Paris Notes 2: Climate Change, Sustainability, and My Role in Stephen Harper's Rise

Much of the appeal of Stephen Harper's years as Prime Minister of Canada has been a kind of stasis. While the United States experienced economic disaster, its banking system teetering for a moment on the brink of collapse, Canada under Harper just hummed along, seemingly affected by neither financial disaster, government shutdown, and political spectacle to its south nor financial disaster and near political dissolution in Europe. Harper's appeal is that, under his firm and boring hand, plain old Canada will keep doing its thing, insulated from the danger that surrounds it in a violent and difficult world. In this sense, Harper has been more philosophically conservative than his American counterparts who, at least since the mid-sixties, have been far more concerned with overturning the status quo than upholding it. Harper's appeal (and this is by no means necessarily a bad thing) lies in his affinity with the average and the boring.

In true Gramscian fashion, though, positions have shifted below Harper's placid surface. These shifts are numerous and seem likely next month to end his tenure as leader of a majority government if not to cost him his job as Prime Minister.

Ten years ago, I played a small role in the election in which Harper first became Prime Minister, serving as both de facto campaign manager and de jure Official Agent for my brother Nigel's campaign on the Green Party ticket. Those were heady days. The campaign stretched a then-longish 60 days through December and January. The Green Party flirted with double digits in national polls and there were high, if unrealistic, hopes that it would win a seat in Parliament. As befits a Green Party campaign with no chance of victory (the Liberal candidate in the riding was the Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale), we ran a low-carbon operation, travelling by bus and foot to events. Despite weather typical of Saskatchewan in December, I rode my bicycle to pick up campaign materials from the Elections Canada office once our petition to be placed on the ballot was accepted. I flatter myself that we were election office favourites for our commitment to principle.

From this distance, one striking aspect of that campaign was the frequency with which we evoked the promise of "sustainability." We uttered the word constantly in conversations and speeches. My most striking memory from the campaign is of Nigel appearing in front of a crowd of a few hundred at a University of Regina all-candidates forum. The NDP candidate touted a Sierra Club report stating that her party had the greenest of all party platforms. Nigel, the dreadlocked outsider candidate, responded directly with a lengthy list of provincial NDP governments' environmental sins, before adding, "And this is the NDP. They're supposed to be the good guys!" He then summed up his position that he had no chance of winning, and the Green Party had no chance of forming government, but someone needed to stand up and point out that if we did not start living sustainably, we were all doomed. This whole election, he concluded, was about sustainability.

Nigel's impassioned speech, one beautifully structured so that it moved from a narrowly partisan attack on the NDP to a philosophical cri de coeur, was very well received. I have surely romanticized this moment of youthful political action, but I recall an ovation that far outstripped anything granted any other candidate that day.

What strikes me today, though, is how quickly the basic message of that speech has become untenable. "Sustainability" as a battle cry has built into it a certain narrative of stasis. There exists, the word implies, a correct balance between human activity and the natural world, and our responsibility is to act only within the boundaries established by that balancing act. Thus we might sustain the earth in its natural state rather than render it changed.

This emphasis on sustaining the current state of things is written all over the hegemonic version of environmentalism: the happily cyclic emblem of recycling suggests that all materials can be returned to an earlier state in a never-ending process; household composting returns food to the dirt from which it came so that food might be grown anew; the very idea of renewable energy sources implies wind, tides, and sunlight that can be harvested forever. Where industrial society is headed toward collapse, sustainable development promises a human civilization that can continue in perpetuity.

But what if all of this is built on a fantasy? For the notion that we humans are in some kind of balance with an external nature, and that this balance might be maintained, seems increasingly fantastical. Slavoj Zizek has been making a version of this critique for some time, and it is clear now that many of the facts are on his side. Global climate change is a part of this; whatever balance may have existed in the past, humans have now committed the earth to significant enough change in the oceans and the atmosphere that sustaining a semblance of the status quo for more than a decade or two is impossible. In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert makes a similar point in the context of species loss; according to her reporting, we are already committed to change so significant it registers in geological time. To the extent that these facts are well established, the idea of sustaining the status quo seems woefully irrelevant.

I argued in an earlier post that climate change in some ways seems to rebut the postmodern notion of the death of metanarratives. Here, though, climate change would seem to push us in the direction of another postmodernist strain: that of contingency and indeterminacy. For if no "sustainable" future is possible, if the climate change and mass extinction die are already cast, then what is left for environmentalism is to make the best of conditions as they change beneath us. That kind of environmentalism could take on the heady, emancipatory swirl theorists like Ernesto Laclau see in the construction of multiple and shifting political coalitions and causes. But it could also look like a late capitalist nightmare of insecurity in an uncertain world. In either case, the old promise of mere stasis cannot be kept.

The battle cry of sustainability is hardly dead. Indeed, headlines about "Sustainable Development Goals" are everywhere in advance of next week's United Nations meeting on the subject, and the Green Party of Canada remains committed to the concept of a "sustainable economy." Stephen Harper may yet hold on to his job on the promise of continued normalcy for the indefinite future. Conditions, though, have shifted underneath the feet of conservatives and environmentalists alike. And those shifting conditions reveal that environmentalists were, in the specific sense outlined here, conservatives all along.

Melodrama, Existentialism, and Gender

In Albert Camus's introduction to Poésies Posthumes by René Leynaud (reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death), he describes the late poet in the following terms: "But I have never known a single person who, loving him, failed to love him without reservation. This is because he inspired confidence. Insofar as it is possible for a man, he gave himself completely to everything he did. He never bargained about anything, and this is why he was assassinated. As solid as the short, stocky oaks of his Ardèche, he was both physically and morally strapping. Nothing could make the slightest dent in him when he had once made up his mind what was fair. It took a burst of bullets to subjugate him" (48).

What immediately follows this passage is a page break, and then this: "Up to now, I have spoken of Leynaud dryly and, so to speak, in a general way." The disconnect here between Camus's actual prose and his description of that prose is striking. What he describes as dry is, in fact, both emotional and laced with figurative language: love, infallible morality, assassination, and a man as solid as the oak trees of his homeland, a man who, in the final clause, stares down a "burst of bullets" in the name of what is right. Far from a dry description, Camus's prose here verges on melodrama.

I want to suggest that this dichotomy between claims of plain-spoken realism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward melodrama, on the other, is pervasive in existentialism. The claim to realism (and I am using "realism" here in its political sense, as the opposite of idealism) is most obvious amongst atheist existentialists. For them, the heart of the movement is a rejection of the comforting fiction that there is a God up there who cares about us and that there is a moral order that we need only adhere to in order to live a good life. In Camus' own terminology, we live in an "absurd" universe, one defined by the enormous gulf between what humans ask of it emotionally and what the cold, largely empty universe is capable of providing. This stripping away of religious illusions is at the centre of both postwar French existentialism and existentialism's pop cultural incarnations.

Christian existentialism, though somewhat more sanguine about our ultimate salvation, often shares this appeal to realism in the face of comforting illusions. For Kierkegaard, there may be a Creator out there, but that fact does not lead to any easy answers: we are still faced with the impossible task of figuring out what morality demands and, more difficult yet, when violation of the moral order is required by the higher call of spiritual demands. In Kierkegaard's most famous title, Either/Or, we are denied even the comforting Hegelian illusion that all dichotomies will be subsumed in a higher stage of dialectical development. For Kierkegaard, theist though he was, it is all choice and no grounds.

Thus both theistic and atheistic existentialism pose themselves as realist antidotes to the illusion of traditional moral and religious teaching. In this sense, they stand on the masculinist (more on that later) grounds of facing facts rather catering to our emotional needs.

At the same time, however, existentialism often poses its arguments, and especially its dramatizations, on melodramatic and therefore, at least as traditional genre distinctions would have it, feminized grounds. (I realize there is one very obvious objection to this characterization, but bear with me for a moment.) Take for example, the most canonical of Sartre's short stories: "The Wall." Here the decision without clear knowledge, the unknowability of consequences, and the absurdity of moral choices are staged in the most emotionally heightened of circumstances: the last hours before the protagonist faces the firing squad. (And not just any firing squad--an enemy firing squad eliminating members of the resistance.) Camus's Les Justes stages its themes on similar terrain, tyrants and the scaffold playing prominent roles in another life-and-death drama. In Camus's letters and essays these figures are, if anything, even more prominent; the title Resistance, Rebellion, and Death tells us much about the tendency toward melodrama to be found within its pages. Throughout the existentialist canon, the ticking clock, the noose, and the bravery of the Resistance figure again and again. Even in Viktor Frankl's relatively upbeat Man's Search for Meaning, the central drama is not the quotidian life of its readers, but the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust.

Now let us turn to the obvious objection to what I have written in the previous paragraph: While the subject matter, as enumerated above, may sound overwrought and melodramatic, these texts do not read as melodramatic. And the reason for that is clear: Sartre and Camus are not overplaying their emotional hand; they are dealing with situations that would seem to be objectively charged with high drama and intense emotion. It is impossible to accuse someone of being melodramatic about the Holocaust because the Holocaust, in its objective reality, demands the most violent of words in its representation. And something similar might be said about the French Resistance, anti-Czarist fighters, and the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. In every case, the objective conditions justify a highly charged representation.

Melodrama, then, is not highly emotional writing, but unjustifiably emotional writing. It is defined by a relationship between the content of a work and how that content is represented.

With that formula in place, I want to turn to the issue of gender. If the existentialists are excused from the category of melodramatists, this is because the subject matter with which they work reads as dramatic, dangerous, difficult, and infused with the highest moral questions. The subject matter of most melodrama does not. But are we as readers free from bias in that assessment? If Sartre reads as morally serious because he was a great man of philosophy, engaged in the serious business of war, why does Harriet Beecher Stowe, concerned with the serious business of slavery, read as melodramatic? If we saw the life of a 19th-century working-class woman as as dangerous, as filled with mortal risk from both assault and childbirth as it may well have been, would we see writing about those lives as melodramatic? Or would we grant that kind of writing the free pass we give Camus and Sartre? A detailed reading of both the facts of 19th century life and the texts representing it would be required to answer that question. However, it may be that our notion of melodrama has as much to do with our assumptions about what life was like for certain groups of people as it does for how those people are written about.

Postscript: It is perhaps no coincidence that the one academic article indicting an existentialist for melodrama levels that accusation at Simone de Beauvoir, for all intents and purposes the only female existentialist.

Narrating the Postwar World: AP U.S. History and the New Right

Historical survey courses must aim for a sweet spot between two extremes. On the one hand, they need to cover enough territory to map for students a reasonable junk of world history. You cannot make the classic grad student mistake of offering an undergraduate course about your dissertation topic; "Late Progressivism: America from 1910-1914" is unlikely to get many signups and even less likely to benefit many students. But a survey course can miss in the other direction as well, proposing to cover so much territory that only the thinnest narration is possible. This is a problem for world history courses everywhere, and reaches its reductio ad absurdum with the Bill Gates-endorsed "Big History Movement," which purports to cover everything from the formation of the Earth to the present in one curriculum, largely reducing history to geology in the process.

Advanced Placement U.S. History often threads this needle quite nicely, but when it errs, it errs in the direction of covering too much. The course provides high school students with a much needed framework in which to place later study of American history and it also weaves in "Document-Based Questions" that ask students to form interpretations of historical issues based on primary sources. The exam itself, in addition to a multiple-choice portion, includes a variety of essay questions asking students to demonstrate several different forms of synthesis and analysis.

All of this is to the good. However, in aiming for comprehensive coverage, AP US History also spreads itself thin, a thinness that can result in a certain kind of narrowness as well. The current curriculum asks teachers and students to sift through American history from 1491 to present in a single year; a sample pacing guide from College Board suggests devoting a scant five hours of instructional time to the period between 1491 (and presumably here "1491" is functioning as a synecdoche for "all Native American history prior to European contact") and 1607. The result of this frantic pace can be kind of capsule history of American periods. Any competent APUSH student can give you a 3-sentence Reader's Digest version of the Progressive Era: abuse of workers; industrial reforms; Teddy Roosevelt. Great teachers can find room for interpretive disputes and historical revision. But in a course that needs to clip along at AP's prescribed pace, there is only so much that can fit. Situating the Progressive Era in its postcolonial (or, if you prefer, emerging American colonial) context is not much on the agenda; queer history is even less likely to get a hearing. Spending time debating the merits of these different historiographical emphases is all but impossible.

Because of their reach into thousands of American and international high schools, these brief summaries will frame American history for tens of thousands of students. And from that fact derives the importance of last spring's AP US History exam which, in the 50th anniversary year of the Voting Rights Act, devoted its Document Based Question not to the Civil Rights Movement, but to "a new conservatism" that "rose to prominence in the United States between 1960 and 1989."

This is a signal shift in how we narrate the postwar world for high school students, a shift away from the postwar era as the triumph of progressive causes and toward it as the triumph of conservative reaction.

At least as an intellectual exercise, this reframing is in some ways long overdue. As Lisa McGirr argues in her brilliant rethinking of the sixties, Suburban Warriors, the conservative movement has been largely ignored in histories of the sixties because it has been “overshadowed by the more flamboyant Left and its movement culture.  Images of Martin Luther King proclaiming ‘Let freedom ring’ on the Washington Mall, students burning draft cards at federal induction centers, and flower children gathering in Haight-Ashbury for the ‘summer of love’” dominate our collective memory of the decade (McGirr 6). McGirr refocuses us on the quieter moments in coffee klatches and PTA meetings that, over the sixteen years from Goldwater's disastrous presidential campaign to Reagan's election, would remake America at the deepest political levels. A number of other academic historians, joined notably by Rick Perlstein's popular histories of the New Right, have made similar arguments over the last decade or so. 

But if this shift in narrating postwar America is intellectually interesting, it is also tempting to see it as politically troubling. If we want the high school students of America to remember three sentences of the postwar world, surely we would rather they remember Martin Luther King, Jr. at the pulpit or Abby Hoffman defiant in a Chicago courtroom than William F. Buckley pontificating in The National Review or George Wallace on the campaign trail. With limited instructional time, the appearance of the New Right in the AP US History curriculum cannot help but crowd out the more traditional heroes of the period.

The solution to this problem is obvious if difficult: moving away from the survey model and toward narrower content coverage. A course that took on less would have time to do more with it. In this specific case, that "more" could involve some real historiographical work for students: which reading of the postwar world, the rise of the New Left or the rise of the New Right, is more valid? What criteria would we use to choose? Is there a way to synthesize the two readings into something that grasps more of the contradictions of the period? Who gains and who loses when one of these interpretations dominates? Those are real and difficult questions. Getting at them would be great. But it would demand jettisoning a lot else--losing, say, 1491-1607 in favour of a deeper look at 1960-1989. 

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.   

Middlebrow: The 2 Poles of Wednesday Martin's "Primates of Park Avenue"

The publicity for Wednesday Martin's Primates of Park Avenue got off to a sensational start, with an excellent op-ed in the New York Times that managed to be both salacious and feminist alongside a tonne of press about the book's more titillating details. But then, with the book's release, things went a bit off the rails. The Times ran a scathing "Reporter's Notebook" piece questioning both the book's facts and its politics, and the New York Post went further, poking several holes in the book's chronology and suggesting that entire scenes had been fabricated. When the Post's accusations proved to be largely correct, the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced that subsequent editions of the book would contain a disclaimer explaining that liberties had been taken with certain facts.

Compared to the op-ed that preceded it, the book itself is largely disappointing. Much of the op-ed's feminist critique of wealthy Manhattanites is lost in a haze of self-justification and Martin's increasingly unlikely attempts to claim outsider status in the world of the super rich. Martin's hook is that she is a kind of amateur anthropologist studying the foreign world of the Upper East Side. This theoretical framework, however, is very thin and is more often condescending than insightful. Martin's anthropology, though, gives overt expression to an internal tension within the book: that between exoticism and universalism. In so doing, Martin provides a particularly clear example of a narrative structure key to middlebrow entertainment.

At one pole, Martin's anthropological conceit requires her to represent the Upper East Side in as exotic terms as possible. If she is really to be an anthropologist teaching us about a foreign tribe, then she needs to convince us these people are meaningfully different from both us and her. Thus, much of the book is given over to hyperbolic (and vague) descriptions of the dizzying cultural differences between lower Manhattan and the Upper East Side and, later, between the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. Those of us from other parts of the world may find it hard to believe that moving a few blocks within the same borough of the same city constitutes field work, but Martin continually insists on the dizzying culture shock she faces at every turn. The cars are different; the clothes are different; the way they pick up their kids from school is different; the way they exercise is different; etc. Never mind that the language, religion, geography, and food are the same--Martin suffers through months of culture shock. (This is a kind of provincialism perhaps unique to New Yorkers; only Woody Allen has been caused such psychological trauma by switching subway lines.) Tellingly, Martin does not spend much time analyzing the economic differences between Manhattan neighbourhoods. Doing so would likely reveal that the most meaningful difference between different New Yorkers, that of money, is largely irrelevant to her; she was super-rich all along, and thus is hardly a foreign observer of these other super-wealthy moms.

At the same time that her anthropological framework insists on exoticism, however, the way she deploys it erases all differences between not only people, but all primates. After describing each strange Upper East Side ritual she discovers, Martin turns to an analogous behaviour amongst some non-industrial culture or, more often, amongst some other species of primate. From there, Martin makes her most surprising move. She does not analyze the similarities and differences between the Upper East Side ritual and that of its anthropological analogue. Instead, she just asserts that they are identical and moves on. Thus anthropology is deployed to level all differences, not only between cultures but between species. The aggressive displays of female baboons are not an interesting point of comparison to the way women buy purses in New York; for Martin, they are the exact same thing, full stop.

The levelling of all difference reaches its climax in the book's final section, as Martin describes the loss of her third child during pregnancy. After conceding that there exist enormous differences in infant mortality rates between the global poor and the global rich, as well as between antiquity and today, Martin goes on to assert that all mothers' emotions (including those of non-human primates) are grounded in the same fear of a loss of a child. Thus individual and cultural differences are subsumed by something even broader than human nature--some kind of (gender-specific) primate nature. Martin may be exponentially better off than even an average American mother but, trust her, all mothers feel the same way.

These are the poles of Martin's anthropology: first she exoticizes a group of people; then she erases that exoticism so we might see that, deep down inside, we are all the same. This is the basic structure of really bad anthropology. But, more importantly, it is also the structure of a certain kind of middlebrow entertainment. The travelogue in which the narrator lives amongst an exotic tribe only to discover that we are all human; the sitcom which ends with the family reunited in the living room; the folksy Readers' Digest joke set on a distant army base: all three depend for their narrative logic on a quick trip into discomforting difference before a safe return to a generalized humanness. The specifics of Upper East Side life aside, Martin's main contribution to letters may have been to provide a strikingly frank example of this narrative progression.