Two different pieces about two wildly different writers. I have read more McCarthy because there are more of his novels.
McCarthy clued me into the fluidity of genre. There is also the matter of violence. It is America, but McCarthy seems to romanticize that violence. I prefer Joyce Carol Oates on violence - it is brutal without any romance.
Why Do Cormac McCarthy’s Books Exist? (The Dispatch) is a review of a McCarthy biography, so a bit of a slender reed for commentary. Consider this, though:
Where did this darkest of dark visions come from? Like McCarthy, many people have had abusive and uncomprehending fathers. Many people have been divorced and tormented by guilt. But why was this man in particular the midwife of these novels? Daugherty’s biography fails to provide an answer to that question. It has illuminating comments to make about and connections to draw from the work, but we don’t get a sense of the white-hot heat of a mind in dialogue with itself—wrestling with evil, dabbling in evil, and turning away from it. We learn about the troubles McCarthy both suffered and instigated, but we don’t see his mind in process, taking on that trouble and transforming it. (And that was Thomas Carlyle’s definition of genius: “transcendent capacity of taking trouble.”) We don’t get a sense that some unusual power was at work here. But it was.
Viet Thanh Nguyen has made me think more since while I read The Sympathizer, I have read more of his essays and interviews. From him or Junot Diaz I came to the idea that our immigrant writers give us insights into America that might not come easily to natives. EQUATOR's The Quiet American Writer is an interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen that contains what has made him important to me.
Pankaj Mishra: What does it feel like to be described as an American writer in a post-American world? When you and I started out thinking about writing, America was the hegemonic power – not just politically, economically or militarily, but culturally, spiritually. The catastrophic loss of American cultural capital and moral prestige is the most extraordinary event of our times. What is it like to be a writer from the US now?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: I came of age in the US after 1975, when my family arrived as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War, during an interregnum in American power. The US had been checked very heavily by its defeat in Vietnam, and by the time I got to university it was trying to reclaim that power. The period from 1975 to [Desert Storm in] 1991 was a moment of quietude in the American empire as it regathered itself.
At that point I considered myself an Asian American writer, or a minority writer, and that identity fit perfectly within American multiculturalism. After 1991 and 2001 it became clear to me that multiculturalism and diversity were insufficient languages to describe systems of inequity and power. 9/11 ushered in the moment we’re still living in: the complete visibility of violence in American society – at home, as there always has been, but also an attempt to reclaim power on the international stage.
For long, I fought not to be introduced in the US as a Vietnamese American writer – a writer with adjectives in front of his name. It was always a pleasure to go abroad and be introduced as an American writer. It allows me to talk about myself as an American who is American because he was a refugee from an American war, and as an American who needs to take responsibility for what the US is doing. Even if I am deeply opposed to what it is doing, I am still implicated in it.
That’s the obligation, or choice, offered to American writers, including so-called minority writers. We could embrace our minority identity and seek inclusion in the empire through these now-contested ideas of diversity, equity and inclusion. Or we could stress our identities as Americans and embrace that complexity – which means not renouncing our complicity in empire but foregrounding it.
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The temptation for liberalism – and this is why both Baldwin and King didn’t trust American liberals – is to sacrifice genuine equality as long as the exercise of American power is genteel enough not to threaten their profits. Writers are part of that system. It’s entirely possible to be an American writer of a racialised, minoritised or colonised background and be rewarded for your work, so long as you don’t question what must come first but is never spoken of: the maintenance of American power. What’s spoken of explicitly is how to make America a more just society, which is code for how to fine-tune American power, or imperialism, from the inside, so there’s less disruption at home. No one questions what happens beyond American borders.
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Coming from India, I’ve always found this odd. To be a writer or intellectual there meant being critical of the political establishment and of your nation-state, especially when that state was suppressing some minority. So this complicity strikes me as very strange. I suppose it’s one of the unrecognised disadvantages of belonging to a very rich, powerful country: you aren’t able to develop enough critical or intellectual resources to write about the world in an interesting way, because you’re always within the system, unable to step out of it.
What American writers write about are the dysfunctions of living within an empire, without using the word empire. There are plenty of novels and works of nonfiction about the terrible things that happen within American society: an unjust education system, a prison system unequal in its application of justice, even young urban professionals addicted to cocaine. These dramas reveal that the US is not a perfect society. But each writer looks at a small piece of it and doesn’t connect it to the operations of the US as a whole.
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To bring it back to literature: in the West, there’s a huge emphasis on the human. Art should be about the human, about humanity, about what brings us together universally. But your example of India being inspired by Israel points to other things that make us human too – our inhumanity, our desire for power and conquest, our capacity to do evil and then to forget that we did it. Part of what imperial and national power wants is to erase the links that would let people understand that what Israel is doing now is what the US did then.
Both the interviewer and the writer mention the history of American anti-imperialism starting with William James and Mark Twain. It is a bit like Jewish anti-Zionism, existent and ignored. That is one defect, but a minor. It is why Orhan Pamuk interests me with his perspectives on a post-imperial culture.
America had an empire on this continent before it went overseas. Everything past the Atlantic Coast was an imperial project. Ulysses S. Grant recognized this fact in his Memoirs when he discussed The Mexican War. Some try to shuffle this off as woke and I read those attempts at propaganda.
Within that continental empire, there was also the capitalist empire. GM treated its factory towns as colonies. We have ignored that fact, too, for all our politicians and pundits lamenting the Rust Belt.
Realism should match reality and perspective determines reality. The broader the view, the closer we come to the truth. Hopefully, there are those with better skills than me to go forward with these ideas.
sch 11/5
