There are readers who devour mostly fiction and there are
those who mostly read non-fiction. Although I enjoy the occasional non-fiction
work, mostly biographies, and, even then, tend to read biographies of writers
or musicians, I happily settle down with a novel as my window to the
world. My non-fiction friends tell me I
am wasting my time as they lecture about their newest insight into what makes
the world tick, or how politics is evolving, and what history really means,
from whatever non-fiction work they are reading at the time.
Except for unassailable facts, what occurred and when, fiction
and non-fiction can be topsy-turvy, with fiction being closer to the truth. Most of my daily "non-fiction"
consumption is reading the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal, with an
occasional Washington Post article
for good measure. The WSJ has always
had a conservative bent, even more so now that Murdoch's empire has annexed the
newspaper and of course the NYT has a
more liberal bias. What the two
newspapers have in common, though, is that they are well written. However, it is amusing how they might look at
the same issue, particularly when it comes to politics. And they have become more polarized during
the last four years as we've skirted a near economic depression and our
government has moved to a state of immobilization. That polarization has been further amplified
in the media of radio and TV, and has become exponential on the Internet. People seem to line up to read or view
whatever seems to fit their belief system, a form of cognitive dissonance. So much for so-called "non-fiction."
But writers of fiction and drama drill down to an inner
world of their characters, trying to make sense of life from within. Other artists, those in the performing or
visual arts are doing the same, perhaps more abstractly. What these authors and artists have to say
about our world matter as much as the
journalists and non-fiction writers, perhaps more so. The writers of non-fiction are filtering
information even though it is purported to be fact. The filters of fiction are more intangible leaving
the reader not necessarily with neat conclusions, but frequently only with questions. One has to actually think, something becoming
more alien in our sound bite, "facetweet" cyber world.
So I find it fascinating when writers are asked to
comment, directly, not through their fiction, about the state of the
world. The P.E.N. (poets, playwrights,
essayists, editors, and novelists) American Center is hosting a World VoicesFestival beginning today
and A. O. Scott, a critic for The New
York Times asked Margaret Atwood from Canada, E.L. Doctorow from the United
States, and Martin Amis from Britain "to consider the question of America
and its role in global political culture."
Margaret Attwood writes a playful parable by trying to
explain the state of American culture and politics to a group of visiting
Martians, Hello, Martians. Let Moby-Dick Explain. She uses two well known short stories of Nathaniel
Hawthorne "The Maypole of Merry Mount," and "Young Goodman
Brown" to make the point that the bickering over individual freedom vs. the
rights of the group and the American quest of finding satanic elements in the
enemy du jour is deeply ingrained in the American soul (witch hunting then, and
"right now it’s mostly ‘terrorism,’ though in some quarters it’s ‘liberalism’
or even ‘evil-green-dragon environmentalism.’ ”)
The Martians are TV and Internet savvy. They come to their own conclusions about the
US: "Though American cultural hegemony is slipping, we perceive: newly
rich countries such as India and Brazil have developed their own mass media.
Also, America’s promise of democracy and egalitarianism — the mainstay of its
cultural capital, widely understood — is being squandered."
Attwood urges them to read Moby Dick, which they do in an instant (Martians are very bright)
but "then they consulted
translate.google.com™ for an expression that would best convey their reaction.
'Holy crap!' " --- coming to the conclusion that the novel was a
predictive metaphor for the very state of America today (check the link for
details). In short, to understand
America, one must look to its literature.
In contrast to Attwood's playful but insightful piece,
E.L. Doctorow writes a scathing prescriptive "primer," Unexceptionalism: A Primer
This is a four phase process (we've gone through the
first three and are in the process of completing the final phase argues Doctorow)
"to achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the
United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally
undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world...."
Here is one of America's leading novelists, works such as
Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate,
and Homer & Langley, who is plainly disgusted at the direction of the
country. His "primer" is
clearly an invective borne out of the same sense of powerlessness and frustration
many feel.
Finally, the UK's Martin Amis weighs in with Marty and Nick Jr. Go to America about when he first visited America as a child with his
family in 1958, (he and his brother wanting their names to "sound
American" hence, "Marty" and "Nick, Jr.") I like to read what visitors have to say
about their impressions of America and once got caught up in Charles Dickens'
first trip to America, incorporating some of his "American Notes" in my
2005 edited collection, New York to Boston; Travels in the 1840's
Amis' family came because his father was a visiting
professor at Princeton. Martin Amis says
"We came from Swansea, in South Wales. This was a city of such ethnic
homogeneity that I was already stealing cash and smoking the odd cigarette
before I met — or even saw — a person with black skin."
Some people would like to think that we live in a post-racial
era but Amis reminds us of the entrenched racism, not only when he lived in
America as a child (when he returned to the UK in 1967 his father wrote a poem
about Nashville which ends But in the
South, nothing now or ever. / For black and white, no future. / None. Not here.)
but now as well, concluding with a reference to the Trayvon Martin case, with a
cynical twist at the end, "Leave aside, for now, that masterpiece of
legislation, Stand Your Ground (which pits the word of a killer against that of
his eternally wordless victim), and answer this question. Is it possible, in
2012, to confess to the pursuit and murder of an unarmed white 17-year-old
without automatically getting arrested? Ease my troubled mind, and tell me yes."
I wrote about the Trayvon Martin tragedy soon after it occurred. Mine wasn't a race to judgment, but that is
what the conservative press would have you believe is happening. A man is indeed
innocent until proven guilty, Amen to that I say. But who speaks for the "eternally
wordless victim" as Martin Amis so forcefully posits?
We live in volatile times and need to listen to our creative
writers.
