[Peace-discuss] What's not being said

[C. G. Estabrook]

[At the heart of the psychoanalyst's art is attending to what is not being said 
-- listening with the third ear, a follower of Freud called it.  Here Walter 
Benn Michaels tries to do that for contemporary American culture, with what 
seems to me to be substantial success. (And the answer is, as the philosopher 
Sr. Mary Elephant put it, "Class! Class! Class!")  --CGE]

	Going Boom
	The economic collapse points up how little our
	literary world has to say about social inequality.
	By Walter Benn Michaels

When, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, he did so with 
mixed feelings. The good news, he thought, was that the ideological supremacy of 
free markets and of the political arrangement most suited to them (liberal 
democracy) had been established—even communists were talking about the 
importance of being competitive in the marketplace. The bad news was that 
without “the worldwide ideological struggle” between capitalism and socialism to 
inspire us, we were in for “a very sad time.” “In the post-historical period,” 
he wrote, “there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual 
caretaking of the museum of human history.” The end of history would be good for 
markets, bad for art.

Right now, of course, it’s not so clear how the good-for-markets thing is 
working out. But it’s still true that we don’t have any socialists—unless, like 
Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, you count Barack (“I love the market”) Obama. 
If things get really bad, however, that might begin to change. What if there 
turned out to be more truth to the conservatives’ outlandish accusations than to 
the liberals’ indignant denials? What if what we’re seeing now is not just the 
end of a boom but the beginning of a new period of “ideological struggle”? If 
good for markets was bad for art, will bad for markets be good for art?

For it does seem fairly clear that, with respect to at least one art form, 
market triumphalism hasn’t been so great. The past twenty-five years have been a 
pretty sad time for the American novel, and a lot of the best ones have been 
committed to historical caretaking. It’s no accident that Toni Morrison’s 
Beloved was proclaimed the best work of American fiction over the period by the 
New York Times or that prominent also-rans included Blood Meridian, Underworld, 
and The Plot Against America. Even younger writers like Michael Chabon and 
Colson Whitehead have rushed to take up the burden of the past. And it’s not 
hard to see why. For although it’s true that books about slavery and the Middle 
Passage, the Holocaust and the extermination of Native Americans, are more or 
less definitionally sad, it’s also true that the logic by which they are 
produced and that makes them so attractive is an optimistic one.

Why? Because trying to overcome, say, the lingering effects of slavery doesn’t 
involve criticizing the primacy of markets; it just involves making sure that 
everyone has equal access to them. So when Beloved reminds us that we are a 
nation divided by race and racism (and, in case we start to forget, A Mercy 
reminds us again), we’re effectively being told that our problem is lingering 
racism—not burgeoning capitalism. And when Morrison wins the Nobel Prize and 
Obama becomes president, we’re being reassured that we are headed in the right 
direction, even if we’re not there yet.

But as the current economic catastrophe has the great merit of demonstrating, we 
are not headed in the right direction. People are losing their health care, 
their houses, and now their jobs for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do 
with bad things that happened in the past (done to and by our ancestors) and 
everything to do with bad things happening right now (done to and by us). 
Indeed, the only relevant past here is the very recent one: the one in which the 
triumph of markets that Fukuyama announced took place, and during which things 
got not better but worse.

In 1987, the year Beloved appeared, the top tenth of the American population 
made about 38 percent of the nation’s income. (The bottom fifth made about 3.8 
percent.) That top figure was substantially up from the relatively egalitarian 
numbers that prevailed from the end of World War II until the late 1970s, but 
that rise was nothing compared with the jump that has taken place since: In 
2006, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the top 
tenth earned about half of all the money made in America, more even than in 
1928, till then the highest figure of the century. The bottom quintile got 3.4 
percent.

For a great many Americans, in other words, the boom has been the problem, not 
the crash. But the more unjust and unequal American society has become, the more 
we have heard about how bad, say, the Holocaust was. And in the past few years, 
as the actual Holocaust has begun to show the first signs of brand fatigue, 
enterprising writers like Roth (in The Plot Against America) and Chabon (in The 
Yiddish Policemen’s Union) have boldly moved beyond bad things that happened in 
the past to bad things that didn’t happen in the past: a Nazi takeover of the 
United States and the exile of a whole society of Eastern European Jews to 
Alaska. (At least they can see their homeland from there.)

Since September, however, things have gotten so bad that not just poor people 
but relatively rich people—up till now, the beneficiaries of the boom—have begun 
to feel the pain. And disapproval of holocausts is getting serious competition 
from fear of poverty. Which is just what the vast majority—the victims of the 
boom—have been worrying about all along. So maybe it’s time to forget about the 
Holocaust for a while and focus on the free market instead, to stop 
congratulating ourselves on being against genocide and to start questioning what 
it means to be for free trade. Although it doesn’t appear anywhere on the 
Times’s list, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is a far better novel than 
most of the ones that do, and the Psycho’s self-consoling reminder, “I am 
rich—millions are not,” has the merit of problematizing the upper middle class’s 
sense of its virtue rather than, like Roth and Morrison, pandering to it.

But forgetting about history is just a first step. For if historicist novels 
have been one way to make the reality of our social arrangements invisible, they 
haven’t been the only one. It was also in 1987 that Margaret Thatcher, an even 
better cultural critic than Fukuyama, pronounced herself tired of hearing about 
society’s problems and dismissed them by proclaiming, “There is no such thing as 
society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Anybody 
looking to explain the increasing appeal of the memoir in contemporary writing 
need look no further. In this context, all the debates about whether memoirs 
really count as literature and about whether it matters if they aren’t 
altogether true are completely irrelevant. Every sentence in every one of them, 
true or false, literary or non-, tells us that there are only individuals and 
(most memoirs add) their families. So maybe another upside of the collapse of a 
Thatcherite economy will be the disappearance of this entirely Thatcherite 
genre. Maybe people will lose all interest in the moving stories of the 
struggles of other people to overcome destructive (although sometimes seductive) 
parents and seductive (although always destructive) addictions, and no one will 
want to read memoirs. Maybe people will even lose interest in their own 
struggles, thus conceived, and no one will want to write them, either.

So—no memoirs, no historicist novels, what else? Actually, a lot of other novels 
will have to go, too. The end of the novel is sort of like the weather, people 
are always talking about it . . . but maybe this time, we’ll get some results. 
For sure, no more books like The Corrections, or any of Oprah’s other choices. 
And no more stories about the children of immigrants, trying to figure out 
whether and where they fit into American culture. Ethnic identity is just the 
family writ large, and no move is more characteristic of the neoliberal novel 
than the substitution of cultural difference for (one of the things Thatcher 
meant to deny) class difference. What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural 
difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what 
people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their 
mortgages. But they don’t. You get a better sense of the actual structure of 
American society from any of Ellis’s famous descriptions of what people are 
wearing (“a suit by Lubiam, a great-looking striped spread-collar cotton shirt 
from Burberry, a silk tie by Resikeio and a belt from Ralph Lauren”) than you do 
from all the accounts of people reclaiming, refusing, or repurposing their 
cultural identities.

And you get an even better sense of it from something that’s not a novel at all, 
the TV series The Wire, the most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of 
the twenty-first century so far. Unlike its more widely watched competitor The 
Sopranos (which really is about what David Chase always said it is 
about—“family”), The Wire is about institutions—unions, schools, political 
parties, gangs. It’s about the world neoliberalism has actually produced rather 
than the world our literature pretends it has. If American Psycho harks back to 
the great novels of Edith Wharton—novels of manners in which the hierarchy of 
the social order is always what’s at stake—The Wire is like a reinvention of 
Zola or Dreiser for a world in which the deification of the market is going out 
rather than coming in. Although, of course, you had to pay the HBO subscription 
fee to watch it.

Walter Benn Michaels’s most recent book is The Trouble with Diversity 
(Metropolitan Books, 2006).

     * http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_05/3274