ABlog

Nothing (not even sex) is more outlandish, more bizarre, than the fact of death as a consequence of birth. That we should become aware, should suffer, should strive, learn, build up our brains, attach ourselves to beloved others—then have to give it up.

Nothing is more offensive to the dictates of common sense than the death of the individual—unless it’s the possible death of an entire world.

A review by Tim Flannery in the August 11, 2005 New York Review of Books, entitled “Endgame,” addresses several new volumes detailing the dismal state of the so-called environment. (The term unfortunately implies that the body of the world is an envelope, a setting for our activities, thus disguising the fact that we literally have no existence above and beyond it: “the environment” is us.) Flannery writes:

In 1961, there were three billion people, and they were using around half of the total resources of food, water, energy, and arable land that our global ecosystem could sustainably provide. By 1986 there were five billion of us, and such was our thirst for resources that we had already reached Earth’s carrying capacity, that is, its ability to maintain its natural resources at levels that will make them available to future generations….By 2001 the environmental deficit had ballooned to 20 percent more than Earth’s sustainable yield…By 2050, when the population is expected to be around nine billion, human beings will be using—if they can still be found—nearly two planets’ worth of resources. The inevitable conclusion is that our species has entered a crisis that will last for much of the twenty-first century. (p. 26)

What is the human imagination supposed to do in the face of statistics like these? What am I supposed to do with the fact that I must measure my own life span against such a mind-boggling shift in our material relationship to the planet? (In 1961, I was in the sixth grade; in 2050, if I can still be found, I will be 100 years old.) We are talking about a second great break in human history, comparable in significance to the one signaled by the invention and first use of nuclear weapons. Human economic activity (let us not for a moment forget the incredibly skewed allocation of all these resources, as a fraction of earth’s billions continues to enjoy vastly more than its proportional share of the deficit spending binge) has itself become a weapon of mass destruction targeting the planet.

How is it possible that such a dramatic and terrifying situation should fail to have a huge impact upon imaginative literature? It’s a wonder that writers haven’t risen en masse and thrown all the old forms out the window in the face of this unprecedented turn in human affairs. If out of no other reason than crass artistic self-interest (if this isn’t material, what is?), the “pathetic perils of that ingénue, our planet” ought to be getting top billing in novels, poetry, plays, short stories, short-shorts, prose poems, personal essays, and any other literary genre you can shake a stick at.

Instead of which, we get “chick lit,” Ian McEwen, Brett Easton Ellis, and thoughts like the following from Francine Prose, in a letter to the New York Times Book Review written in response to Rachel Donadio’s profile of V.S. Naipaul in a previous issue: “…we return to these ‘little’ narratives [i.e. imaginative works that shun politics] because in every era, in every place, men and women continue to be born, grow up, fall in love, marry or not, live in families or alone, bear children or not, grow old and die. And strangely enough, regardless of whether or not we approve, people stubbornly persist in finding these events as important as ‘the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies’ [a quote from Naipaul]….What fiction continues to offer is profound and detailed information about what it is like—any time, anywhere—to be a human being.” (New York Times Book Review Letters column, Sunday, August 28, 2005, p. 6)

There are a couple of things to be said in response to this. One is that how men and women are born, grow up, live in families, and all the rest may have a great deal to do with the clash of belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. Another is that it is the job of writers to reveal more than their characters necessarily know, or at any rate can articulate, about their own situations; the fact that many people do not concern themselves with politics or history does not mean that politics and history reciprocate, and so the writer is not excused from the job of situating private life in a social context. Yet another is that the “eternal” life cycle activities cited by Prose no longer have the same significance—surely not to the reader, and probably not to the individuals involved, whether or not they consciously acknowledge the fact--when imagination of the unending chain of generations gives way to the now-common, almost formulaic disclaimer that Tim Flannery includes when he refers to the likely state of the world in 2050: human beings…if they can still be found….

I just read a satirical short story by J.G. Ballard that speaks obliquely to the question of why imaginative writers are not elbowing each other out of the way to write about what it is like to be a human being in a planet on the brink of auto-genocide. Entitled “The Secret History of World War 3,” the story takes as its premise an America that has elected Ronald Reagan to a third term in order to resurrect the feeling of well-being he generated during his first two stints in office. The populace becomes fixated on an endless series of news bulletins about the senile President’s health, to such an extent that nobody except the writer of the “secret history” notices that World War 3 has broken out, even though the facts are reported on television in between presidential health updates:

“Good news on the President’s CAT scan. There are no abnormal variations in the size or shape of the President’s ventricles. Light rain is forecast for the D.C. area tonight, and the 8th Air Cavalry have exchanged fire with Soviet border patrols north of Kabul. We’ll be back after the break with a report on the significance of that left temporal lobe spike….”

The narrator, appalled that “the Kremlin is putting counter-pressure on NATO’s northern flank,” hunts desperately for further information on the geopolitical situation, only to encounter a beaming newscaster’s reassurance that “At 2:35 local time President Reagan completed a satisfactory bowel motion.” (J.G. Ballard, War Fever, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990).

It’s the misfortune of the narrator of Ballard’s story that his preoccupation with a nuclear exchange that could wipe out life on the planet runs counter to the common sense of his society, which says that the President’s health is the fountain from which all societal well-being flows. The problem now faced by imaginative writers is that the actuality of being human at a time when human activity is so radically undercutting the prospects for human continuation constitutes an offense against the common sense of every society that ever existed.

I’m borrowing a little, here, from what I remember of the sense in which the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci spoke of “common sense” in the theoretical writings he elaborated from his prison cell; in Gramsci’s terms, common sense is really a kind of global positioning device that people unwittingly carry in their psyches, having had it installed there by the ruling order. Common sense is about knowing which side your bread’s buttered on. It’s about taking it as an article of almost sacred faith that the future will resemble the past, an assumption necessary to keeping in power those who currently hold the reins. (For once we acknowledge that the future will have to be different—we are alive now, but death is real—all bets are off; we may experience a radical reduction in our willingness to be motivated by the short-term, narrow-gauge rewards and punishments that usually serve as such effective incentives to keep people in line.)

In my novel The Company of Cannibals, a charismatic artist-martyr known as TINA (There Is No Alternative) exhorts her followers to “make reality real.” She is really talking about breaking through the stranglehold of common sense to confront the stark nature of our species situation. “Making reality real” is the goal of political protests (like those currently being conducted by anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and her colleagues in Crawford, Texas) and of the writers of disruptive literature—those who do not believe that there is some way to feel human so universal that it is going to be uninflected by our planet’s tribulations; those who have mounted an insurrection against “imagination as usual.”

Liberal damage-control efforts currently being directed against Cindy Sheehan and what she stands for offer a textbook example of how common sense thinking operates out of, and helps reinforce, narrow definitions of acceptable dissent. In a curious column in last Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich referred to Sheehan’s insistence on an immediate end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq in these terms: “The false choice, in which Mr. Bush pretends that the only alternative to his reckless conduct of the war is Ms. Sheehan’s equally apocalyptic retreat, is used to snuff out any legitimate debate.” (Frank Rich, “The Vietnamization of Bush’s Vacation,” NYT, Sunday, August 28, p. 10). In this formulation, Cindy Sheehan becomes George Bush’s peer in the irresponsibility department; her rejection of the notion that there could at this point be any legitimate role for the U.S. in Iraq is seen as unleashing a folly of world-ending magnitude (“apocalyptic’). Thus do those who call attention to the gravity of our predicament and insist that it be addressed get accused of complicity in bringing it about. Shoot the messenger.

There is one sense in which it is right to see an apocalyptic dimension in such messages: the level of questioning involved—the level of seriousness about “making reality real”—does threaten the common sense world in which we all go calmly about our business, intensifying the conditions of resource overuse and justice deficit that have brought us to the brink. If Cindy Sheehan is right, then an entire world of “responsible” nationalistic American political discourse must collapse like a house of cards.

The response to imaginative writers who challenge the common sense notion of an eternal human nature that offers itself as a subject for art capable of transcending its historical moment (even when that moment might be humanity’s last) is likely to be no less indignant, no less supercilious. I say, bring it on.

Running Tab

August 30, 2005: In an article on how the vulnerability of New Orleans to devastating hurricanes such as Katrina was greatly intensified by the building of levees to control the Mississippi, the New York Times quotes environmental historian Ari Kelman who in turn quotes a nineteenth century traveler to the region: “‘New Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of dollars and cents.'” (Cornelia Dean and Andrew C. Revkin, “After Centuries of ‘Controlling’ Land, Gulf Residents Learn Who’s Really the Boss,” NYT, August 30, 2005, p. A14)