A Frolic of Her Own

The politics of stories

So I've been snooping around a few blogs by academics, and came up with several interesting posts - like here, and here, and here, here, and here - about the virtues, or lack thereof, of "political" fiction.  This issue has been something of a lifetime bee in my bonnet, so I'll add some thoughts:

• Both sides of this debate appear to see politics and fiction as inherently antithetical.  But that there's a different way to look at it - that politics and fiction are inherently made of the same stuff, and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad.  The idea of "activist fiction," or someone "incorporat[ing] the political shit that characterizes his nonfiction into his fiction", certainly fills me with a sense of dread.  But it's really not because someone has had the temerity to mix fiction and politics.  It's because I expect any political writing - yes, even raw, unincorporated "political shit" - to have some nuance and subtlety, and to leave some space for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.   Writing that does nothing but promote the author's narrow political passions is likely to be as intolerable in an Op-Ed piece as in a short story.

• In their irrationally acute need to prove themselves undogmatic fingernail-parers, many writers - particularly contemporary English-speaking writers - have managed to convince themselves that politics does not exist.  (Perhaps this is why so much fiction today takes place in small towns, or in the past, or from the perspective of children.) 

• Such writers often embrace the falsely bumpkinish, li'l-old-me view that writers are just storytellers, but of course there's nothing inherent in the definition of "story" that means that it can't be about politics or have political implications.

• I have long had a theory that it is the relative poverty and isolation of most writers that promotes this insularity.  If you are a visiting writer making a crappy salary at a remote rural college,  you have sort of by default opted out of mainstream American culture, and the preoccupations of mainstream American culture may therefore be less interesting to you.

• Some works of fiction, published relatively recently, that have a political dimension, even though I wouldn't necessarily call them "political novels," are books like this, or this, or this, or this, or this.

• And of course writing may be a political act - though, for most residents of modern democracies (or even quasi-democracies), it's awfully pretentious to view it as one.

• I grant that there may be some irritable reaching after fact and reason involved in holding a political point of view that is perhaps mildly incompatible with a full range of sympathy for diverse human perspectives and experiences, though I'm not totally convinced the conflict is as great as all that.  Moreover, I think most good fiction aims to affect people, but not in as specific a way as say, convincing them not to support Social Security privatization.  Again, though, the idea is to avoid programmatic fiction, not political fiction per se.

That's it for now, although I'm sure I'll return to this topic.

As promised: Politics of the 1860s

So here's my plug for the book American Brutus (by Michael W. Kauffman), which narrates at great length and with ample background the events leading to the assassination of President Lincoln. I've been interested for a long time in the politics - as opposed to the social or military history - of the Civil War (and the immediately pre- and post-Civil War) era, and this book provides a fascinating look at anti-Lincoln ideology. It's also a well-told, gripping narrative that, as David Talbot observes, is begging to be made into a movie starring Johnny Depp.

A few other things to like about this book:

• It's a scholarly book by a nonacademic, something I'm always heartened to see. (Actually, the only other example I can think of is another important book about Civil War history - legal history, in this case. The author, Michael Kent Curtis, now has a teaching position, but wrote the book while on sabbatical from his law firm.)

• There's a sort of running comparison, which the author deftly but subtly draws attention to, between Lincoln's assassination and 9/11. Although the analogy might seem somewhat strained, it's not - it's actually eerily, fascinatingly apt. Kauffman emphasizes, for example, that prior to Lincoln's assassination, the president traveled virtually unprotected, largely because of an almost willful failure to believe that an assassination could happen in America. The news blackout, panic, and false rumor-spreading that immediately followed the assassination are also strangely familiar. Finally, of course, the book vividly depicts the half-justified, half-hysterical fear that people who appeared to be one's fellow citizens might in fact be murderous conspirators, and the civil liberties violations that were its probably inevitable consequence.

• While this is definitely not its main focus, the book provides, almost offhandedly, a fascinating portrait of urban life in the middle of the Civil War, and it contains hundreds of interesting historical tidbits. I had never before thought about the usefulness of livery stables as a way for politically disaffected young men to meet and get around in relative anonymity. And who knew that the Confederacy employed a glamorous, bilingual female spy to ferry letters to Quebec? Or that the White House was so wide open to the public that there was a large problem with people wandering in and tearing pieces off the curtains as souvenirs?

• 14th Amendment junkies (you know who you are) will be interested in the book's portrait of John Bingham, who prosecuted Booth's alleged co-conspirators - some of whom were indeed co-conspirators by any definition of the term, others of whom were pretty much innocent bystanders. A couple of years later, of course, Bingham would go on to write all the important parts of the 14th Amendment, fueling a 20th century academic debate that might be summarized as follows: "Bingham: confused, rambling old fuddy-duddy or guy who basically knew what he was doing?" Kauffman's book, which depicts Bingham as a ruthless, brilliant prosecutor who was, perhaps, overly single-minded but whom it would be farcical to call confused, adds a small new scrap of understanding to this debate.

• Finally, for those who are sick of red-blue hostilities (or whose job description prevents them from engaging in them), the book, even as it contains a lot of resonances with current political life, is scrupulously fair-minded. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the author's politics.  For what it's worth, I failed. 

Judicial propriety

Judge Kozinski has a thoughtful article on the real ethical problems judges face, and how they are mostly insoluble.

I've thought about these questions a lot in the past several months.  The values of the judiciary (circumspection, neutrality, discretion, rule-following) - some of which also permeate the practice of law in other forms - are generally alien to my basic personality.  Trying to adhere to them has been a struggle that has been useful in some ways and frustrating in others. 

I think the legal community prizes these values too much, accounting for the culture of timidity at many law firms (which shows up in such forms as Internet censorship, reluctance to give job recommendations, etc.).  At the same time, I continue to think they are necessary where the judiciary is concerned.  Even though some weird, elaborate formalism is involved in requiring a judge who has ascended to his position largely through political connections - and whose closest friendships and judicial philosophy may have been forged through such connections - to suddenly renounce all apparent interest in politics, the alternative is worse.

But I have to say that this no-speech diet is very unnatural, and I spend a lot of time fantasizing about the campaign contributing, politicking, information disclosing, and general fomenting of controversy I'm going to do when this is all over.