"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago. I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought. She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.
I was dubious, as I am of all claims that society is getting dumber. From what I can see, society has always been composed of a healthy majority of idiots. In any event, I've never been convinced by comparisons between today's reading population and that of times past because literacy rates are so much higher now. You can't expect literate morons to gravitate to the same fare as literate non-morons, and incorporating so many of these morons into the literate population (a development which I fully endorse) was bound to change the overall mix of reading options.
But I continued to mull Gabi's question, and I was still mulling when Daniel Mendelsohn published his review of Ben Yagoda's book, Memoir: A History, in The New Yorker. Mendelsohn, like Gabi, suggests that the recent glut of memoirs "may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture." Although Yagoda apparently doesn't speculate about why such a displacement is occurring, Mendelsohn has a theory. Televised talk shows, reality TV and the confessional Internet culture, Mendelsohn conjectures, may be creating an audience that cannot identify with protagonists who don't claim to be "real":
Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?
Although, as numerous recent memoir fakes have demonstrated, "real" protagonists often tread into fictional territory, modern audiences (according to Mendelsohn) may find such protagonists easier to sympathize with (and to forgive) than fictional characters.
I am as intrigued by Mendelsohn's explanation, but ultimately as skeptical of it as I am of Gabi's. Certainly, "real" stories have an allure that the fictional will always lack, but the notion that an audience's ability to relate to characters depends on the claimed truthfulness or fictional nature of the story doesn't (intuitively) strike me as persuasive.
More likely, in my opinion, is that people are becoming conditioned to expect certain narratives in certain media: quite possibly people are gravitating towards TV and Internet content that delivers some semblance of "the real" - 24 hour news stations, reality TV, infotainment, documentaries, nature programming and, of course, talk shows. Television and dynamic Internet leave less room for the imagination than a book; demanding that such media deliver narratives that, likewise, are composed of more facts and less fantasy is (to my mind, misguided, but nonetheless) an understandable expectation.
But if people aren't becoming too stupid for novels, and if television and Internet narrative expectations aren't infecting books, then what explains the recent outpouring of published memoirs? The most credible supposition, to my mind, builds on a point Judith Shulevitz made in her review of Yagoda's Memoir in The New York Times Review of Books. She argues that memoirists, whether liars or oracles (or, more likely, something in between), appeal:
(1) because [they] might become . . . friend[s]; (2) because we might learn something useful; and (3) because we can't help being curious about the ways other people go about reflecting on themselves and justifying their existence.
At this historical moment, those last two reasons are intensely salient. The modern world demands much of its denizens. People must be educated and informed. They must be physically fit and attractive. They must be healthy and engaged in the world. They must have families and jobs. They must be sexy and productive. They must be prosperous and environmentally-sound. They must be free of prejudices and self-aware. They must be mobile and simultaneously rooted in family and community.
No other time in history has demanded as much of its people. Typically, in past ages, societies have been content to let their women occupy one limited realm, their soldiers another, and they restricted similarly their wise men, merchants, rulers, wealthy and poor. These groups all had roles that were, generally speaking, well-defined; and these roles required skill sets that were, generally speaking, within the capacities of their players to learn within a relatively short time. Not so today: "unbounded" is le mot just with respect to social roles. Everyone must be everything. And the necessary skills for such high-level functioning require more time, training and experience to acquire than most of us will ever have.
The current popularity of memoirs, to my mind, relates to these social demands. Memoirs tantalize readers with the promise of answers to their stress-inducing question: how do you do it? How do you meet social expectations in this day and age? Can someone else - someone successful enough to merit a published book about their life - tell me what I'm supposed to do?
Historically, of course, seekers of such information turned to (among others) the witch doctors, elders, gossips and teachers of their day. They might also seek second opinions in the works of their relevant epic poets, myth makers, and story tellers (playwrights, novelists, etc.).
Usually, of course, the advice of the witch doctor contingent was oral and unrecorded, so quite possibly we undercount the extent to which it was relied on by past generations. Today, of course, the modern equivalents of the witch doctors (Jack Welch, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, etc.) have many mass platforms and outlets on and by which to promote and record their answers to the pressing question: how do you do it? So perhaps we now overcount their importance.
Regardless, if today we are seeing a supposedly ahistorical reliance on the witch doctors, et al., and a corresponding decline in reliance on the epic poets and their ilk, perhaps the reason is not the audience's intelligence, nor its capacity for identifying with fictional characters, but the content of the fiction on offer. Surely fiction that enfolds the breadth of this global moment and provides fodder for rumination about the modern predicament is not penned by MFA graduates enjoying suburban lives underwritten by their jobs teaching in MFA programs?
(Image of title page of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the website of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
In Ngugi wa Thiongo's A Grain of Wheat, Kihika, a Mau Mau rebel leader, expresses some brutal opinions about the way preceding generations dealt with imperialism:
I despise the weak. Let them be trampled to death, I spit on the weakness of our fathers. Their memory gives me no pride. And even today, tomorrow, the weak and those with feeble hearts shall be wiped from the earth. The strong shall rule. Our fathers had no reason to be weak. The weak need not remain weak. Why? Because people united in faith are stronger than the bomb. They shall not tremble or run away before the sword. Then instead the enemy shall flee.
(p. 180.)
While wa Thiongo doesn't outright endorse Kihika's view of history, he doesn't refute it, either. But - though Kihika's unyielding condemnation and lack of interest in nuance might be appropriate (and is probably necessary) for a guerrilla fighter - history is more complicated, more interesting and kinder to Kihika's forebears than Kihika allows.
As an overall descriptive of the black African response to British imperialism, "weak" is an inadequate adjective. "Measured," "thoughtful," "multi-faceted," "practical" or "wise" are all more accurate. A close reading of the historical record reveals, decade by decade, a slowly-evolving, pragmatic African response to the British colonial presence. Here is a summary:
From 1895 (when the British officially arrived) through 1914, the colonists came with - in addition to a breathtaking sense of superiority and the ideology of Pax Britannica - some things the Africans wanted and/or adopted: Jesus, medicines, new ways of living and - importantly - enough power to banish the twin menaces of the Masai and the Swahili slave traders. Some Africans did rebel and resist the British, and the British mounted "punitive" military expeditions against those tribes; but Africans also cooperated with the British, and some African leaders allowed themselves to be co-opted into service of the imperial cause.
From 1914 through 1922, Africans adjusted their views of the British. The whites came to be revealed as fallible humans - and hypocrites: not super-human bringers-of-peace and banishers-of-slavery-and-tribal-warfare, but self-interested farmers who warred among themselves and forced the Africans into the white fight. Criticism of British government policies began to be voiced. Africans protested against "alienation" of African lands and reassignment of such property to whites. Africans additionally began to question to white missionaries' interpretations of Christianity, where such interpretations condemned traditional African practices.
From 1922 through 1939, African opinion condemning colonial abuses coalesced, although little agreement could be reached about how to address such abuses. The Kikuyu, the largest tribe, split internally on the issue of how to engage the British. Few were willing to allow white missionaries to continue to "represent" black interests, but advocates for slow-going diplomacy found opponents in favor of more radical measures designed to bring faster results.
From 1939-1952, Africans again adjusted their views of British rule, this time in light of WWII and India's triumphant achievement of independence. The Africans saw that the British could be defeated. The condemnation of colonial abuses hardened into a rejection of the imperial presence altogether. Jomo Kenyatta emerged as a leader who could shepherd Kenyans into independent nationhood.
From 1952-1963, the Emergency pitched black Africans (and the Kikuyu especially) into a guerrilla war for independence. British atrocities during this period confirmed the worst suspicions about the white man being more devil than human and promoted a dichotomy of black-African-good/white-Colonist-bad that was to influence subsequent thinking about the colonial era. Nonetheless, not all blacks resisted the British (e.g., the spear-carrying soldiers depicted in the accompanying photograph), and the British had some African supporters.
As this overview suggests, the black African response to imperialism in the time leading to the years covered by A Grain of Wheat was not at all passive or submissive, but complex, sophisticated and characterized by a reluctance for reflexive, knee-jerk behavior. In its diplomacy, the response asserted that Kenyans were a people of a nation dealing as equals with another nation. In its entirety, the response was one about which Kenyans, including Kihika, could justifiably feel pride, if reductive, backwards-glancing concerns about emasculation and, to use Kihika's word, "weakness," didn't force a less positive interpretation.
For all its admirable undermining of reductive ideologies (explored in this post), A Grain of Wheat could have and should have done more to depict the variegated reality of Kenyan history and to honor the individual men and women whose forbearance, patience and negotiations skills gave the Mau Mau violence its claim to justice - and who made Kihika a freedom fighter, rather than a thug.
(Image of black African soldiers [carrying spears] escorting captured Mau Mau fighters from The Daily Mail)
If Jeffrey Toobin correctly recounts the facts in his recent New Yorker article about Roman Polanski, then the public condemnation of Polanski's A-list supporters (who include Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Debra Winger and Bernard-Henri Levy) is disturbingly misguided.
In her blog for The Nation, Katha Pollitt leads the condemnation team with a rallying question: "If a rapist escapes justice for long enough, should the world hand him a get-out-of-jail-free card?" She concludes:
It's enraging that literary superstars who go on and on about human dignity, and human rights, and even women's rights (at least when the women are Muslim) either don't see what Polanski did as rape, or don't care, because he is, after all, Polanski - an artist like themselves.
But if Toobin's reporting is right, then Pollitt's analysis is wrong. She goes awry in her first question. Polanski, according to Toobin, did not escape justice and did not (and cannot) get out of jail free. Rather, Polanski was incarcerated for about a month-and-a-half, during which he was psychologically examined. The psychological report recommended that any further punishment should be limited to probation.
At the outset, Judge Rittenband had assured Polanski's attorneys that the psychological examination would serve as Polanski's punishment (despite Polanski's lawyer's objection that such a use was an improper deployment of psychological testing). After Polanski's release, however, Rittenband toyed with the idea of sending Polanski back to prison for another month-and-a-half and then deporting him - a punishment that Rittenband (as a state judge) had no authority to impose (deportation being the jurisdiction of the federal government).
Polanski therefore chose to flee - not from the imposition of punishment in accordance with the American criminal justice system - but from the fickle and illegal abuse of judicial power. For a man who'd shown resilience in the face of blows of fate unseen since Greek tragedy - including surviving Hitler, his mother's death in Aushwitz, and the murder of his wife and child by the Manson gang - a reluctance to submit to the corrupt whims of a civil servant strikes me as understandable.
Thus, Pollitt's opening question should have been: "If a rapist is punished much more leniently than satisfies modern sensibilities, and further takes matters into his own hands when his punisher proves to be corrupt, is extradition more than thirty years later, with the aim of imposing a stricter sentence, consistent with our system of justice?"
The answer is no.
Pollitt is simply incorrect that "literary superstars" and other Polanski supporters don't see what happened as rape. Without question, Polanski raped a child and caused her tremendous pain, both physical and emotional.
Pollitt is similarly wrong when she complains that Polanski's supporters "don't care" that he raped a girl because he's an artist. Polanski's supporters do care that he raped a girl (and the fact that he's an artist is irrelevant to his status as a rapist); but they also care that, in a Judeo-Christian system of ethics, even rapists (and even artist-rapists) get to serve their time and move on: it's called redemption - or paying one's debt to society - and it's the bedrock of the Western system of justice.
Pollitt's disregard of the basic ethics of Western justice seems to result from the reflexiveness and unexamined quality of her response. To the extent that Pollitt's knee-jerk objection has merit, it's that Polanski was allowed to repay his debt to society at unfairly favorable interest rates. But public mores about sentencing in rape cases have changed radically in the last thirty years. And, while I agree that Polanski's behavior merited more strenuous legal repercussions, the fact that we in 2009 don't accept as sufficient Polanski's punishment in 1978 doesn't give us license (morally or legally) for a "do over" - which is as it should be.
"Do overs" are dirty tricks, the kind of stunts that mobs demand, and that authorities provide when they cowardly capitulate to a tyrannical public. Western systems of justice, and the American system in particular, are rightly and wisely designed to resist the vagaries of popular feeling and to protect those most likely to be its targets, no matter how unsavory - e.g., child rapists.
This policy is good, not just for the health of a nation's system of justice, but also for its literature. Katha Pollitt would do well to mark Henry James' concern for his friend Edmund Gosse, who was swept along in the flotsam of the public's outrage about Oscar Wilde's sodomy:
Henry studied Gosse and paid attention to his tone. Suddenly, his old friend had become a rabid supporter of the stamping out of indecency. He wished there were someone French in the room to calm Gosse down, his friend having joined forces, apparently, with the English public in one of their moments of self-righteousness. He wanted to warn him that this would not help his prose style.
Colm Toíbín, The Master (71-72).
If Katha Pollitt's writing about Polanski is any example, she can't afford any further diminishment in the quality of her prose.
This week's New York Times online book review featured a video, in which Sam Tanenhaus interviewed E.L. Doctorow about his new book, Homer & Langley. Doctorow - whose gentle, mellifluous voice matches his deft touch with political agendas - admits in the interview that the political dimension to Homer & Langley is about "entropy." Now, in the aftermath of the reign of Bush and Cheney, Doctorow says, "I hope we're living a little better, trying to recover our identity or our illusions of our noble identity as a country. The last best hope for mankind and so on." (5:25-5:44)
Whether "recover[ing] . . . our illusions of our noble identity . . . . [as t]he last best hope for mankind" is "living better" is an interesting question. While I'm inclined to think that Americans will probably be happier, living under the illusion that the United States is the last best hope for humanity, I don't believe that such deluded happiness is either advisable or sustainable. (Simply based on our carbon emissions, America is not only not the last best hope for mankind, but unquestionably the chief agent of its demise.)
I am surprised to hear Doctorow advocating a return to illusions - however seemingly nurturing. My own expectation of a novelist of Doctorow's stature (and with Doctorow's penchant for political activism - literary or otherwise) is that he'd recommend embracing a national identity based on reality: we can't go back again. At a minimum, writing a novel about entropy seems wasted effort if retreat into illusion - an approach no less entropic than the Bush/Cheney administration - is the recommendation.
I have no basis for speculating about the reasons for Doctorow's position, and - disappointingly - Tanenhaus didn't pursue that line of inquiry. Perhaps I'm simply misunderstanding him; of course, in a 5-minute video, complex ideas will inevitably be oversimplified. But, as a default, Doctorow dispelling my illusions is as unremarkable as is America undermining his.
"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago. I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought. She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.
