POLITICAL NOVELS: who gives a shit

Who gives a shit about a political novel?

Every so often I think, “I should be writing something political.” Something that intersects with the real world in a certain way that lays out political ideas. A ladder has three rungs, corresponding to the development of a man’s thoughts: the lowest is Aesthetics — as a child and teenager he figures out what is Good in music, art, movies, literature. What has an affect on him, develops his taste. Then he ascends one rung to Ethics: what is Good behavior for the individual. These can be hard lessons and take a long time. Lots of mistakes. But he should be tending toward an understanding of what is Good. The third and top rung to climb is Politics: what is Good behavior between people. How can behavior be organized in groups and systems to seek the Good in life. How can authority be established and laws and principles that progress (or react to progress) for the group.

You can get stuck on a rung. The lifelong aesthete only pursues the Good movie, the Good novel, the Good band all his life and never considers what’s good behavior or good policy for a nation. He takes in culture but only at a very individualistic level: “I think my taste is good, is the best.” He never progresses upward to think about what’s good for his interface with others, or what’s good for the group in itself.

Robbe-Grillet, who I have only read the theories of on the novel, would say something like: “The world changes and we lack tools to comprehend the world. Or, our tools are very ancient and can’t keep up with the world’s complexity and rapid change.” Therefore we’re flying blind and can’t make good decisions about how to live in our world. The novel used to do that. Robbe-Grillet wrote of the need for “a new novel,” one that reflected the changes of the world since the heyday of the novel in the 19th century. I’m only repeating what I’ve read of him. You can’t expect a 19th century French novel to tell you what you need to know about 20th century America, or about a 21st century interlinked cyberspace without national borders.

This may touch on politics. Who can make heads or tails of contemporary politics enough to pin them down to dramatize them or make narratives about them? TV shows attempt to do it. Depends on what you mean by political. A novel or a TV show about politicians could satisfy this critical urge. But there’s something cringey about a novel about a president or a senator. Making their way through their day and dealing with situations that are oh so perfectly tailored to give us some healthy medicine about our political world.

Politics make people run the other way.

This is all off the top of the dome; I have no notes or constructed thoughts. No examples really of what I mean. I just wonder if a novel could ever be written that would adequately get at the political texture of life in current day social media land without becoming a pity party about “Trumpism” or “the GOP” or “hot button issues.” There must be an angle that would touch on the cultural wavelength everything is vibrating at right now. And could illustrate a path forward.

But you can’t write a novel with a political program when the world is about to end, you will say back to me. What political system matters when we’re about to be scorched off the face of the arid, overheated planet like an insect under a kid’s magnifying glass? Ok. Well what is the scope you’re using? The big picture might be telling us we’re about to go extinct. But can art still teach us something in this extreme place we’re in? Art is something that reflects life back to us, according to one theory. And the reflection is bleak. Another theory (one I have had problems with for my own reasons I might get into here, I don’t know, it’s all unpredictable) tells us that art is not for reflecting the horrible world back to us so we may know it and — I don’t know, conduct ourselves accordingly? — but no, art is for illustrating a better world, somehow, and giving us the building blocks for making it happen. I have grown to dislike this second theory. Maybe there’s a nihilistic teenager inside me who has a distaste for the Uncle Tom’s Cabin model of literature. Literature that changes the world for the better. Where can literature help us change? Or can it, even? Soviet Russia thought that literature should help socialism, communism, dialectical materialism come to pass. Changing the prism slightly: Dostoevsky wrote novels to tackle political and religious issues of his day, seemingly because he was concerned about the trajectory that 19th century Russia was going on. The change was happening before the literature in the sequence of history, not the other way around. Maybe this is the role of the political novel: to be diagnostic. To illustrate aspects of the changes already set in motion, changes invisible to journalism or pop culture or common man’s thought. There needs to be a bird’s eye view of the political changes because we’re stuck at man’s eye view. And we can’t interpret the changes. No matter how many articles we read or tv programs we watch. The novel about politics is supposed to be stepping in to do this, in its special secret novelistic way.

I’m sure such a book is out there. But maybe it is being published at a level or scale that is paradoxically very high up in the publishing world (the big 5) and yet, so, very watered down and bland. I say this because I don’t read a lot of books being published at those aeries and those lofty places. So whatever insights into politics are not teaching me at my level. I need a political novel that can permeate indie fiction land and that can palpate parts of my mind, heart, and soul that other cultural products can’t get at. I have faith that such a novel could be written. It would have to be a subtle knife. I will see it coming and deflect it otherwise. It will have to penetrate my mind at an almost pixel-level of high resolution. A poison. That will speak to me at my class level, my income level, my reading level.

The cynicism is thick. That will be a major obstacle. The encrustation of fear and negativity caused by the desensitizing flow of current events — news of evil and misfortune coming relentlessly as a flood — would make any work of art with a message difficult to consume properly. Apathy has a large surface area, a zone that is smooth with few spots for hope to get a toehold.

I wrote a political novel of sorts. I hope it gets published. It was written over many years, from the long ago George W. Bush administration up through Obama 2. I had a thought to write some long work of fiction about all the political speeches I was seeing on TV. How they seemed to be chemical compounds grown in a lab for how they predicted the applause of politically engaged audiences who just wanted to believe in the speech of some leader. Bush was an unremarkable little idiot who seemed to be surrounded by an astonishing cadre of politically expert manipulators. The speeches were part of that. I became aware in those years of the way that events where speeches were made were artificial constructions designed to capture the emotions of people watching at home. W would speak to military personnel who applauded his toughness, and watching at home, hearing the live applause, you were expected to allow those feelings to sweep you away too. We were still captured by TV politics. Which is still there, of course, but people like me don’t watch TV news like that anymore. I used to watch CSPAN. I wanted the raw coke. Uncut. George W. Bush was a carefully stage-managed phenomenon. I also listened to Limbaugh on AM radio. It’s in the language and speech that consensus and rhetorical appeal are made. This country (maybe all countries) were steered by instruments of speech and language. People studied this. You think when you applaud a political speaker that you are acting freely? No, somebody developed those applause-lines for you. It was the death of belief and the birth of cynicism to understand that. Too bad it took a global war on terrorism to familiarize you with the terrible bargaining that went hand in hand with being micro-vassals of the empire. Many many people ate it up and thought we should just kill as many other people as possible. They cheered and applauded leaders when the leaders were being most bloodthirsty. Jingoism was live and direct. It still is. But I didn’t get it, and didn’t feel the discomfort that made me start moving aesthetic, ethical, and political furniture around in my mind until that war. It was painful. The Patriot Act and the war in Iraq and neoconservatives and the American Empire’s heavy spiritual price tag in those years were made clear.

I bought into it. I became a kind of conflicted liberal national security hawk after 9/11 like many other people did. I supported the effort to kill Osama bin Laden. I engaged in spy fantasies about fighting terrorism and espionage against America. I was flying high on psychotic mania when I took a few half-steps into this crazy idea that I could possibly serve my country by learning foreign languages and working for the government. I can’t tell you of the enormous collapse and disillusionment that went along with it. The confusion. I was against the war in Iraq but in favor of the CIA taking the fight into the shadowy spaces around the globe. It was, I reasoned, quieter and would spill less blood. I guess. I was an antiwar cheerleader for war, but war by other means. I wanted a mental, cerebral, intelligence war to be fought. That’s what I was in favor of. But I hated civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. You’ve heard of sapiosexuals? I was a kind of sapiopatriotic hawk who didn’t take stock of the Faustian bargain that Americans were in for as the 21st century got underway and we realized what world we were living in.

What does this have to do with the political novel? Nothing. Nothing except I tried my best to write one. It’s called Free Speech. Maybe you’ll read it one day. Maybe you yourself will write the political novel that I’m asking for. The world is so hard to understand if you are being honest and are not subscribing to easy answers. Big things are happening. We frequently hear that no one has really written the “social media” novel yet. There is probably a host of COVID-19 novels that we are seeing come online. I haven’t spoken about the wrinkles of dissident right wingers in bohemian spaces that I’m seeing. There’s a right-wing counterculture that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. That is fascinating. It’s easy to dismiss as offbeat contrariness and less easy to contend with as a real development of political thought. Aspects of culture and politics we can’t even name yet are hopefully being sifted for novelistic treatment right now as we speak. And I almost don’t even want them to be written by the academics. Smart people are like traitors to their fellow man. There’s an aesthetic quality to their productions that banish them from what I’m talking about.

Maybe the best political novels aren’t being written in English and so they are in need of translation if they are going to reap the right hearts and minds in the right audiences. Maybe we in America are so decadent and lost and rotten we’re hopeless cases. We’re the enemy. What novels, plays, songs would the Harkonnens enjoy? Are we the Nazi party of the global holocaust that will devour all viable life on earth? We are essentially pals with the oil companies. We are symbiotic fish swimming around corporate sharks and eating crumbs out of their gums. The shark gets something out of it, and we get protection. But we’re on Team Predator. Who gives a fuck what media we consume, what we like to listen to or what books we read. We just might be the plague. It’s not our time. We will wallow in puddles of decadent fluids that came from inside us, smegma and ooze that are just byproducts of the consumerist life cycle. We’re Americans.

I’m always touchy about saying this, but something cataclysmic might need to happen. I don’t want violence. I’m a pacifist. I’m not one of these violence-worshipping fascists who think war will cleanse the world. But there’s a sick complacency that attends this end of the world quietism. The active people, the people at least flailing at a solution, are portrayed as lunatics in the media. Or critics of things as metaphysically fundamental, seemingly, as gender. My daughter’s generation wants to critique that whole gender thing at the very root. And older generations can’t fathom what they have in store for the rest of us. The change is so big we can’t wrap our arms around it and understand it. We’re gaining the technological tools to see big pictures. But we use those tools to buy t shirts and watch porn and play video games where we serve other people and other interests and kill whole buildings full of inconsequential phantom people.

Maybe you don’t recognize the “we” I’m slinging. That’s alright. This just sounds awfully familiar to you. No one’s got a fresh spin on it. That’s what cheapens the dialogue. And makes people’s eyes glaze over. Ok boomer.

I’m just saying. Politics is a living, ever-morphing hieroglyph that it will take a special Champollion to decipher. It’s gobbledygook right now. It’s in clear language but no one really knows how to speak it. It’s like being trapped in a nightmare where you’re trying to read the hospital sign to figure out where your dying child is being kept but the letters and arrows are like jellyfish that swim across the visual field and won’t stay still. Everything depends on an accurate picture but maybe Robbe-Grillet was right and the novels we’re getting are archaic junk lenses. We don’t know what in the ever loving fuck the world is right now. No one has said the right thing in a novel yet. At least that I’ve seen. I don’t read everything but I’m not even getting helpful ripples yet. I’m getting necropolises. Nothing has fidelity enough to guide the way. Maybe we’re supposed to stay lost.

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This rap battle features Dirt from Syracuse who is my favorite battle rapper. Syracuse was about fifteen minutes from where I grew up. I just watch these battles and laugh and marvel at the lyrical spray. It’s got nothing to do with politics I just thought I’d post something here.