Paris Notes 1: Climate Change, Katrina, and the Return (?) of the MetaNarrative

Of all of the ideas to emerge from high postmodern theory, the one that has penetrated the furthest into the wider culture is probably the notion of the collapse of "metanarratives" and their replacement with smaller, local truths. Articulated in its academic forms by Jean-Francois Lyotard (on the Left) and Francis Fukuyama (on the Right), the general contention that totalizing narratives (particularly that of communism versus capitalism) are either deeply flawed or no longer applicable has spread into most every form of multiculturalism, pluralism, and respect for diversities of identity and life experience. It would be hard to imagine today, for example, a university religious studies class that sees one religion as telling the correct story of the universe or that fails to acknowledge the different wisdom to be drawn from every faith tradition. Even cable news journalists now speak reflexively of the different narratives (plural) politicians create, often with no attempt to establish whether one of these narratives is closer to objective truth than the others.

Climate change would seem to pose the strongest possible challenge to the "collapse of metanarratives" theory. With climate change, we have a narrative that is, in the strongest sense, "meta." Here is a phenomenon that ties all life on earth together in a single, increasingly teleological story of ecological collapse. Where the communism vs capitalism story always required some obvious stretching to account especially for events in the colonial and postcolonial world, climate change affects every human and, along with its twin, ocean acidification, reaches even to places that humans do not and cannot visit. Perhaps most strikingly, climate change, unlike the theological and political metanarratives that preceded it, is grounded increasingly in the world of verifiable, scientific fact.

Thus, one could reasonable expect climate change to emerge in our era as a metanarrative even more powerful and all-encompassing than the communism-capitalism story that preceded it. From farming to national security to race to trade agreements, climate change would seem able to subsume every individual event into one story. At the very least, it is a much stronger contender than it post-9/11 rival, the facile story of a "clash of civilizations" promoted by American neoconservatives. With climate change, we have the return of just what Lyotard said could no longer exist: one coherent story that applies everywhere and to everyone.

The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina gives us an opportunity to test this hypothesis. First, let us note that for many years after, Katrina and its aftermath were about race. Both Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water narrate the event through the lens of black-white race relations. Dave Eggers' Zeitoun shifts the focus slightly to anti-Arab animus, but remains concerned with race and civil rights. Jamelle Bouie's recent 10th-anniversary piece on Katrina makes the case for a race-relations framing most pointedly, arguing that Katrina was "the most defining moment in Black America's relationship to its country" thus far in the 21st-century. (Most famously, Kanye West's public declaration during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," demonstrated quite clearly how race was, for many Americans, what was at issue in Katrina.)

The one exception to the racial lens is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, where Katrina appears very briefly as an example of possible effects of climate change; Gore subsumes the specific events of Katrina into the larger story of global climate change and, in so doing, provides a (very brief) preview of what I am hypothesizing should become a more popular reading of Katrina as climate change becomes a more powerful metanarrative.

Jelani Cobb's New Yorker essay on the anniversary of Katrina provides an instructive example of how my hypothesis here fails, and why its failure might matter to the politics of climate change. Cobb places the Katrina disaster in the long history of institutionally sanctioned black poverty and black oppression in America, continuing the tradition of narrating Karina primarily in terms of race. In the midst of making this case, he makes the point that the term "natural disaster" is a "linguistic diversion": "Hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are natural phenomena; disasters, however, are often the work of humankind." Thus, Cobb argues, the impacts of natural disasters need to be understood in their specific, local context of differential access to infrastructure, emergency aid, and so forth.

Setting aside the matter of whether hurricanes might not be, at least partially, the work of humankind, Cobb makes quite clearly here what seems to me the correct intellectual point: rather than subsume local events to a totalizing metanarrative, clear understanding requires articulating global phenomena (like earthquakes and hurricanes) through the specific circumstances of the localities they effect. Saying, "Katrina is one example of climate change-driven disaster" is far less precise than saying "here are the ways this climate change-driven disaster ended up having the specific effects it did, given the specific history of race and poverty on the American Gulf Coast." All of this is roughly in keeping with Lyotard's initial reading of the collapse of metanarratives.

But if something is gained here, something also lost. By focusing on the specific and the local, attention is taken away from the general and the global. And that shift in focus makes it harder to see the places where large patterns do, in fact, hold. Moreover, it makes it harder to build the kind of global coalitions needed in advance of the Paris climate talks; if my disaster is primarily the result of my local circumstances, I am less likely to see that you and I are both victims of the same global problem.

If Cobb's essay is emblematic of how we narrate Katrina ten years on, then one of the challenges for climate change politics will be how to re-narrative Katrina as part of a global climate change story, without losing the insights Cobb derives from geographic and historical specificity. How to do that, and how to do it for a mass global audience, remains unclear.

Ann Rule May Be a More Important Cultural Icon than Truman Capote

With the publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote famously claimed to have invented a new genre, "the nonfiction novel." As with much Capote said, this was not exactly true. When In Cold Blood came out in 1965, it was riding the crest of an almost twenty-year wave of book-length creative nonfiction, much of it generated at The New Yorker, including Capote's own The Muses are Heard. What Capote did do was move the nonfiction novel on to the terrain of what was, at the time, a very, very lowbrow genre: true crime. In so doing, Capote in one fell-swoop elevated true crime to the cultural level of The New Yorker and extended it to a book-length genre rather than the stuff of pulp magazines. These were significant accomplishments.

After that, though, Capote bailed. Capote never again returned to true crime (but for a kind of late self-parody entitled "Hand-Carved Coffins"). Indeed, In Cold Blood represents more less the end of Capote's nonfiction career rather than the beginning of it.

The person who did do the heavy lifting to establish true crime as a major genre was Ann Rule, who died in July at the age of 83. Rule was a tireless author and promoter of true crime whose The Stranger Beside Me is perhaps the most important example of true crime as a mass-market genre rather than as the self-consciously literary texts of Capote and, later, Norman Mailer. Capote will certainly be remembered as a great prose stylist. Rule, however, may ultimately be seen as the more important cultural figure. Rule's version of true crime exists at the intersection of a new conservative movement and the women's movement, two things that go a long way to defining late twentieth-century American history. In light of Rule's understanding of contemporary politics and culture, Capote's foray into true crime seems surprisingly divorced from its time and place.

Rule's true crime, as with most true crime, is in many ways very conservative, often an unabashed cheerleader for the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the New Right. As I argued in my dissertation, true crime creates something of a conservative fantasy about what America and American crime look like:

         "First, true crime skews America’s demographics.  In a nation in which people of colour and the poor are far more likely to be the victims of crime, true crime presents a world in which victims, criminals, and police are almost exclusively white and middle class.  Moreover, the victims are almost always women, thus often turning misogynistic violence into a kind of entertainment.  As Jean Murley argues, the demographics of true crime represent 'a countercurrent to the social progress and cultural changes—feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness—that have transformed American life in the past four decades' (3).
          Second, true crime is almost always about the restoration of the status quo.  By definition, the genre describes a person or people who subvert society’s norms and, if they are murderers, violate its most sacred taboo.  In the end, however, the police get their man: 'In true crime, the killers are usually incarcerated or executed at the end of the story, reassuring us with a good old-fashioned reordering of the chaos wrought by crime' (Murley 3).  While there may have been a psychopath on the loose, true crime assures the reader that order has been restored, usually by brave and earnest officers of the law.
            Third, true crime’s means of production tends to underscore its close affiliation with law-and-order ideology.  As Laura Browder points out, 'True crime writers are often affiliated with victims’ rights groups, and some, like former policewoman Ann Rule [arguably True Crime’s most successful writer], work with law enforcement agencies' (936).  In the case of televised true crime, the link between text and law enforcement is even more pronounced.  Shows like America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries actively solicit the viewer’s participation in restoring the social order; by calling in tips, viewers become an arm of the state, assisting in the capture and incarceration of wrongdoers."

At the same time that is a very conservative genre, however, true crime as Rule produced it is also in some ways a female-dominated, even feminist genre: (quoting my dissertation again)

           "Browder argues that, while they may be overtly reactionary in their stated aims, some true crime texts 'are also subversive, in that they tend to question the very foundations of patriarchal culture—the family in true crime is often a poisonous unit' (Browder 936).  Moreover, in her interviews with female true crime readers (by all accounts, the genre’s readers are overwhelming women), Browder discovered something other than the passive consumption of misogynistic violence: 'Many [fans] read true crime to help themselves cope with the patriarchal violence they have encountered in the past, and fear in the present' (Browder 928).  'As read actively by female fans, what seems…to be anti-feminist can be read as feminist, and what is often perceived as sick, warping material can become a form of therapy, however flawed' (949).  Thus it is possible to see True Crime’s depictions of violence not as a normalization of that violence, but as a critique of a society in which that violence is normalized."

Thus true crime in general, and Rule's books in particular, sits right in the tangled intersection of the two biggest American cultural shifts in the last third of the twentieth century: the shift away from the New Deal consensus and toward Reaganism, on the one hand, and the rapid cultural successes of the women's movement, on the other. And to drive the point home, Rule demonstrates the tangled ways in which these movements over lap. The women's movement was a progressive, liberatory movement--except when it wasn't: for example, when empowered female voters favoured Phyllis Schlafly over the ERA. And the New Right was a regressive, reactionary movement except when, as Rule makes clear, its concerns about rising violent crime actually served the cause of greater daily freedoms for women. (Perhaps these political contradictions go someway to explaining the riddle posed by Amanda Marcotte at Slate, why Rule initially had to publish under a male nom de plume.) 

This is not the place to sort out the precise relationship between the women's movement and the New Right. It is only the place to say that Rule captured the tensions between these cultural poles in ways far beyond anything Capote ever did. And, in the end, crystallising cultural history into specific narratives might be what great writers do.

       

E. L. Doctorow and the Danger of Crossover Fiction

E. L. Doctorow, who died last week at the age of 84, both wrote about American history and warned us about people who write about American history. Both parts of that formulation are fun to read, but the second one is too often ignored. Where Doctorow warned us against letting any representation mistake itself for reality, those of us who teach high school too often let the most overt of fictions crowd out careful study of the facts.  

Probably Doctorow's most famous passage of writing comes from the opening paragraph of Ragtime. It has been quoted everywhere in the last week, but is worth reading again in full: "Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900's. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another, That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants."

Doctorow is here obviously not writing about the Progressive Era. Rather, he is writing about how we write about the Progressive Era, pointing us to all of the most threadbare cliches we have for the age. As Fredric Jameson famously points out in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Doctorow renders history "flat," as though, were he writing in French, he was using only the passé composé and thus taking all nuance of chronology out of his narration. This is history as rendered in the worst of high school history class film strips. 

This passage is emblematic of a strong strain in Doctorow's fiction. Part of his project was, in a sense, to write so badly about history that we could not help but pay attention to how badly we all write about history. (And, of course, Doctorow then went on to play delightfully with the vignettes he had created, subverting the story he had started out telling.) In this way his novels stand for us as a warning: don't do this to history; don't mistake the threadbare fictions for the actuality of the past.

That aspect of Doctorow's fictional project is particularly relevant for those of us who teach high school English for it is us, too often, who allow the convenient fiction to stand in for the complexity of history in just the way Doctorow warned us against. 

Let us take the most obvious (if somewhat complicated) example, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. To make the obvious point, The Jungle is a novel: every character is invented, as is the plot. Moreover, it is an extremely didactic novel, with events arranged not in the name of verisimilitude but in the name of socialist propaganda. And yet, as I argued in a 2007 article for Studies in American Naturalism, neither The Jungle nor Sinclair himself are often considered as literary matters at all. Rather, they are treated as primary sources on the Progressive Era. Thus fiction makes a strange crossover move, becoming fact right before our eyes. 

In The Jungle's case, this crossover move is a bit more complicated. Sinclair claimed that every individual event in the book did, in some manner, actually occur. Moreover, his claims of veracity led to a federal investigation that, more or less, confirmed much of the "truth" of the novel. Nonetheless, The Jungle did not happen. No one family suffered the avalanche of hardships foisted upon the Rudkus family, and condensing every evil of the Progressive Era into one book greatly skews our sense of the period. 

This problem is, I think, broader than just The Jungle. If Sinclair's novel has become our snapshot of the Progressive era, how often does The Things They Carried become our snapshot of Vietnam? Or To Kill a Mockingbird become our vision of the pre-Civil Rights South. This, we imply, is what it was like back then. And thus one highly mediated text becomes historical fact. 

An even more problematic case is the ubiquitous use of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to represent the Harlem Renaissance. Here a novel written well after the Harlem Renaissance (at least in the usual dating) was over, not set in Harlem, and thematically much more connected to a later generation of Black writers' (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison) rethinking of Southern life can become a kind of cartoon of the period it now stands in for: Black artistic expression, African American vernacular, boisterous Black communities, etc. 

Doctorow warns us against letting easy fictions slide into the place of history. When these novels become primary sources, we allow a version of just that movement. 

A counter-argument could be made here: In reality, if, two years after taking a year of American studies, what a student remembers of the Progressive Era are 3 vivid scenes from The Jungle, that would have to be considered a win. Given the enormous breadth of information high school students are expected to study, retaining much beyond that is both unlikely and not particularly well rewarded when it happens. 

But maybe that is another challenge Doctorow poses to us. If students were to get past the clichés Doctorow enumerates in the opening of Ragtime, they would have to focus more deeply on fewer periods of history and literature. And doing that would imperil the whole survey-course model; students would have to spend much more time studying the contradictions and complexities of fewer eras. In the process, they would lose sweep in the name of depth, a substitution that might have its benefits.