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Not everyone in the 19th century went down the long slide to happiness, endlessly. Novelists said again and again they would never represent happiness. Tolstoy’s opening line about all happy families being the same is the best known, but Balzac, too, said, “Le Bonheur n’a pas d’histoire,” happiness has no story. The novel’s only actual version of happiness—marriage—came to seem, toward the end of the century, something of a dark joke. After all that trouble, went the joke, you marry Gilbert Osmond. Those who tried to get away from the marriage plot by seeking their own happiness—Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina—got just what they didn’t deserve. The novel didn’t make you any promises. Quite the opposite: it could have scared you off of life. But somehow its congenital unhappiness actually made you want to live.
In a row under the bed, a bit dusty, is the motherlode. Books upon books. So many candy-colored University of Minnesota paperbacks—Lyotard, de Man, Irigaray—actually, all kind of the same color as the pills. These books were going to be a rebuke to everything false. We were going to bring this false civilization down. Well, to hell with you, Foucault! And to hell with you, Lacan!
The bookstore clerk looks at his watch. “Theory’s dead,” he says. “A year ago.”
“Does that mean you aren’t going to buy the books?” we ask.
“If you’ll take store credit.”
The colossal face of Derrida stares up at us, in death, as in life, made of granite. This face was made for Mt. Rushmore. Derrida seems to say: “Take store credit.”
By the mid-’60s something crippling was happening to fiction, still quite hard to explain: articulate writers blamed the sheer craziness of American life (Roth) or the “exhaustion” of forms (Barth). There was the pressure of criticism, which could lead even a dyed-in-the-wool critic like Sontag to declare herself “Against Interpretation”; others pointed to academic writing programs and the group therapy of the workshop. In short order, 1968 arrived, and the chaotic Seventies, an era which received—in place of Germinal or Sentimental Education or The Posessed, or even The Grapes of Wrath!—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and William Gaddis’s JR. One was a symbolico-enyclopedic epic unembarrassed beside Joyce, the other (in a mode stolen from the minor English modernist Henry Green, alternating dead-to-rights dialogue with brief descriptive passages of hallucinated brilliance, and elevated by Gaddis to demented majesty) a novel concerning nothing less than American capitalism. But in retrospect these books appear marginal where the “Great American Novel” was supposed to be central, heroic sighs of depletion instead of inaugural hymns.
Where, frankly, were you going to get your diagnosis of society—from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho? Lyotard did it better in Libidinal Economy, and was much scarier—without pornographic bloodshed. A civilization that may have punished less, but punished better, administering its surveillance from inside one’s own mind (Discipline and Punish), or replaced the real with a mediatized world of simulations (Simulacra and Simulation), or had an economic incentive to reconfigure disparate knowledge as commensurable “information” (The Postmodern Condition)—well, that was very clearly the world we lived in. Whereas the itsy-bitsy stories of sad revelations in Best American Short Stories 1989—that was some trivial bullshit.
The best and most exciting novels of the same period, the ones that made you think the notion of a “Great American Novel” hadn’t been misconceived all along, were openly responding to theorists. Don De-Lillo’s White Noise brought in a theorist as a character. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (OK, she’s British), and especially The Eye in the Door, triumphed as a controlled experiment in the application of feminist theory to stories (of World War I) a whole nation took for granted.
The big mistake right now would be to fail to keep faith with what theory once meant to us. You hear a great collective sigh of relief from people who don’t have to read “that stuff” anymore—the ones who never read it in the first place. But who will insult these people now, expose their life as self-deception, their media as obstacles to truth, their conventional wisdom as ideology? It will be unbearable to live with such people if they aren’t regularly insulted.
And all of us who spent our formative years on a critique of the sign can’t only have gone into advertising. So theory will return in unexpected ways. The Corrections, a monumental renewal of the critical social novel, spent its first hundred pages in the skin of a teacher of theory. Chip ended up the house-husband of a successful doctor; Franzen himself took up the bigger task, and made something properly novelistic of phenomena that he, too, like Chip, like all of us, had looked to theory to explain.
Theory is dead, and long live theory. The designated mourners have tenure, anyway, so they’ll be around a bit. As for the rest of us, an opening has emerged, in the novel and in intellect. What to do with it?
The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and not even a friend listens in? No better instrument than prose fiction was ever developed for answering this question. Beside the novel at its best, even Wallace Stevens is a bumbling simile-monger and Tarkovsky a crude footage-purveyor. That’s not the half of it, you say, that’s just rococo phenomenology, that’s pantheistic camera work. You want “the one bright book of life,” as Lawrence called it. Lawrence had the novelist’s proper arrogance: “I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”
But to deliver up the whole interior hog, the writer needs to forget even the small sympathetic public seated attentively on gray metal folding chairs. The writer fails if he tries to become a useful tool, a hot commodity, even an objet d’art. He has to be something more like a set of passive measuring devices: perceptual calipers, emotional wristwatch, barometer of manners, historical astrolabe, social Richter scale. The measuring device never thinks about how it comes across—the question is absurd. What comes into the mind, what comes through the living person? Answer these questions with precision, and actual art has a chance.
[...] Even knowing that for every successful immigrant there were others with equal moral claims who suffocated in vans, drowned in the ocean, or were turned back to die in the Holocaust, we willingly made ourselves complicit in the system of exclusion that divided “legals” from “illegals.” Once we had a toehold, many of us tried to protect ourselves with every form of insurance we could: families, careers, houses, civic activism, bureaucratic maneuvering, investments, expensive lawyers, fanatical loyalty to the Republican Party, hatred of other immigrants. Once we accumulated enough of these, we were promised, we would never have to think about being immigrants at all.
I do not mean to adopt the facile pose of the leftist critic for whom all accommodation to the reality of the fallen world is just so much cowardice or betrayal. DACA allowed hundreds of thousands of people who would have otherwise lived in fear to enjoy some fraction of the peace and security the rest of us take for granted. But we should be clear that the gesture that bestowed this gift also confirmed as natural and moral an immigration regime that was artificial and unjust — a regime that made targets out of millions of desperate people fleeing countries devastated by humanitarian intervention and globally mobile capital in the service of American empire. Worse, it was a dispensation whose moral claims were easily ignored when, in the late fall of 2017, the Democrats had the chance to initiate a debt-ceiling standoff to defend it. In the event, the Democratic congressional leadership suspended the debt ceiling for a year without extracting concessions on immigration from Trump. It was as if they never really believed in that kind of redemption in the first place.
ackkk so good
More broadly, our task is now to make a single, simple point. There is no humane border regime, just as there is no humane abortion ban. The border will always tear parents from children, caregivers from charges, longtime residents from the only communities they’ve ever known. It may do it faster or slower, with ostentatious brutality or bureaucratic drag, but it will always do it. The liberal or apolitical masses who are prepared to analogize migrant concentration camps to the Holocaust have accepted, not always consciously, the moral dignity of immigrants, the impossibility of negotiation or compromise with the system that detains them, and the inadequacy of voting alone as a means to destroy it. [...]
[...] To make atrocity into a random, meaningless spectacle is to argue against any taking of sides and indeed against political involvement as such. Any attempt to find meaning by assigning causes, by generalizing about those causes, and by organizing politically so as to do something about those causes, is defeated in advance by the balance as well as by the sheer scale and incomprehensibility of human awfulness. If atrocity seems beyond human understanding, well, it must be allowed to stay that way. When the subject comes up, you will of course adopt the proper facial expression. But to pretend you could do anything about it would be to show yourself prepared to commit atrocities of your own. It’s morally safer to stay home, feet up, heads bent over our devices.