by
Granta
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
hen the German sociologist Karl Mannheim first drafted reflections on the so-called Generation Question – Generationsfrage – in the middle of the 1920s, the examination of age cohorts was still a relatively novel way to study society. Mannheim did not subscribe to the idea of generations as simple chronological slots. His generations were compound constructs, born out of the clash of a biological continuum with a sequential order of events, which meant that the entity in question had to share a cultural-political experience, not just a year of birth on a passport. ‘The sociological phenomenon of generational cohesion,’ Mannheim claimed, was undoubtedly ‘founded on the fact of the biological rhythm of births and deaths’. But he was careful to emphasize that the biological base needed a political-cultural superstructure: a generation ‘holds within itself an underivable superadditive’, a type of shared experience that catapults the group from natural into human history. Mannheim gave the example of French peasants at the time of Napoleon. Those who did not join Napoleon’s armies remained cloistered in the mental world of their parents and grandparents, where customs and traditions were passed down from father to son. By contrast, the young men who experienced the military campaigns, victories, and defeats of Napoleon, acquired a common generational experience that divided them from those who came before them and those who followed.
The potent blend of loneliness and agitation might go a long way in explaining the distinctly moralistic sensibility for which the millennial generation has become notorious. To be millennial demands a strong moral posture, but it offers very few tools to channel the commitment in question into anything sustainably collective. Moralism alternates between a luxury and a deprivation for those who do not have to aggregate and publicly negotiate their preferences. Millennials were confronted with a distinctly new mode of interaction between public and private: energetic yet diffuse, modeled on the fluidity of the online world. The mass politics which Mannheim witnessed is hard to detect today; as is the post-politics so characteristic of the 1990s, when Gen Xers openly disavowed any political commitment and proclaimed the end of collective life. The difference between the generation-standard-bearing novelists David Foster Wallace (Gen X) and Sally Rooney (millennial) is a telling indication of the change. In Wallace’s world political conflict has been evacuated from a public sphere in thrall to commercialism and advertising, with only madcap terrorists actively dissenting. The result is a void that can only be filled with acts of individual re-enchantment or therapeutic group therapy. Rooney, by contrast, operates in a public sphere in which politics has clearly reclaimed its urgency, and collective notions of class have acquired a newfound plausibility. But the resultant posture is still fundamentally one of self-expression: a character may serenade her cleaner’s proletarian credentials, another may declare she is a Marxist, but it’s not clear what Marxist organization she’s a member of.
illennials seem doomed to generational warfare: without the organisations and categories that once sought to treat the problem of inequality on its distinct, class-based terms, a fight between generations is now the only plausible option. The irony is that the increasing salience of generational categories provides a sociology for a world that has become less sociological: when all other forms of affiliation and belonging have become weak, generational divides are bound to resurface as a last resort. Together with race, gender, or ethnic background, generational markers imply a crisis of collective life rather than a remedy for it. As Mannheim himself never forgot, the persistence of generational thinking means that humanity hasn’t fully liberated itself from biology: the struggle between generations, in this sense, is just another instance of the struggle of species.
Weekends we drink forties on the flatbed of Edwin’s stepdad’s blue pickup. Behind the 7/11 after dark, anything is possible. The we’s always me, Edwin, and whatever collection of shitheads decide to gather that particular evening. I say shitheads but mean only boys. I say boys and mean some kind of mollusk, hard-shelled with tender meat inside. We get the beer with Edwin’s fake – says he’s from Iowa, twenty-nine, and his newly grown mustache offers a little wink. I use the money from my allowance, even though he’s got more, and we sit and drink until the police are called or we get bored.
These nights are endless, years blended into a stretch of asphalt, into Olde English bottles smashed into showers of light, into shadowboxing as our shadows cast huge kissing shapes below the parking lot’s uniform sodium streetlamps. And Edwin smirks through all this like nothing could possibly touch him unless he invites it. Timid grin, fat lower lip, thick eyebrows below his midnight-blue Yankees cap. At night in bed, when there is only my dark ceiling looking down at me, his face floats there, taking up the whole faux stucco surface, unnaturally big, eyes like two dimming headlights, his mouth a car door opening as if to say: Get in, queer, doesn’t matter where we’re going, I’m driving.
pretty
At the last protest before my last protest I grow nauseated by the pageantry – the photo-op signage, the 300 dollar jackets with political slogans pre-sewn-in, the mind-numbingly repetitive chanting. Maybe the problem is that I understand too well. This is a salve for practitioners and the easily sated. Supermarket sheet cake for the choir. We’re gathered outside one of the president’s many towers, a handful of barricades have been prearranged for us to march in circles inside. We are yelling in this penned-in section of fencing while traffic moves freely around us, demanding justice as business goes on undisturbed. And even as we say these same words over and over, it’s clear we each have different definitions of what justice, and freedom, and power mean. What I know for sure is any word repeated enough ends up meaning nothing.
A group of friends ask me to take their picture. They’re laughing until the lens is trained on them and then, behind their signs, they make serious and severe faces for the internet. One of the girls compliments my anti-cop shirt (which I bought on Amazon) but not my makeup (which I stole from Sephora). There are official cameras surveilling us. The cameras stand in for police while the actual police sip free coffee in their cruisers.
To be here is to be alone surrounded by people – at once watched and invisible. Over these two hours we keep inquiring what democracy looks like, who owns these streets, and whether, if the people are united will they ever be defeated? The answers to me are clearly: not this, not us, we’re not, and, inevitably, we will be. The demonstration ends after about the length of a movie, and everyone goes home feeling better – as if we’ve done something, as if something’s been done.
I go home sick. Throw up my Burger King into the toilet. Check Twitter to see the protest trending for a moment, then gone.
I know exactly what you mean when you say your ex-husband was a writer and editor and your current partner is not, and that this works much better, allowing you space. After my first marriage, I was never again attracted to literary or even especially intellectual men. I went for visual artists. I wanted my literary and intellectual life to be my own. I think it’s important that you note the difference in occupation. Ambitious, intelligent young women tend to overvalue a mate who does the same work, but it’s more likely a liability. A contemporary version of Dorothea Brooke and Mr Casaubon.
A good first marriage is luck. A good second marriage should not be. The overall tone of Parallel Lives, its attitude toward marriage, derives from my own experience as a young woman discovering that the person I thought was autonomous, me, once I got married, no longer was. I was part of a couple. That is a brutal transition in life. I was too inexperienced to know at that age what kind of person would satisfy my emotional needs over the long haul. I hoped then and still hope that Parallel Lives might help other people make this transition, with a greater understanding of the dynamics of couples.
this is phyllis rose
But I feel I am avoiding the direct thrust of your question: is something lost or gained by sticking with the personal, resisting sublimation as you put it. You do gain great power by rising above the personal. One of the most abused battle cries of my generation was ‘The personal is political’. This has led to an ocean of banalities in public life – politics and journalism both – so that it seems every speech, every investigative article, must begin with a personal narrative. The personal is political only if you are a good enough writer or a good enough politician to make it so. If you want to know just how boring the personal can be, hang out with old people. It is one of the great tragedies of aging that just as every detail of every experience you’ve had in your life becomes precious to you, you have probably lost the ability to make it interesting to anyone else not assigned you as a school research project. You are desperate to tell your story, but your story, to your listeners, is ‘the past’, a place in which they have only polite interest or which they will mine for their own art. And that is how it should be.
again phyllis rose
Thank you so much, Sheila. Between us, something else was just occurring to me. Here again, the difference in our ages comes into play. At a certain point, legality is no longer the issue. Neither is love. I no longer wear my wedding ring, to signal something not to others (that I’m available) but to myself (that my husband is gone, even if I’m the only one who knows it). At ninety-eight, he is just not the man I married when he was in his sixties. He has dementia and is more a remnant than a person. Still, I am morally and practically responsible for him. We’ve transcended the legal and the emotional and reached a level of pure commitment. It’s true for him, too. I am the only person who exists in his world. I am certain there are many other elderly people in similar situations, mostly with the women having to take care of the men. I don’t know how the saintly people we see in movies and read about in memoirs do it!
ack
[...] I was all limbs and acne at seventeen, all Church of England schooling, stripey ties and busy sexuality. The point of life was to bunn parental opinion. I also had a sense that another form of inheritance could be gotten elsewhere. In books, cinema, music – Woolf, Beckett, the Wu-Tang Clan, Bresson and Scorsese. Anything my parents offered seemed overcast with conservatism. Perhaps all that tradition and religion felt worth holding on to for them. For me, it only meant everything needed to be fought over, defied, and then dramatically renounced. I kept pushing away, and my parents feared I’d forget them. Why you have to be so different to other boys? It forced a distance that threatened to become irreparable.