Ten minutes on July 28, 2008
Ten minutes on July 28, 2008
“The best political theory is in novels”
I recall arriving at Stanford University as a graduate student in English in 1976, fresh from Penn and East Coast weather and saying goodbye to my off-to-Harvard-Law girlfriend. I was questioning why I was still doing lit, which meant a lot of reading and then reading about the readings and then writing about the readings about the readings.
Within about six months I was involved in political organizing against apartheid in South Africa with a group of Stanford students and a few faculty. In the next year I read a lot in political and economic theory, trying to get a fix on my own politics. The New Left was recently more or less deceased, but their theory and especially their rejection of older left positions was intriguing to me. And I found theory bracing, direct, laying out positions and interpreting historical events and trends, all of which I found relatively new. I read Hazel Henderson and E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly and Jane Jacobs; I read a lot of feminist theory, and small and large M Marxist theory, and anarchist theory and history, and had a giddy sense of liberation from the world of literary criticism. I read Barry Commoner and an early ecology book (Our Synthetic Environment) by Murray Bookchin written under a pseudonym; I read Silent Spring and a bunch of texts on nuclear power and in so doing a lot of writing on how to move forward past oil and coal without going nuclear.
It is hard to express how it felt to read these things. First off, I was reading them alongside doing political work, so each reading seemed to help me get a fix on the organizing we were doing, short and long term goals, and how specific issues (anti-apartheid, anti-corporate, anti-nuclear energy and then weapons, El Salvador and Nicaragua support work) fit into a longer term, larger vision of social change. Second, the reading was shared among people I grew to admire greatly, who I felt were acting on their principles, using their Stanford-level intelligences to fight for things that were worth fighting for. Unlike in a classroom, this reading and discussion felt alive, timely, and energizing.
Ironically, as I swerved from reading novels and fiction to reading theory and history, I found that many of the people I was working and organizing with were reading books like Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed and The Female Man and Ecotopia and Herland; they were reading Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown and John Brunner and the Illuminati trilogy boys (Robert Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson). Don’t get me wrong: most of my friends were also reading biography and essays and political writing (Emma Goldman especially!) and taking classes in political theory and so on. But when the night came and the party ended up in the kitchen talking ideas and books and philosophy, it was more often novels that generated the most interesting conversations.
And so several of us came to the conclusion that novels are a better source of political theory than the alternatives, including of course political theory. Why?
This is all an indirect way of talking about a book I am currently reading, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it is a social and political history of the city of angels, as well as a whodunit thriller. Here is the book jacket blub from the original hardcover:
Returning to Los Angeles a few years after World War II (the setting of his last novel, The Black Dahlia ), Ellroy has come up with an ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit and past violence converge explosively. At once taut and densely detailed, this is a mystery with the grim, inexorable pull of a film noir, shot through with a strictly modern dose of extreme (though not gratuitous) brutality and a very sure sense of history and characterization.
What makes this good theory, or the opportunity for readers to theorize?
1. The characters speak in the ways LA cops and citizens would be likely to speak at the time. that is, their speech includes their politics: the casual racism and homophobia, the gendered observations, the spirit of the age cold war rhetoric, are all located in realistic speakers, not anonymous historical Thems. And the various levels of response to such talk is also crucial. One character spouts anti-Communist rhetoric; another sees it as overblown and irrelevant to the actual motivation of the speaker; a third and fourth see it as a way to play the game and make money and get promotions.
2. Connected to this, the institutional conflicts and motivations are crucial to understanding why people say the things they do, and keep silent on other things they might otherwise say. No one feels the need to restrain their racism or hatred of homosexuality (the latter is, lest we forget, massively criminalized, so everything from pederasty to consenting rich guys rolling around in private bungalows is both an affront to heterosexual decency AND massively illegal). The police department, the City and LA county governments and political machines, competing Hollywood unions and film companies, the newspapers and columnists, the jazz clubs and alcohol/drug rehab farms, the organized crime gangs and prostitution rackets, all circulate within an economy of information. Money buys protection but not always; the Cold War figures in private feuds and schemes to get promotions. People are regularly shaken down, braced, blackmailed, turned, broken with information; and all this happens with ‘squarejohns” and their wives taking out the trash and driving to work and knowing little about the realities taking place just beyond their perception.
3. Finally, these novels show the intersection of private and public. This cop is also probably a very closeted gay man, immersed in a murder case that involves all levels of the LA gay scene; this other has a complicated and ugly relationship with his Czech wife (a camp survivor) and her son, which inflects his compromise with hard-line Cold Warriors to more or less destroy the ‘Red” union so that the corrupt Teamsters can get their jobs. The personal, in these novels, is relentlessly political.
The Los Angeles that emerges from Ellroy’s "L.A. Quartet" (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) is thickly described, and supports the notion that everything is indeed connected. Treatment of homosexuality is connected with a certain kind of damaged heterosexual masculinity; gays paying protection money to sheriffs and cops is connected with mobsters doing the same. And the political and persona pressures on each character tell; conflict is inevitable, it eats at your gut and causes you to do things that generate more conflict, either externally or internally.
So what theory can be derived from well written and well constructed novels? Theories that take into account the complexity of human motives, and the complicated way that the personal is political. The Dispossessed for example examines not only the difficulties in establishing a truly anti-hierarchical, anarchist society and culture, but also the embedded difficulties and contradictions within hierarchical social structures; neither is “realistic” or “ideal” but rather both are attempts to solve difficult, often intractable problems of human social organization.
As the novel unfolds, I felt amazement; I felt the complex multiple reality of 1950 Los Angeles, and in particular its toxic blends of racism, Cold War opportunism, homophobia, and corruption, come alive, so that when I would look up from the page, I felt vertigo at what has changed, and what elements have remained, changed in appearance but not necessarily in depth. That world changed partly because of political movements, partly because many individuals’ lives changed in small but important ways. And that world stayed the same – the race and class divides, the crime and drug running and protection schemes and ideologies of fake patriotism and paranoiac fear – because of political movements, and because many individuals’ lives did not fundamentally change in small but important ways.
Finally, theory to the Greeks was a kind of seeing. In Greek, theoria means "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at," from theorein, "to consider, speculate, look at," from theoros "spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see." Often the Greeks seemed to connect theorein to the stage, in the sense of talking about what one saw dramatized. And so theory is born in dramatization and conflict; the playwright not only entertains, but embeds a story inside the entertainment about core conflicts in the society. Clever, eh? That way the entire citizenry can discuss what the play means, and put this discussion “in play” without having to have it be immediately political and real.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Novels are a kidn of play, a kidn of virtual reality, to rehearse stories about conflicts in our identity and culture and nation; they are models of what is, so that we can see the stories we are currently telling, and when necessary, change those stories.
A better story is possible.
“The best political theory is in novels”
I recall arriving at Stanford University as a graduate student in English in 1976, fresh from Penn and East Coast weather and saying goodbye to my off-to-Harvard-Law girlfriend. I was questioning why I was still doing lit, which meant a lot of reading and then reading about the readings and then writing about the readings about the readings.
Within about six months I was involved in political organizing against apartheid in South Africa with a group of Stanford students and a few faculty. In the next year I read a lot in political and economic theory, trying to get a fix on my own politics. The New Left was recently more or less deceased, but their theory and especially their rejection of older left positions was intriguing to me. And I found theory bracing, direct, laying out positions and interpreting historical events and trends, all of which I found relatively new. I read Hazel Henderson and E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly and Jane Jacobs; I read a lot of feminist theory, and small and large M Marxist theory, and anarchist theory and history, and had a giddy sense of liberation from the world of literary criticism. I read Barry Commoner and an early ecology book (Our Synthetic Environment) by Murray Bookchin written under a pseudonym; I read Silent Spring and a bunch of texts on nuclear power and in so doing a lot of writing on how to move forward past oil and coal without going nuclear.
It is hard to express how it felt to read these things. First off, I was reading them alongside doing political work, so each reading seemed to help me get a fix on the organizing we were doing, short and long term goals, and how specific issues (anti-apartheid, anti-corporate, anti-nuclear energy and then weapons, El Salvador and Nicaragua support work) fit into a longer term, larger vision of social change. Second, the reading was shared among people I grew to admire greatly, who I felt were acting on their principles, using their Stanford-level intelligences to fight for things that were worth fighting for. Unlike in a classroom, this reading and discussion felt alive, timely, and energizing.
Ironically, as I swerved from reading novels and fiction to reading theory and history, I found that many of the people I was working and organizing with were reading books like Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed and The Female Man and Ecotopia and Herland; they were reading Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown and John Brunner and the Illuminati trilogy boys (Robert Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson). Don’t get me wrong: most of my friends were also reading biography and essays and political writing (Emma Goldman especially!) and taking classes in political theory and so on. But when the night came and the party ended up in the kitchen talking ideas and books and philosophy, it was more often novels that generated the most interesting conversations.
And so several of us came to the conclusion that novels are a better source of political theory than the alternatives, including of course political theory. Why?
This is all an indirect way of talking about a book I am currently reading, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it is a social and political history of the city of angels, as well as a whodunit thriller. Here is the book jacket blub from the original hardcover:
Returning to Los Angeles a few years after World War II (the setting of his last novel, The Black Dahlia ), Ellroy has come up with an ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit and past violence converge explosively. At once taut and densely detailed, this is a mystery with the grim, inexorable pull of a film noir, shot through with a strictly modern dose of extreme (though not gratuitous) brutality and a very sure sense of history and characterization.
What makes this good theory, or the opportunity for readers to theorize?
1. The characters speak in the ways LA cops and citizens would be likely to speak at the time. that is, their speech includes their politics: the casual racism and homophobia, the gendered observations, the spirit of the age cold war rhetoric, are all located in realistic speakers, not anonymous historical Thems. And the various levels of response to such talk is also crucial. One character spouts anti-Communist rhetoric; another sees it as overblown and irrelevant to the actual motivation of the speaker; a third and fourth see it as a way to play the game and make money and get promotions.
2. Connected to this, the institutional conflicts and motivations are crucial to understanding why people say the things they do, and keep silent on other things they might otherwise say. No one feels the need to restrain their racism or hatred of homosexuality (the latter is, lest we forget, massively criminalized, so everything from pederasty to consenting rich guys rolling around in private bungalows is both an affront to heterosexual decency AND massively illegal). The police department, the City and LA county governments and political machines, competing Hollywood unions and film companies, the newspapers and columnists, the jazz clubs and alcohol/drug rehab farms, the organized crime gangs and prostitution rackets, all circulate within an economy of information. Money buys protection but not always; the Cold War figures in private feuds and schemes to get promotions. People are regularly shaken down, braced, blackmailed, turned, broken with information; and all this happens with ‘squarejohns” and their wives taking out the trash and driving to work and knowing little about the realities taking place just beyond their perception.
3. Finally, these novels show the intersection of private and public. This cop is also probably a very closeted gay man, immersed in a murder case that involves all levels of the LA gay scene; this other has a complicated and ugly relationship with his Czech wife (a camp survivor) and her son, which inflects his compromise with hard-line Cold Warriors to more or less destroy the ‘Red” union so that the corrupt Teamsters can get their jobs. The personal, in these novels, is relentlessly political.
The Los Angeles that emerges from Ellroy’s "L.A. Quartet" (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) is thickly described, and supports the notion that everything is indeed connected. Treatment of homosexuality is connected with a certain kind of damaged heterosexual masculinity; gays paying protection money to sheriffs and cops is connected with mobsters doing the same. And the political and persona pressures on each character tell; conflict is inevitable, it eats at your gut and causes you to do things that generate more conflict, either externally or internally.
So what theory can be derived from well written and well constructed novels? Theories that take into account the complexity of human motives, and the complicated way that the personal is political. The Dispossessed for example examines not only the difficulties in establishing a truly anti-hierarchical, anarchist society and culture, but also the embedded difficulties and contradictions within hierarchical social structures; neither is “realistic” or “ideal” but rather both are attempts to solve difficult, often intractable problems of human social organization.
As the novel unfolds, I felt amazement; I felt the complex multiple reality of 1950 Los Angeles, and in particular its toxic blends of racism, Cold War opportunism, homophobia, and corruption, come alive, so that when I would look up from the page, I felt vertigo at what has changed, and what elements have remained, changed in appearance but not necessarily in depth. That world changed partly because of political movements, partly because many individuals’ lives changed in small but important ways. And that world stayed the same – the race and class divides, the crime and drug running and protection schemes and ideologies of fake patriotism and paranoiac fear – because of political movements, and because many individuals’ lives did not fundamentally change in small but important ways.
Finally, theory to the Greeks was a kind of seeing. In Greek, theoria means "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at," from theorein, "to consider, speculate, look at," from theoros "spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see." Often the Greeks seemed to connect theorein to the stage, in the sense of talking about what one saw dramatized. And so theory is born in dramatization and conflict; the playwright not only entertains, but embeds a story inside the entertainment about core conflicts in the society. Clever, eh? That way the entire citizenry can discuss what the play means, and put this discussion “in play” without having to have it be immediately political and real.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Novels are a kidn of play, a kidn of virtual reality, to rehearse stories about conflicts in our identity and culture and nation; they are models of what is, so that we can see the stories we are currently telling, and when necessary, change those stories.
A better story is possible.
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