Totalitarian Kitsch and the Irrelevance of Critical Literacy

Part 6 of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) frames the narrative within a kind of embedded essay on what Kundera calls "totalitarian kitsch." Totalitarian Kitsch is a theory of politics that sees dominant ideologies as functioning not through ideas but through a certain aesthetic. Under totalitarianism, Kundera argues, life is organised around certain images that have such broad emotional appeal that they cannot be argued with. Thus a kind of totalising emotional togetherness is created by the state. The first example Kundera gives of totalitarian kitsch in practice is the May Day parade: "As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blasé faces would beam in dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement" (249, Kundera's italics). Kitsch, though, is not restricted to the specifics of communist ritual; it must be rooted in symbolism with broader appeal: "It must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love" (251).

Kundera's formulation might be seen as the flip side of Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp." Whereas the camp aesthetic necessitates a certain countercultural politics and subversion of dominant ideologies, kitsch is necessarily a handmaiden of totalitarianism: "Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch" (251, Kundera's italics).

Though he doesn't quite put it in such pedagogical terms, the antidote to kitsch, in Kundera's view, is critical literacy. For example, asking questions of kitsch's desired emotional response automatically defangs it: "In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it" (254). Critical reading here is a weapon--a knife with which to cut totalitarian pretensions to pieces.  Two pages later, Kundera makes a similar point in less metaphorical terms: "As soon as kitsch is recognised for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness" (256). In both cases, the key to depriving the authoritarian state of its power is to recognise how our images and emotions are manipulated through texts like a May Day parade.

Kundera's novel is, very obviously, wrapped up in a certain historical moment: The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the aftermath for Czech intellectuals in the following decade. Read from the perspective of 2020, however, I think this faith in critical literacy might be the thing that seems most dated about the novel.

Consider the predicament of the Trump COVID-19 press conferences. Here Trump preens and parades as the wise leader who handles the crisis flawlessly and commands the respect and attention of the nation in so doing. The media, in this case, responds as Kundera suggests it ought to. It points out Trump's factual errors, his exaggerations, his attempts to rewrite the historical record, and so forth. And the result is that Trump returns more defensive, more combative, and less able to put on his performance as all-knowing leader. Any kitsch effect, any warm emotion, is destroyed, much as Kundera predicts. Even those media outlets that support Trump end up doing so out of grievance and anger, focussing on the villainy of perceived enemies more than on the evocation of fellow feeling.

The political problem, though, is that it doesn't matter. The basic response to the Trump presidency has been exceptionally high levels of critical literacy that have absolutely no affect on politics. The Trumpian bubble is burst again and again, and yet his poll numbers hardly move, he is impeached but then acquitted, the leaders of his party remain in lockstep with him. And the same might be said throughout the democratic world. Everyone knows (and openly says) that Boris Johnson lied and continues to lie about Brexit; he wins anyway. Everyone knows Kaczynski is manipulating the courts for political purposes; he wins anyway. Everyone knows Bolsonaro lies about indigenous rights; he wins anyway. The panacea of critical literacy fails. It turns out that you can use your analytical knife to slice through the totalitarian stage backdrop. But the show carries on regardless.

This is not a very cheerful conclusion. If a widely literate and educated population can see right through a leader and yet fail to remove him, then what other levers of power need to be moved? The answer is hopefully that other levers in the cultural realm still have a certain importance: not just critical literacy to burst bubbles, but the creation of alternative myths and images and so forth. Perhaps, though, the lesson is a more atavistic one: That you can learn to read and analyse all you like, but that, all along, the levers that matter have been at the levels of economics, politics, and physical force.

Elizabeth Hardwick and Writing Well

To teach high school English is to worry about how poorly students write. They have nothing to say. They say it imprecisely. Is this the fault of the assignment? Is this the fault of the teacher? Has it always been this way? These are the standard themes of conversation and complaint. Embedded in these concerns is the problem of a missing target: When students write analytically about literature, we are not entirely sure what we want them to do.

Returning to the mid-century glory days of the literary essay offer some correctives to this problem. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, the most recent of which is now 15 years old and the earliest of which was published in 1953, are of varying interest today. Her insights into the style of letters and diaries are as close to "timeless" as any genre criticism is likely ever to be; her thoughts on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in their interest in how religion and race overlap, must have as much force today as they ever have. Her long descriptions of the Maine countryside, on the other hand, can try the patience of the modern reader (or, at least, this particular reader who has no particular interest in Maine).

Despite some passages that have, understandably, not aged as well as others, let us stipulate that Hardwick's essays, taken as a whole, can be seen as a kind of analytical writing we might want to aim for. They are smart. They are interesting in their structure, never getting bogged down in a predictable series of claims and counter-claims. They provide evidence that is suggestive and interesting, but never hammer home an argument with quote after quote in the way of the sophomoric student paper. They are interesting and creative in their use of language, playing with sentence structure and word choice in ways we have been trained not to expect from this kind of non-fiction writing.

How does Hardwick achieve this kind of writing? The obvious answer is that she is a rare genius, and that is obviously true. There are, though, two lessons that can be learned here--lessons that can be generalised beyond Hardwick's personal skill and that fly clearly in the face of how English classes ordinarily teach and assign writing.

The first is that Hardwick's writing is evaluative. Much of her work was book reviewing and, as she amusingly points out in an early essay, a "review" would seem to strongly imply stating an opinion (64). Such evaluative writing is, if not quite a taboo, certainly discouraged in many high school (and university) classrooms. To take two driving forces behind high school curricula, neither the AP nor the IB has any place in their formal, concluding examinations for any kind of evaluation of the quality of a work, and a student who ventures such an opinion is very likely to be penalised for writing outside of the expected genre. This is a shame, because Hardwick's clear positions on the strengths and weaknesses of a writer give her essays not only some of their verve but also a kind of narrative excitement: What is she going to say about Mary McCarthy? Surely she must hate Norman Mailer as much as I do? What does the title "Militant Nudes" even mean? No "analysis," in the schoolmarm sense of the word, could carry with it that implicit suspense.

The second lesson here is the breadth of Hardwick's subject matter. The Collected Essays include the expected topics of a professional book reviewer (William James, Henry James, Edmund Wilson, Gertrude Stein, etc.) but also the riots in Watts and at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention, the exploration of Brazil and a protest against Theodor Adorno. And within the traditionally literary topics, there is a great deal that is not traditional textual analysis: thoughts on the life of George Eliot's husband; the problem of being an intellectual in Washington, D.C.

The essays that leave behind strictly textual criticism are still in every important way "literary." The creativity with language is still there, as are the experiments with essay structure. Maybe most importantly, these essays bring to their subject matter a literary standard of argument: evidence is offered, but so are generalisations and impressions beyond what the historian or social scientist would allow.

To write like Hardwick would be to abandon much of what makes student writing bad. It would be to let students say "I hated this book," but also to let them abandon the book entirely and write about, say, a parade or a protest or a city they visited on vacation. That might be more than the high school English class, as currently structured, is quite ready to accept.

Nostalgia and Alienation at the Tower Bridge

After ascending the Tower Bridge in London, viewing its in-house museum, and peering vertiginously into the River Thames through sections of glass flooring, you have the option of continuing into the bridge's engine rooms to learn more, via a display of Victorian mechanics, about the bridge's historical workings. At the end of this second section of the tour, a short documentary plays on a loop. The film features archival photos over which play voice recordings of past bridge workers describing their time working on the bridge.

The film is more moving than one might expect in what is, essentially, a museum devoted to a steam engine. The workers speak of their nervousness the first time they were left in charge of raising the bridge, their devotion to the bridge in the face of long hours, and their pride at having played a small roll in the bridge's life. One worker notes the fact that, no matter where you travel in the world, you are likely soon to see an image of the Tower Bridge in one form or another. "That's my bridge," he says.

These memoirs fly in the face of a good deal of Marxist theory. The kind of work these men, by their own accounts, devoted themselves to and take enormous personal pride in having done is, more or less, the kind of work a certain kind of 19th-century radical (both Marxist and otherwise) saw as the epitome of alienated labour. Here are men employed not for themselves but by an impersonal state, men producing neither goods for use nor even goods for trade, but rather providing a service to international trade over which they have no control. While some of the men working on the bridge are trained in specific skills, none of them did work one could call artisanal. They own neither a set of skills they can call their own nor the products of their own labour. In short, this is the kind of industrial labour that, to both Marxists and less systematic dissenters like William Morris, should have alienated the workers forced to do it.

How, then, to account for these men and their apparently heartfelt pride in their work? The condescending answer would be simple false-consciousness: These men have been so indoctrinated into state capitalism that they have learned to love their own oppression. In general terms, there is certainly something to this notion. History is not lacking for people who have defended, sometimes to the death, systems that oppose their own best interests.

That explanation, however, seems hard to apply in its full force to comfortably well-off workers in a generally liberal democracy. That is to say, these are not men denied the opportunity to learn of other possible ways of life or so impoverished that they could not have sought other jobs.

If false-consciousness doesn't fully cut it, then, there seems to me to be another, less systematised, and maybe more literary, explanation: nostalgia.

This interaction between alienation and nostalgia is maybe easiest to see in the current, crudely political case of Trumpian yearning for traditional factory jobs.

We might look at it this way: It is not immediately obvious that regimented, assembly-line jobs are a working-class utopia, and you do not need to dig very far into labour history to discover that such jobs were, in their supposed heyday, often greatly disliked; one could write a history running from the sit-down strikes in Ford plants in the 1930s through to the dens of iniquity that some GM plants were the 1980s. Yet Trump and his ideologues yearn, or at least claim to yearn, for a return to these jobs. Given the details of both the jobs in question and the history of labour organising when those jobs were dominant in the American economy, it would seem that there is less a careful theory of labour here than a knee-jerk desire for the good old days.

Surely something similar is at work in the Tower Bridge. Our smiles at these working-class recollections have as much nostalgia in them as does any Trump rally, if considerably less evil.

None of this is to deny entirely the central Marxist notion of alienation. Surely there is something to the claim that some workers are more alienated from the products of their labour than are others. However, it seems equally likely that the lived experience of that alienation involves are a fair amount of nostalgia for the conditions of the generation past. And if it seems unlikely that one could ever be nostalgic for the working conditions of the modern call centre or fast fashion sweatshop, we need only turn to Upton Sinclair's thoughts about the coal mining jobs some commentators today so desperately want back.

If alienation is 50% nostalgia, the clear problem is how far back that nostalgia runs. If I am nostalgic for the work my grandfather did (an electrician in the public service, as it happens), and he was nostalgic for the work his grandfather did, is there some end point to the regress, some moment when labour was actually experienced as non-alienating in its own moment? Or is it turtles all the way down?

The Great War and Modern Memory: A Partial Defence of the 5-Paragraph Essay

The 5-paragraph essay has a terrible reputation. It is often seen by writing instructors as a simplistic formula that teaches students to prioritise form over content or, worse, simply to avoid ideas that are too complex to be squeezed into its structure. At its very worst this avoidance becomes for students a habit of mind; good ideas become those which can be explicated in a single-sentence thesis, framed as one side of a two-sided debate, and defended with three "points," each supported by one or two pieces of direct textual evidence. Any idea that does not fit this structure is discarded before it is even considered. This critical view of the 5-paragraph essay is correct. The 5-paragraph essay is, in its dominant usage, a terrible formula.

And yet, it seems to me, there is some scapegoating going on here. Not everything bad about sophomoric writing can be blamed on an essay structure. Conversely (and maybe this is the more debatable point), plenty of good writing is possible within that structure. The key is the scope of the argument.

Consider Paul Fussell's classic work of cultural history The Great War and Modern Memory, originally published in 1975. In many ways, Fussell's book follows the book-length version of the 5-paragraph essay: It has an introduction framing the argument, followed by a number of chapters (the professional academic's body paragraphs) supporting the argument with different sub-claims and evidence, and then a conclusion. Fussell has more chapters than does the 5-paragraph essay have paragraphs, so his is technically a kind of 9-paragraph essay. But the basic structure remains the same.

Fussell's book, though, is extraordinarily good, not only brilliant in its analysis but a page-turner in its content, at turns shocking, amusing, and fascinating. The book achieves this level of excellence, I am arguing, not despite its conservative structure, but because of it.

Fussell's thesis is that World War 1 was narrated by its participants and remembered by the wider culture through the lens of irony, in Northrop Frye's sense of that word. Each chapter takes a different broad topic and explores it, providing evidence and analysis of the ways irony shapes our understanding of the war.

The book should suffer from obvious methodological problems. It does not propose any specific method in its approach either to historical documents or to more literary texts. It is very vague in what it sees as the relationship between writers and the underlying historical facts that shape their narratives, let alone more thorny questions of the relationships between ideologies and individual consciousnesses. It does not define its scope by a particular archive; instead it ranges widely across poems, maps, military orders, soldiers' folklore, architecture, and diaries, amongst many other forms of texts. In short, it should be kind of a mess.

What holds the book together, then, is exactly its thesis-driven structure. With an argument in place for each chapter, Fussell is free to range widely, grabbing what evidence he needs from wherever he can find it, and bringing to bear whatever methods of analysis he needs to make his case. That is to say, what makes the book work is its traditional structure: Thesis, followed by evidence, followed by analysis. The rhythms of that structure allow the content to range widely, to remarkable effect.

But if the structure is so traditional, what saves the book from being the pedantic drivel opponents of the 5-paragraph essay detest? The saving grace is the nature of the theses that drive each chapter: they are invariably broad and loose, leaving space for exploration far beyond the simple proving of a legalistic case.

Take the opening paragraph of the chapter "The Troglodyte World": "The idea of 'The Trenches' has been assimilated so successfully by metaphor and myth...that it is not easy now to recover a feeling for the actualities. Entrenched, in an expression like entrenched power, has been a dead metaphor so long that we must bestir ourselves to recover its literal sense. It is time to take a tour" (39). The argument here is clear: Insufficient attention has been paid in the literature on the war to the origin of this metaphor, and this critic is going to right that wrong. The invitation, however, is not to hear the author prove the case but, rather, to take "a tour" of some of the implications of this observation.There is argument here, but also exploration and observation.

This, it seems to me, is a model of how the thesis-driven essay (if not just the 5-paragraph one) might be resuscitated in literature classes. It is not that the structure of the argumentative paper needs to be discarded, but rather that the arguments in such a paper need to be bigger, more expansive, and more generous. There needs to be room in the structure for more than just proving your own case and refuting your enemy's.

Elsewhere in the book, Fussell addresses directly this structural concern that runs throughout the text. In the chapter "Adversary Proceedings," he criticises the tendency to collapse ideas too quickly into a simplistic frame: "As it grows politically conscious, literary discourse naturally takes on the theoretical characteristics of postwar political adversary proceedings. And that is fatal for it" (118). That is to say, literary texts that simply pick a fight with an enemy are dull if not actively deadening of their readers.

One might say the same about literary criticism. The fear of the 5-paragraph essay is grounded in a fear of generally dull and often actively simplifying, stultifying argument. The structure, so the argument goes, requires students to be pedants and bores. But we might, I am suggesting, avoid this trap without discarding entirely the standard structure of argumentative academic writing. The key, at least in the context of writing about literary and cultural ideas, might be to make arguments that are not opening briefs in adversarial proceedings, but invitations to a tour.

A Bad Year for Écriture Féminine?

"And it's damned what a sensitive man is brought to," he said, talking to the swinging body, "when he's racked with women, and with beasts."

--Djuna Barnes

The fallout from the Harvey Weinstein revelations has so far been that rarest of things: a revolution with no particular downside, the presidential aspirations of Al Franken notwithstanding. But if nothing has been lost, something in feminist theory may have been settled.  

The style and structure of this revolution (or, at least of its first three months) have left no place for the kind of writing that was once in the vanguard of academic and artistic feminism: the style or mode (or experiment) called écriture féminine. Rather, this revolution has been written in a journalistic, objective mode more constrained by institutional and ideological limits than almost any other form of writing. If feminism might finally triumph in this historical moment, it looks to do so without its house style. 

Two examples might suffice to make the point. 

First, take Djuna Barne's Ryder, an experimental novel originally published in 1928. Chapter 5 of the novel is written in the mode of a sermon decrying the moral "damage" done to victims of rape and strongly implying that women too often bring sexual violence upon themselves: "A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled!" (21).  The 8-page chapter is written entirely in this fashion without any explanation of how this chapter relates to the previous one or who this sermonising narrator might be: "Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up?" (23).

Chapter 6, switches gears entirely and with devastating satirical effect: "In the small British country seat of Tittencote (described in the last chapter) in the year 1869, John Johannes de Grier lay dying" (30). To be clear, the town of Tittencote has not been described at all in the previous chapter. Or, at least, it has not been described in any way that would usually be labelled "description." Instead, the entire previous chapter is given over to the sermonising excerpted above. What Barnes does here is use the structure of the novel and her abrupt shifts in style to make a polemical point: All one needs to know about the village of Tittencote is that it is the kind of place that treats women as they are treated by the previous chapter's sermon; everything else about its existence can be inferred from the attitudes on display there. 

This, I think, is an example of what poststructuralist feminism means by "écriture féminine." On the level of style and structure, Barnes here displays all of the openness to interpretation, subversion of narrative conventions, humour, and raw difficulty of a writer out to subvert the phallogocentrism of, at least, the realist novel. And on the level of politics, that stylistic experiment is yoked to an expressly feminist position: the satirising of sexist stereotypes and their relationship to sexual violence.  Barnes here (and throughout Ryder) creates what many forms of feminism once imagined to be the future of anti-patriarchal writing. It is a riotous, polyglot, carnivalesque prose that uses more staid genres against themselves. This is writing aimed squarely at the heart of an Apollonian order.  

If Barnes is as good an example as any of what feminist writing was once thought to look like, the Oct. 5 New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that began the Harvey Weinstein era reads like its polar opposite.  

Admittedly, the article begins with a double narrative lead, one story about the actor Ashley Judd and a second about a former Weinstein Company employee named Emily Nestor. By the standards of daily reporting, this is a fairly significant departure from the "inverted pyramid" structure in that the lead does not directly summarise the key events. In the context of prose in general, however, this lead is still written in the terse, objective tone of mainstream American journalism.  

And following the lead, the story returns to the precise tone and structure expected of formal news writing: "An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company." Here are the hallmarks of what in some quarters was once derided as logocentric, patriarchal prose: the grammatical accuracy, the cautious and precise claims, the careful compiling of evidence to support those claims, and, of course, the reference to the institutional authority of The New York Times itself. There is not a hint here of Barnes' Bacchanal.  

But it is, obviously, the The New York Times' version of feminist writing that has created a revolution (to the extent that we are really living through a revolution). The precise, methodical collection of data and the recording of that data in blank, declarative sentences seems utterly foreign to the French feminism that once heralded a revolution in personal expression. At that level, the level of pure style, an argument may not have been won, exactly, but a question seems to have been settled: As it turns out, one need not overthrow the patriarchy's style; one need only overthrow the patriarchy itself.  

The Brexit Map

The main train station in Krakow, Poland exits directly into the Galeria Krakow, a large, relatively high-end shopping mall. On the second floor, there are two enormous maps of Europe, one above the entrance to a Carrefour grocery store and one on the facing wall. Below each is written the repeating slogan "Find your place in Europe."

Political maps generally reinforce the idea of nation states. By drawing borders, they create the visual impression that any two points within the same border, no matter how disparate in real space, are connected more to each other than they are to the outside world. (Russia might be the exception that proves the rule here; at the same time the map insists that Moscow and Vladivostok are both "Russian," the enormous distance between them on the paper quietly questions the notion of Russia as a unified country.) Political maps clarify borders, creating clean and fixed boundaries between states.  As Ken Alder points out in The Measure of All Things, his history of the creation of the metric system, the very act of measuring and charting space is tied up in the creation of nation states as unified, centrally governed blocks of space; the act of creating a national map undermines older traditions of local autonomy.

The map in Galeria Krakow works in the opposite direction, undermining nation states in favour of a purely cosmopolitan and pan-European sense of space. In so doing, it nicely clarifies a vision of European union with which so many populist and localist voters have recently expressed distain.

First, and most obviously, the Krakow map eliminates any overt reference to nations. National names and national borders are removed, and are present only implicitly in the names of national capital cities. That implication, though, is thin. Given the immediate context (a shopping mall), the sense is that these cities have been selected more for their commercial importance than for their political ones. The elimination of nations is reinforced by the slogan underneath: One's place is in Europe, not in France or Croatia. 

Second, the map establishes the city as the sole physical presence in a map of Europe. In a traditional map, the closed shape of national borders implies a kind of presence to the empty space within them, in the same way that by drawing a circle on a blank sheet of paper, you give a kind of mass to the space within the circle. Thus the empty space between, say, Paris and Lyon looks "French" because it is enclosed in the border of France, even if that space is literally blank on the map. 

Here, the effect is much different. The non-city space is rendered as pure absence. There is no difference between the space of rural France and the space of the North Sea; both are equally absent and irrelevant to this vision of Europe. Thus rural Europe is not just de-emphasized (a perhaps justifiable decision in a map of economic or population centres), but erased. One must find one's place in this transnational Europe in a city; nowhere else exists. 

Third, the language of this borderless, rural-less Europe is English. The city names on the map are in Polish (Praga is Prague, Warszawa is Warsaw, etc.). However, the imperative slogan is in English: Find Your Place in Europe. Just as, spatially, everything about the nation except its cosmopolitan cities is erased, so too are its national languages. The very command to find yourself within this transnational capitalist space is rendered in the default language of transnational capitalism. 

Here, then, is encapsulated something of the worldview Brexit and its populist cousins reject, a Europe in which the rural and the national are erased in favour of a network of interchangeable commercial nodes.

S-Town and the Comforts of Aesthetic Hierarchy

There was a moment there when podcasts threatened to do something different.

It is early days yet for this medium and, as in the early days of cinema and radio, genre lines and corresponding prestige seemed, at least for a few years, to be shifting rapidly beneath our feet. There have of course been, almost since the podcast's inception, the longform magazine-y shows that have perfected a fairly familiar form of narrative journalism: This American Life, Radiolab, and, more recently, Invisibilia. Brilliant though these often are, they mostly produce work familiar in its structure and subject matter and, generally speaking, work of the kinds already suited to Pulitzer Prizes and other such forms of institutional acclaim. That is to say, these magazine-y podcasts win the kind of praise granted to excellent magazine journalism.

But with the advent in 2014 of Serial, the This American Life offshoot, a kind of anarchy threatened to reign alongside these more staid versions of nonfiction podcasting. Season 1 of Serial resurrected the most exceedingly fun form of lowbrow crime reporting, granted it a kind of Paul Auster reflexive gloss, and won plaudits from every sector of cultural criticism in the process. Suddenly it seemed critical praise was due not just to the standard magazine fair, but to a genre usually the province of grocery store paperbacks. Serial Season 2 may have missed the mark in many respects, but it continued to upend aesthetic hierarchies in its willingness to make the true crime cliffhanger the dominant plot structure of critically-praised podcasting.

2017, however, has witnessed two events that have quickly put the usual aesthetic hierarchies back in place. First came the release of the widely panned Missing Richard Simmons. If true crime always threatens to veer into tabloid invention, Missing Richard Simmons made clear that podcast true crime was no exception to the rule. The once-a-week release schedule meant a series of breathy cliffhangers, each more disappointing than the next, and the narrative payoff was about as poor as could be: an emotional appeal to the show's titular missing person that hoped to hide behind pathos the fact that the show's investigate reporting revealed, more or less, nothing.

Second came S-Town, a story that returned longform podcasting to realist terrain, narrativised the abandonment of true crime, and was praised far and wide for doing just those two things. S-Town begins with the overt promise of true crime in its soapiest form: a murder and police coverup set in the gothic environs of a poor, racist, southern town. But, by the end of episode 2, the true crime genre is entirely abandoned. The murder turns out not to have happened, and the remaining 5 episodes turn to an exploration of the ersatz tipster's character. The remaining hours are essentially a form of realism: a careful study of the interaction between setting and character, replete with symbolism and nicely embedded in the larger cultural history of America. If a podcast can be Henry Jamesian, then this is a Jamesian podcast.

The confluence of Missing Richard Simmons' failure and S-Town's triumph have quickly restored true crime and realism to their usual aesthetic relationship: the former degraded, the latter exulted. This is in some ways disappointing. One of the exciting possibilities of Serial was that, through the new medium of podcasting, the lowbrow genre of true crime might be reinvented in highbrow terms in a way not really attempted since the era of New Journalism (beginning with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and ending with Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song). But the historical accident of Missing Richard Simmons and S-Town being released in rapid succession has meant that the critical appraisals of both genres have been returned to their comfortable norm. Missing Richard Simmons, though a single text, stands in for the failures of the entire true crime genre; S-Town, a particularly fine example of realism, proves the case that realism has always been a more important artistic mode.

Donald Trump: A Tyrant, but Whose Kind of Tyrant?

One reasonable criterion for the worth of nonfiction is longevity. How long is a book worth continuing to read? This has rarely been truer than at the end of a year in which so many political events have been declared "unprecedented." If recent events are truly unique in history, then surely books published prior to those events can have little to tell us about our current predicament, yes?

But, in fact, the opposite seems true, and both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency have created cottage industries searching for theorists and philosophers who speak to contemporary problems. Of this year's attempts to prove the prescience of older texts, few are more brilliant than Andrew Sullivan's argument that Plato accounts nicely for the rise of Donald Trump. I would like to take on a less ambitious task and hearken back only to Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, On Revolution.

In particular, I want to point to one of the many careful distinctions she makes in characterising the modes of power that emerged from the American Revolution. Arendt argues that the American Revolution (and, to a lesser extent, the French Revolution) bequeathed to us a definition of tyranny that is less precise than the one that preceded it. Prior to the American Revolution, Arendt claims, "tyranny" referred not to all types of one-person rule, but to one-person rule in which the ruler chose, of his own accord, not to rule in the public interest: "Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political theory to distinguish between government according to law and tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the lawful, civil rights of the governed." (Arendt 121).

Thus, for pre-Revolutionary philosophers and politicians, it was not kings per se who were tyrants; it was only bad kings who were tyrants: "Under no circumstances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the revolutions quickly were to be driven. Tyranny, as the revolutions came to understand it, was a form of government in which the ruler, even though he ruled according to the laws of the realm, had monopolised for himself the rights of action" (Arendt 121).

As Arendt argues here, from the experience of republican government emerged the idea that any form of non-democratic government was ipso facto tyrannical. The individual in power might make good decisions or bad; either way, her failure to gain sanction from the people she governs constitutes a form of tyranny. It is in this sense that a certain kind of conservative can see President Obama's use of drones as tyrannical even while, when push comes to shove, supporting the specific decisions he has made. It is Obama's failure to consult Congress or the people directly, not the rectitude of his actions per se, that constitutes tyranny.

The pre-Revolutionary distinction between forms of one-person rule is, I want to suggest, being revived before our eyes in the phenomenon of Trumpism.

In the eyes of Trump's critics, his selection of certain companies for scorn, his decision to "save" a Carrier plant in one place while ignoring workers in another--that is to say, his decision to rule almost without policy and only by caprice--constitutes tyranny as such. We might concede that, yes, the nation or the world is better off with those few jobs saved and that Carrier plant open; but we still object to the way in which Trump "monopolise[s] for himself the rights of action." If jobs are to be kept in the United States, we insist, this ought to be done through a rational policy debated in the legislative and executive branches.

Trump's fans, however, adhere to an older, pre-Revolutionary definition of tyranny. Under this sense of tyranny, these acts are not tyrannical because, though they may stem from one-man rule, they uphold the public interest. Under this definition of tyranny, Trump may be capricious and may rule outside the bounds of republican norms. However, he only becomes a tyrant insofar as his actions advance his own interests to the exclusion of the nation's. If he saved 700 manufacturing jobs, who cares how he did it?

Trump's critics, then, have their work cut out for them. Marshalling evidence that Trump acts without the consent of Congress or without public consultation will convince few for whom such acts are not the problem. Unlike during the Nixon era, in which the question was only whether evidence of the crime could be found, in the Trump era it is a question of how to define the crime itself.

Antarctic Notes 2: Exploration, Imperialism, and Tanks

"They were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France." 

--Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Why do we dislike imperialism? The obvious answer is its victims; in expanding their empires from (primarily) European bases, imperial nations subjugate other people, sometimes with genocidal consequences. Understandably enough, the effects of imperialism on these colonised people have received the lion's share of attention in postcolonial criticism.

The European (and, in one case, Japanese) exploration of Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers an interesting case study in this context. If it is indeed the effects on subjugated peoples that makes us object to imperialism, then attempts to "conquer" the South Pole should register differently; there being no Antarctic people to subjugate, there should be little to object to.

And, indeed, this is the case. Tales of Antarctic adventure certainly strike us as less problematic than parallel imperial tales from the "scramble for Africa" and the "settling" of the North American  plain written in roughly the same period.

That said, reading the narratives these explorers left behind suggests that there is something internal to the act of conquest itself that troubles us. Beneath the heroism, legitimate scientific curiosity, and awe at the beauty of nature in these stories there lies a sense that these men's self-assurance and fixity of purpose is itself problematic, that the lack of introspection here is, even absent concrete and immediate victims, still destined to end poorly.

This nagging sense of something wrong with the Antarctic imperial project bursts through to the narrative surface very occasionally. The most striking example of this is in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. The Terra Nova expedition, of which he was a part, had brought with it early versions of snow mobiles which they hoped would allow them to move supplies from their camp on the Antarctic coast to supply depots further inland. In assessing their utility after the fact, Cherry-Garrad makes this striking statement:

"Did they succeed or fail? They certainly did not help us much, the motor which travelled farthest drawing a heavy load to just beyond Corner Camp. But even so fifty statute miles is fifty miles, and that they did it at all was an enormous advance.... The general design seemed to be right, all that was now wanted was experience. As an experiment they were successful in the South, but Scott never knew their true possibilities; for they were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France" (Cherry-Garrard 332).

This last sentence is shocking. Writing in England in 1922, with the consequences of World War I (including the battlefield deaths of many of survivors of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition) all around him, Cherry-Garrad draws a direct connection between his own project and the horrors of the war.

Cherry-Garrard's memoir is otherwise notable in its lack of psychological insight; to Cherry-Garrad, every member of the Scott expedition was brave, stoic, patriotic, and good-natured to the end. That flatness of psychological insight makes this one sentence that much more striking. Here Cherry-Garrad breaks through, seemingly accidentally, to a remarkable piece of cultural insight: that British exploration, even in its most victimless and scientific mode, leads not incidentally but directly to the technology of warfare and the wreckage of the Great War.

Thus, to an Edwardian explorer maybe even more clearly than to us, the problem of imperialism is not just the victims external to its function, but the mindset and methods internal to it.

Antarctic Notes 1: Edwardian Form

One way to organise literary forms is on a spectrum from those which allow the fewest possible voices to speak to those which allow the most to speak. Thus we might see the possible range of literature running from the most monological, closed, didactic forms (propaganda of one form or another--Upton Sinclair at his worst, for example) to the most polyphonous, dialogic, and open-to-interpretation forms (the more sprawling realist novels, certain forms of experimental poetry, postmodern collage, and so forth).

It is fairly widely accepted that one end of this spectrum is less ethical, progressive, democratic, etc., than the other. That is to say, it is fairly common place to see the didacticism of Sinclair or later proletarian fiction as authoritarian and bad, and to see the openness and polyvocality of, say, Djuna Barnes or Thomas Pynchon as democratic, open-to-debate, and, therefore, good. The multiple voices in the works of these more esteemed writers encourage diversity of perspectives thereby undermining the authoritarian politics embodied in the forms at the other end of the spectrum. Or so the usual reading goes.

Reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World suggests a politics of form absent from the typical reading described above. Cherry-Garrard's memoir describes Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated attempt to discover the South Pole, and Charry-Gerrard's own role in it. In many ways, despite the hyper-masculine, perfectly Edwardian subject matter of exploration conquest, and the extremes of human endurance, the book's form appears more typical of later postmodern writers' collage and multiple voices. That is to say, the book's form is remarkably "democratic." Throughout the book, Charry-Gerrard includes other writers' work in the form of scientific papers, diaries, letters home, and later recollections that allow him to elaborate on topics in which he is not expert and events for which he was not present, as well as to give other people's perspectives on events he has already described first-hand. Indeed, at times these quotations almost overwhelm the writer's own voice, taking up pages at a time. His deference, in particular, to Scott's diary tends to render Cherry-Garrard's own voice almost secondary within his own text.

These citations and quotations, however, serve almost the opposite purpose to those usually lauded in polyvocal, dialogic literature. Rather than showing a great diversity of voices contesting each other or illuminating multiple perspectives, the polyphony here serves only to highlight the remarkable unanimity of the voyage's personnel. Every voice agrees as to the purpose and value of the voyage, the nature of the obstacles faced, and the heroism of the men in facing them. The controlling metaphor here is not the multicultural fabric or bustling agora, but one taken from the polar journey itself: multiple men yoked to a sledge, working together to pull in the same direction.

Thus Cherry-Garrard's book suggests a different possibility for multi-voiced literary forms: a distinctively Edwardian vision of many people all speaking to the same purpose, working toward the same goal. There is no postmodern diversity or parallax here; only solidarity and unanimity. Thus emerges from Cherry-Garrard's form something like the Edwardian postmodern or, perhaps, the Edwardian anti-postmodern. Or, perhaps, the last glimpse of a total unity of purpose before World War I would make any such thing inconceivable.

Books about White People

Here is a picture of five books, all published between 1969 and 1972:

And here is a sixth, published in 1969:

I came across these while unpacking books into a new bookshelf, and had for the most part forgotten about both owning them and having once read each of them. (The occasion for first reading them was a dissertation chapter on Norman Mailer's journalism.) The books are striking today for their contemporary relevance.

Each deals with what, in the wake of Richard Nixon's election, seemed to be a movement toward a kind of white identity politics. White Americans, particularly working-class white Americans,  these writers argue, had come to see themselves as a kind of aggrieved identity group and were now voting on those grievances. The result was the election of Nixon and a a cultural "backlash" against the Civil Rights movement and the counterculture. The writers presented here disagree considerably both about the legitimacy of these grievances and the likely longterm political consequences of them.

What they agree upon, however, is that whiteness had been, in the late 1960s, politicised. Once taken as simply the given background of American life, whiteness was now the terrain of political discussion, its meaning and value argued over by professional critics and shop foremen alike. 

This is perhaps the first lesson these books hold for our current cultural and political moment. It is not so much that Donald Trump is like Nixon (to the extent that either of them is psychologically knowable from afar, they seem strikingly different). Rather, it is that the politicisation of whiteness was a necessary precondition for the rise of both. To put that more starkly: politicised whiteness would seem to be a threat to progressive politics, and perhaps to the political order as a whole. 

The second lesson these books hold is that not all identities are politicised equally. Each of these books speaks to the concerns of white voters and of working-class voters and they for the most part see the working class as white by default. All of that remains mostly true of our current concern with and politicisation of white Americans. (The one important difference might be the post-industrial blurring of the distinctions between working-class, unemployed, and chronically under-employed people.)

The Nixon-era books, however, politicise another identity category, one that is almost entirely absent from political discussion today: White ethnicity. Pieces of a Dream is subtitled The Ethnic Worker's Crisis with America, and that concern with ethnicity is a theme that runs through all six books. The difference between a descendent of English Americans and a descendent of Italian or Lithuanian ones was, in the Nixon era, front and centre. Today, it hardly registers.

There is, maybe, a glimmer of hope here. Not that the identity category of "white" might be segmented into different ethnicities and pitted against itself, but that identity categories might be re-articulated in different and more productive directions. To put that another way, the importance of ethnicity to writers 50 years ago is a reminder that all politics is identity politics. A person is no more "naturally" an Italian American than she is a white American, nor more naturally a "worker" than she is a "Christian." Cultural work is required to create and then to politicise each of those ideas. And if our culture has, at this moment, created and then politicised the idea of a monolithic whiteness, then it might in the future create and then politicise categories which today seem irrelevant to politics and which might, looked at from a distance, hold more political promise: neighbour, producer, conservationist, caregiver, etc. 

Writers once thought it crucial to figure out the meaning of Slavic-Americanness; today they could hardly care less. Perhaps, then, we might one day worry not at all about what it means to be white, having turned our attention instead toward what it means to look after children or care for the elderly. 

Persepolis, Islamophobia, Unit Planning

Should we teach Persepolis? Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel and memoir of her youth in revolutionary Iran is, at this point, clearly a part of the high school canon. And perhaps rightly so; it certainly checks a lot of boxes: Given it's visual nature, it is accessible to weaker readers, and yet complex in theme; it is a female- and minority-authored text adrift in a white, male sea still too full of Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Jack London; it allows students to take a "literary" approach to a text type still sometimes dismissed as childish or simplistic (I had such a conversation with a parent just today); and, lastly, it allows students relatively easy introductory access to literary nonfiction, a genre worthy of study in its own right and granted renewed importance by the Common Core State Standards. So the book works on a number of levels.

There is a problem, though, with teaching Persepolis in the high school classroom: Islamophobia. In some senses, the text combats Islamophobia in that it introduces students to the details of a particular moment in the history of one Islamic society, including some of the fissures that divide that society, and in so doing it undercuts some of the sillier abstractions that pit a monolithic "Islamic World" against a "Western" one.

Beyond that basic emphasis on historical specificity (and that point is not nothing in a world that still too often trades in ahistorical colonialist generalities), the text does not bear out a postcolonial or anti-Islamphobic reading. For example, on the very first page of volume 1, the text establishes the Islamic headscarf as a potent symbol of unfreedom, juxtaposed against the previously free world of French, secular education. This trope continues for the duration of volume 1, with French education associated with equality of the sexes, individual liberty, and an honest pursuit of truth. In the final pages, these symbolic resonances are made literal as Marji escapes the Iranian revolution to a European boarding school, thus finding artistic freedom in the West when she could not in the Islamic East. The myriad ways in which Islam (and not Marji's parents' secular vision of the world) is associated with violence and repression are obvious enough, from stories of torture at the hands of the Islamic regime to women's protests quashed by Islamist thugs to a pointless war deploying tens of thousands of child soldiers.

(To push the point slightly further, the text puts Marx to fascinating use. Throughout the book, the truly idealistic revolutionaries are Marxists and the pragmatist champions of the status quo are westernised liberals; it is only the Islamist revolutionaries who are craven--represented as primarily interested in a crude sort of Puritanism, sadism, and misogyny. Thus the forces of classical European revolution, liberal capitalism and Marxism, are synthesised into twin pillars of good intentions while it is the non-Western revolutionary force, Islamism, that is cast as the bad guy.)

One would not want this postcolonial point to swerve too far into a criticism of Satrapi herself. It goes without saying that her experience of the Iranian Revolution should be widely read and understood, and that her criticisms of the, by the all accounts, terrible revolutionary government of Iran are entirely warranted. It is also entirely correct that a story of horrific sexual violence committed by men against women is of particular interest in an era of heightened concern about sexual assault and a renewed interest in the relationship between gender and violence. So, to put that more succinctly, there is no question of veracity here, or at least not one I am aware of or qualified to make, nor any question of best intentions on Satrapi's part.

The issue, though, is, as it always is in an English classroom, one of selection. Students will not be exposed to infinite representations of Islam, nor will they be exposed to texts in a political vacuum. And so it might seem that, in 2016, for a European or American or otherwise "westernised" audience, a text that represents Islam primarily as un-freedom is problematic. Does it reinforce Islamophobic stereotypes that are otherwise widely circulated in the culture and also politically problematic? I think this answer is largely, "yes."

So what, then, is one to do? The simple answer would be, "Don't teach Persepolis." But that, in turn, raises potentially bigger problems about quiet censorship and the narrowing of the canon to only the most certifiably "liberal" (in the 21st-century, American, collegiate sense of the word) texts.

The answer to this conundrum is neither political nor literary; it is curricular. The problem with teaching Persepolis as the sole representation of Islam students encounter is that you are teaching Persepolis as the sole representation of Islam students encounter.  And here in lies the problem with the English Language Arts unit built around a particular text. Were students to read Persepolis in the context of several other, diverse representations of Iran or of Islam, the problems Persepolis raises would largely disappear. To take just one example, one could imagine discussing Persepolis' veil imagery in the context of The New Yorker's recent article on Islamic modelling and alternative views of beauty and freedom.

Both texts, of course, would have to be consciously taught in order for these matters to come to the fore. And this, it seems to me, is a strong argument in favour of ELA units based not in specific texts (even when supplemented by additional short pieces) but in broad questions. If the question was, "What does Islam represent?", it would be hard logically to conclude that the best way to answer the question is by reading a single person's representation of Islam. If, on the other hand, the model underlying the unit is that we are teaching a specific text, in this case Persepolis, then other readings will appear at best ancillary, and arguably as wastes of time. Thus, in this narrow context, the problem of representation becomes not one of politics but one of curriculum.