Do We Need Tearing Down To Build Again?

 I suppose this is a political post. You might think so. It is meant to be about writing and culture.... Okay, so it is about politics, if we think of politics is how people live together.

This post comes from France by way of The Guardian: Name by Constance Debré review – a demolition of bourgeois life.

Heaven forfend I should claim to love her books! Debré’s trilogy has shaken up the French literary scene but it’s gloriously unclear what it amounts to. The French love their rebels, which makes it harder to really be one. For all her claims to be entirely apart from the literary world, Debré has much in common with Edouard Louis, another writer renouncing name and class and denouncing hypocrisy in violently stripped-down prose. Because the working-class Louis is concerned with inequality – with the appalling bodily injustice meted out by the class system – there’s some sense that his books offer a vision of social regeneration. Though their verve and delight comes from his own ascent, with its particular mix of luck, desperate exploitation and loving redemption, they do suggest how change might work on a less makeshift and individual scale.

I do not know Debré or Edouard Louis, but neither do I know of any other American writers working this territory. It seems to me that this was the territory worked by Theodore Dreiser and Nelson Algren. Is the MFA writer to blame for this? They seem ready and available scapegoats.  However, my impression from the review is that Debré is not a mainstream writer, although one that gets herself noticed. The difference may not be then the education of our writers as much as the traditions and education of French readers. Perhaps Americans are too scared of rocking the boat to read someone intent on shooting holes in the boat's bottom?

Debré, on the other hand, offers only destruction, and makes the experience of reading her books wilfully claustrophobic. But perhaps this destruction may be necessary. Angela Carter talked about the Marquis de Sade as a moral pornographer, justified because the destruction pursued by characters such as his Juliette assaults the structures of our social world so much that renewal starts to seem thinkable, even if neither Sade nor Juliette were particularly interested in it. Something similar may be true of Debré’s lurid moral starkness. And certainly for a while after finishing Name, much else I read felt artificially sugary in the book’s aftertaste. Debré makes it harder to be hypocritical; harder to contrive stories about sophisticated made-up people. Name isn’t a manifesto for a new world, but it’s all the more effective as a work of demolition that makes new manifestos possible.

Hard for fiction to be as destructive as our reality under Donald J. Trump. It is like a constant Walpurgisnacht for sociopaths. 

Our social world has become more and more, our erotic attachment to our phones and social media.

Lines open for attack. Here in Indiana, we are about to cut back on an already lousy Medicaid system. The rich are intent on sucking even more life from those living from pay check to pay check. Christian nationalism wants to impose its theology and whiteness on a diversity of religions and skin color, We live under a political system that delivers less than its citizens want, so much so that alienation grows like mushrooms in the dark.

Who will take on the writing that captures what is wrong while also giving a view of what might come?

sch 4/20