bewildered responses to the novel, readers simply unable or unwilling to process the religious material, who somehow seem to read it as some kind of tract. This is unfortunate, and baffling. Readers of this blog know that I am not a religious person, yet I have had no trouble with the religious nature of this novel. Indeed, I name it among the more important novels I have read, and I am actually saddened by the capacity people have to misread the book. It is, in many ways, what used to be called "wisdom literature", yet it is also a marvelous, and subtle, literary performance. And, it seems to me, a wholly appropriate literary response to our current situation, in the sense in which I have here attempted to channel or expand on Josipovici and others.

On Nader and Progressivism

Over at Read Red, Shelley Ettinger points, with deserved scorn, to the release of a novel by Ralph Nader, of all people, called Only the Super-rich Can Save Us! Apparently, the idea is to explore in fiction "what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people" take on "the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve it". Shelley says:

The spectacle of such a bizarre, twisted delusion being promulgated by someone who used to present himself as a fighter for progressive change might strike some as sad. It ought in any case to expose him once and for all as no legitimate leader in the cause of the class struggle.

Sadly, given the urgency of the problems facing us and the general disarray of the left, it's possible that it's true that we could only be saved by the actions of an imaginary small group of benevolent rich people. But it's still delusional.

This gives me an excuse to expand on my remarks from earlier in the week. I think Nader had revealed that he was no real leader, without the aid of any delusional novel, in the way he conducted his last two presidential campaigns. I voted for him without apology in 2000 because he seemed to be part of something larger, and the idea, however limited, was to expand the base, to be part of building a real movement against the stagnant two-party oligarchy (funding for third parties being part of that). I remember there was real excitement in the air. I voted for him again in 2004, this time without much enthusiasm. I didn't like his campaign that year, divorced as it was from any kind of wider movement, though I also did not appreciate the attacks by liberals unfairly and inaccurately blaming him for the considerable evils of the Bush Administration (liberals seemed uninterested in the truth about the stolen 2000 election; it's always more important to defend the system). The Kerry campaign was simply a joke.

As I mentioned, I voted for Obama last year, under no illusions about who or what he would be. And I could not justify another Nader vote, in part because I increasingly feel that he misses "the bigger picture". What I mean is this. Contrary to what Shelley says in the quote above, I do believe Nader is a progressive. That's part of the problem. Progressivism is intimately tied to the fortunes and methods of the capitalist state. I've referred here on several occasions to the "so-called Progressive Era", citing Gabriel Kolko's excellent history of the period, The Triumph of Conservatism, in support of the idea that, far from being this golden period of left-wing victories (though there were some victories, to be sure), in fact the era consolidated and strengthened the hand of the capitalists, the smartest among whom themselves argued for and largely created the extensive regulatory apparatus that was necessary to protect capitalists from the free market. But, in fact, my smarty-pants use of "so-called" is unwarranted, because this is exactly what Progressivism was.

Of course, the word "progressive" has become a sort of catch-all umbrella term covering any liberal or vaguely left-wing views, and this is how Shelley innocently uses it in her post. She is an avowed communist, so I know she harbors no illusions about liberals or the state. But I find the word unhelpful and have ceased using it to describe myself or my beliefs--there are big differences between those of us who are resolutely anti-capitalist and those who believe in liberal democracy and the tameability of the capitalist system. It's true that in the context of the existing system, a functioning regulatory framework is much preferred to the current situation. That said, it must always be remembered that not only was the regulatory system designed by capitalists, but the welfare state--the New Deal, for example--was part of a necessary accommodation with labor, in order to, again, save capitalism from itself. This deal was enabled by the incredible, unrepeatable growth of the post-WWII period (growth which itself was enabled by the burgeoning military-industrial complex and the insanity of the Cold War), and itself entered into crisis in the late 1960s/early 1970s. There is no going back. And yet going back appears to be all that progressives, Nader included, have to offer, in the face of ongoing, expensive wars and the lack of a powerful labor movement which could force such an accommodation. Nader sounds great when he talks about regulation and generally says the right things about particular wars and about Palestine, but he gives no indication that he appreciates that crisis is necessary to capitalism, that war is, that the capitalist state does not exist to serve the people.

Incidentally, the narrative of progress itself is another reason I object to the word "progressive". This is a narrative that exists within the Marxist teleological tradition, too. Usually this implies change that can be seen as a kind of necessary, inexorable "progress", in the way that history itself is seen as progressive--where, to rework a phrase from Marilynne Robinson (quoted by me, here), previous generations are seen as benighted in comparison with our own (as I used to assume, in my youthful naivete, that each generation would necessarily be less racist, less sexist, less religious than their parents). It's perhaps the blithe acceptance of technological progress that most disturbs me. We act as if technology simply progresses, as if technological change isn't a function of the capitalist process, as if it would continue to "progress" in the same manner in the absence of the capitalist pressures, or ought to.

Drastic changes are urgently needed, but many of the changes that I think are necessary would involve reviving lost forms from the past, a give and take with the best of what tradition has had to offer. I would call the world a better place if they took place, but I would not call it progress. More on this in future posts.

Irreducible Experiences

But what does it mean to say that a novel such as Gilead has "potentially deep implications for the Left"? I'm not sure, and yet I wrote it, so I must have meant something by it. The experience of reading that novel was unlike that of any other, and that experience was a valuable experience in its own right. In trying to describe the novel, I wouldn't think saying much about what I learned from it would be of much interest or value. It's certainly not overtly political, though there is material about John Brown and the abolitionists, and about the Civil Rights era.

Blanchot quotes Malraux, who writes that, "Any art that claims to represent implies a system of reduction" ("The Museum, Art, and Time", Friendship, p.19). Malraux is writing about painting, but the point holds. If the writer tries to write a work that represents a political reality, or any reality, necessarily a system of reduction is involved. Similarly, it seems to me, assigning an interpretation to a work implies reduction as well, a reduction that negates the actual experience of the work. If I say that Gilead was an important reading experience for me, an avowedly leftwing atheist, what does such a claim entail? How can I reduce it for another's satisfaction? The narrator of Gilead is an elderly preacher; the book takes the form of letters written to his very young son. He does not struggle with his faith, but he does struggle with God and with components of that faith, with what a life of faith means in the context of life itself and all its contingencies. He is aware that he is not as fair a man as he ought to be, and he is not always good, according to his lights. I found the book to be a deeply moving experience. And of course I have written here about faith and its absence, and different kinds of faith.

And yet saying all this says finally not much about my experience, does it? And one doesn't want to resort to mystification--my experience is unwritable, unsayable, you just don't get it--though I know some claim Blanchot does just that. This, then, is the struggle. How to write about literary works without reducing them to their messages, to their different elements, to ultimately writing about them instead of the book itself, and its specificity. How also to convey the importance of these experiences? And how they might relate to politics, without the works being political entertainments? (Political entertainments: this is what I think most political novels end up being. Worse, entertainments for an increasingly tiny audience, necessarily muting the value of the political aspect. I will try to expand on this notion later.)

(I am meanwhile apparently trying to perfect the meandering, indeterminate blog post.)

The most enlightened age

Suppose someone wanting to learn to dance said: 'For hundreds of years now one generation after another has been learning dance steps, it's high time I took advantage of this and began straight off with a set of quadrilles.' One would surely laugh a little at him; but in the world of spirit such an attitude is considered utterly plausible. What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.--Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

This generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. -- Thoreau, Walden

We congratulate ourselves on living in an enlightened age, within the Enlightenment tradition (though we are besieged, oh yes, let us never forget), and yet collectively we take so little advantage of gained knowledge. And, believing in progress, we like to think that what we know now--or rather, what is known now, not what we know--is necessarily an advancement on what used to be known, but has been forgotten. Earlier ages are by definition more benighted than our own.

Recently Andrew Seal reported, with disappointment, on some lectures he attended given by Marilynne Robinson. I still haven't had the time to sample the lectures for myself, but apparently she was exercised about what she calls "parascience", presumably the extra-scientific writings from the likes of Richard Dawkins. Is she precisely anti-science? I don't know. I'm not sure it matters. Whether she is or isn't, I think she's saying, and has been saying, something important. (And unlike comrade Shelley at Read Red, I hardly think Robinson's wonderful novel Gilead is "deadly dull"; nor do I understand how one could have read the book and been able to conclude that it's little more than a "religious tract". On the contrary, I think the novel has much to say to us, with potentially deep implications for the Left.)

I employed another lecture given by Robinson in a post I wrote a year ago, in which I discussed conceptions of democracy held by the (American) revolutionary generation, conceptions all but lost now, conceptions I believe we would do well to revive. There is science, and then there is institutional Science, necessarily in thrall to Capital, and the diffusion and acceptance of bad science as general knowledge. In that lecture, she notes how Social Darwinism, which of course was accepted as Scientific Truth for some time and still has not been fully eradicated, scuttled what had been promising movements in the pursuit of equality. The problem, if anything, has only gotten worse. Naturally, this ties in with some of my recent themes here. With the global economy and, far more importantly, the environment in increasingly uncertain state, it seems clear to me that we're going to need to know the kinds of things that people once knew, that we're going to need to know how to do what people once knew how to do. A call for a true popular science, if you will.

Myth Rushes in to Fill the Gap

"We praise democracy most of the time, but we practice it as if we had accepted every argument against it, as if we believed it must depress the level of culture and of public life." - Marilynne Robinson (2007)

". . . when communal memory, dialogic memory, breaks down or disappears, myth rushes in to fill the gap." - Gabriel Josipovici, "Memory: Too Little/Too Much" (1999) in The Singer on the Shore (2006)

"Opportunitys once lost is not easily recovered." - William Petrikin, letter to John Nicholson (1789) quoted in Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy

I've made the argument here that democracy, properly understood, should mean a society in which people have non-trivial say over basic decisions affecting their actual lives. We have a fantasy that the history of the United States is the unfolding of this great experiment in democracy, but it is exactly that: a fantasy. A case can be made, fairly easily, that the history of this country is in reality the history of the systematic prevention of democracy. The U.S. Constitution, that holy document, in particular is a key element in this thwarting of democracy, and yet in our imagination, the Constitution is held up as defining and protecting democracy.

In a recent post, I mentioned my reading of Eric Foner's book, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. I said that, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book was how it showed "how the established leaders of Pennsylvania, for example, co-opted the more radical elements, before re-consolidating their power during the revolution itself, with the resulting system being far less free than many had hoped and fought for." Subsequent to that post, I read the book Taming Democracy (Oxford 2007), by Terry Bouton. Bouton's book is subtitled "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution and is a fascinating study of the raised and finally crushed hopes of the revolutionary generation. (Full disclosure: Bouton was one of Aimée's college professors. I've never met him.) One thing that struck me about reading the book is the centrality of economics to the arguments and struggles of the time. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown (see her Democracy Against Capitalism or Empire of Capital or The Origins of Capitalism), one of the key features of capitalism is the wholesale separation of the economic from the political. Economic decisions are made outside of the political realm, whereas the state enforces the conditions necessary for these decisions to have weight. That is, since economic power lies elsewhere, our impact on crucial decisions is negligible, regardless of whatever political victories we may claim. This is why voting is reduced to our selection of one of two candidates, both of whom ultimately serve not the people, but big money. This is difficult to see, since capitalism is like the air we breath, so it is bracing to read about the obvious role of economics in the conceptions of freedom held in earlier eras.

Bouton focuses on Pennsylvania, as did Foner, largely because of Pennsylvania's role as both the center of the most radical popular revolutionary attitudes and as the focus of the counter-revolution that began during the war itself, finally resulting in the Federal Constitution, “taming democracy”, as the title has it. He explains the various economic policies imposed by the British that led to the revolution. It begins with British attempts to extract payment from the colonies in order to pay for the heavy expenses of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which it tried to do by "enact[ing] a set of policies encompassing trade, finance, and taxation that created a profound scarcity of money". Colonies were forbidden from printing paper money as legal tender, and paper was pretty much all the colonies used, since they had so little gold or silver (there was a huge trade deficit with Britain). Through the 1760s, it was increasingly argued by ordinary people that what was wrong with British policies was not just abstract political concepts like "Taxation without Representation”, but that such policies impacted the population unequally, and that this inequality, aside from being unfair, meant that people lacked say over important decisions. In the popular conception, independence meant owning property; most people were farmers. Economic independence meant political independence. It was widely felt that one could not be "free" if one was economically dependent. For most people, this meant owning land. (We are, of course, talking about white men, let's not forget. And it was taken for granted that they had the right to take land from Native Americans.)

By 1776, a decade-plus of popular agitation led to the adoption in Pennsylvania of a new constitution. It was the most radical, most democratic constitution in the colonies, and very popular with ordinary Pennsylvanians. It included many of the features which later became part of the Bill of Rights, and most interestingly, a unicameral legislature:

Modern Americans are accustomed to thinking about the height of democratic government as a divided legislature (house and senate) and a powerful executive (president) armed with the veto. Pennsylvania’s revolutionaries thought otherwise. They viewed such a government as checking democracy rather than promoting it. After all, divided government was a British legacy, where the king and upper chamber of Parliament (the House of Lords, filled with titled aristocrats who served for life) checked the democratic branch (the House of Commons). Most Pennsylvanians believed they had suffered under such a system. Consequently, they wanted a new government that would remove the barriers that had kept their voices from being heard.

The executive had only advisory and enforcement powers. "[T]his was the most democratic government in the new nation; according to Benjamin Franklin, that meant it was also 'the safest and best.'" Consider Marilynne Robinson's quote at the top of this post. She's right, isn't she? Don't we think it's in our best interests that there be an "upper" house of Congress, or any legislature? Got to keep the rabble in line. That is, I would wager, our official American position. Whenever I see a discussion about democracy in its purest form, there is a recoiling away: always the assumption is that you simply can't have it; people can't be trusted. But in the 18th century, the bulk of ordinary people seemed to believe otherwise. Naturally, the wealthy were horrified at the idea.

I don't plan a detailed review of the Taming Democracy here, but suffice it to say that reading it was an often revelatory and infuriating experience. I was inspired by the simple idea that most people believed they had the right to a say in decisions affecting their lives, that they believed they had the right to fight for it and did in fact fight for it. I was especially inspired by what he calls the "rings of protection", concentric rings of people resisting unpopular laws: sheriffs refusing to enforce, judges refusing to sentence, people refusing to attend property auctions, people digging trenches across access roads, preventing tax collection and eviction, and countless other kinds of acts in common cause. To quote from John Pilger, writing about his native Australia (in his book Heroes): "Genuine Australian radicalism, without the closed logic of any fear or prejudice, flowed from experience and conditions, rather than from theory or intellectual fashion. . ." The experience of ordinary colonial Americans led to the radicalism of the Revolution against the British, and to the decades-long resistance to the counter-revolution and to the unpopular Constitution. Most of this history is lost, effaced, forgotten, replaced by the myths of the founding fathers and the glory of that Constitution.

Marilynne Robinson's words quoted at the beginning of this post come towards the end of her short essay, "A Great Amnesia", which was adapted from a talk she gave at Amherst college and which appears in the Readings section of the latest issue of Harper’s (May 2008). I think it's an important piece. She discusses the time she spent reading political economy in her spare time at Amherst, during which she learned of the "iron law" of wages, which has it that "the great class of those who lived by their labor could not earn more than subsistence", an iron law that "has come into force again in much of the world as a consequence of a form of competition that has based national economies on the poverty and low expectations of the mass of their populations." But her discussion begins in the library at Amherst, a library that was "almost always equal" to her demands. She talks about a house that was part of the Underground Railroad, and "other hints at participation in the great issues of an earlier America". And here's where her piece unfolds. The significance of these hints only struck her when she found herself in the Middle West, and "found any number of Amhersts . . . scattered over the landscape." She talks of colleges founded in the Midwest, the faculties of which

seem to have been composed largely of graduates of divinity schools in New England and New York, which sent bands out in to the West to advance the cause of liberal education and the reforms it was meant to promote, including the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women. Many of these colleges were racially integrated and integrated by gender also before the Civil War.

She elaborates:

A very generous hope was abroad in America which undertook to realize itself in the wide diffusion of a kind of education historically associated with privilege. That it was intended to break down the barriers education had historically enforced is clear from the fact that it was open to otherwise excluded groups, African Americans and women. Also, many of these schools were organized according to what was called the Manual Labor System. This meant that everyone in the college community, including the faculty, did the work involved in the keeping it fed and housed, in order to assure that there would be no economic barriers to education. On the frontier this meant everyone chopped weeds and butchered hogs and operated the printing presses that poured out abolitionist pamphlets, many of them mailed to the South. The association of learnedness with privilege or leisure was intentionally undercut.

. . . the strength of this movement was based on the willingness of a surprising number of highly educated people to leave the relative comfort of the East for lives of almost unimaginable difficulty, based on the assumption, which proved true, that the populations that found their way to the prairie would have an interest in Latin and Greek, mathematics and logic. [. . .] Their intention was to re-create American society by practicing as well as promoting standards of justice and freedom to which the nation had not risen.

What happened to destroy this great experiment in democracy? She points to "the emergence of Social Darwinism". Certainly Social Darwinism "had precursors in many forms, not surprisingly, since there is nothing easier than persuading people of their natural superiority to other people." But Social Darwinism was accepted as science for a long time, and "[t]here is no arguing with science". She talks about a "great amnesia": it mattered not that there had been blacks and women admitted to and succeeding in colleges before the Civil War; since science now "proved" that they were inferior, "there was no use for that kind of information." I think she makes a compelling point about Social Darwinism and its scientific imprimatur. (This is not the place for me to go into the differences between science as a practice, and the effects and practices of institutional Science then and now.) I would also point to the bottom-line needs of the emerging industrial economy (though they are related: Social Darwinism was tailor-made for capitalism).

Robinson in her essay notes that if she "had not been struck by the anomalous presence" of these Midwestern Amhersts, these New England colleges and towns found in the middle of the heartland, she would not have "learned that aspirations for American democracy had once been so generous and at the same time so high". While reading the essay, I immediately linked it in my mind with the stories found in Taming Democracy. With both, we have the lost history of a more expansive conception of what democracy can be, of what community can be, conceptions that I believe can help us find a way forward, out of our current mess. These conceptions have been buried beneath the weight of History. As she says, these things are not part of the "story we tell ourselves". We tell ourselves other stories, exaggerated stories: of individual freedom, of invention, of progression over time, of rights granted from above instead of won from below. Meanwhile, our communal memories of what once was, and what once was thought possible in common cause, have been obliterated, replaced in many ways by persistent "fear and prejudice" and by diminished expectations. And myth rushed in to fill the gap.