PrettyFakes

“We are stirred and embarassed. There is solidarity and there is scorn.”—Chris Bachelder, U.S.!

A few weeks ago, Vice-President Dick Cheney came to speak in my town. I, along with a smallish group—maybe 35 at peak attendance—went to protest, because what else can you do when Dick Cheney comes to your hometown, if you believe, as do I and a growing number of Americans, that he is a threat to the constitution and to the democratic ideals that make the US the US? (And if you don’t believe this, then spend an afternoon with Glenn Greenwald.)

So, principle compelled me to be there. But once I got there, I didn’t quite know what to do. The e-mail announcements I’d been receiving for weeks beforehand recommended that we decorate a white shirt with slogans, and they even thoughtfully suggested slogans, some funny, some serious, all appropriate. Or, the announcements mentioned, we could make a sign. These were all perfectly reasonable protesty things to do, and yet, somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to do any of them. I showed up in my shirt and tie, though thankfully someone had thought to bring extra signs. And I was comfortable marching along, holding my sign aloft, perhaps even occasionally shouting something suitably anti-evil. But when the time came to chant, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t chant. I can’t. My intense contempt for Cheney and everything he represents warred in me with my absolute horror of being absorbed into a group, another sign-carrying sloganeer.

It’s not just in the political realm that this horror prevents me from giving myself freely to communal endeavors. My love for Bruce Springsteen is well documented, and yet, at Jazz Fest, no matter how powerfully moved I truly was, I just couldn’t bring myself to raise my arms into the air during “My City of Ruins,” despite the thousands of New Orleanians and other festival-goers around us who’d done the same with no prompting other than the urging of their hearts. And when people began joining hands during “We Shall Overcome,” I could feel my skin gathering up its energy for a nice long crawl, and then settling back down in relief when it realized that there was a wide mudhole between us and the nearest swaying hand-holders.

No doubt my ambivalence about my religious background has something to do with my general ambivalence about things communal. My discomfort with surging masses stood me in what I continue to believe was good stead across a vast array of summer camps, youth rallies, and charismatic revivals. I remember the stifling panic I felt when a group of friends on a church bus one summer evening, guys who as far I knew were only concerned with baseball, fishing, and video games, surrounded me to ask why I hadn’t been “saved,” and to insist that I get “saved” right away, even when, once they told me what they meant by the term, I was pretty sure I’d done it already. But not in public, you see. Not in the way they approved.

But for all that this fear of assimilaiton served as a useful surivival tactic, it also made me skeptical of group activities, period, even when I shouldn’t have been, as I wrote about here. I smirked my way through every initiation, religious or otherwise, that required being subsumed into a larger whole. American individualism, clean-lined and discrete, was—is—so deeply imprinted on my character that I was incapable of figuring out what was worth committing to and what wasn’t. No one wants to be laughed at for believing something too strongly, especially if that something turns out to be patently ridiculous.

And so I was struck when I came across the passage I quoted at the beginning of this post in Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! It describes a crowd’s emotional oscillations during an underground screening of a wobbly, scratchy documentary, one that ends at another underground meeting, where workers share their grievances; its final shot is an extremely long take of a steady light, into which, the film’s audience gradually realizes, they are meant to step to share their own stories, in just the way that the people in the film had done. The description of the crowd’s shifting reactions to their own stirred emotions, followed by their eventual willingness to step into the light, encapsulates what seems to be Bachelder’s main project in this book: the search for what he calls a “poetics of engagement,” an aesthetic method that can hold beauty and justice together without diminishing either—and how to do all this in an age defined by its cynicism and irony, an age in which commitment provokes a chuckle.

The book’s main character is Upton Sinclair, the author famous for creating many shelves’ worth of earnest and dogged failures in this regard—failures that Bachelder nevertheless finds somehow inspiring precisely because of their earnest doggedness. In Bachelder’s world, Sinclair is still writing somber and atrocious novels; recent titles include Pharmaceutical! and A Moveable Jungle! I picked this book up expecting it to be a light romp—it is, after all, about an undead Upton, a radical who can never rest in peace because he is perennially resurrected by hopelessly enthusiastic Leftists. I thought I’d get a few laughs, maybe zombie Sinclair would chow down on the brain of some thinly veiled parodic version of a Bush administration member (only to find that there’s no brain there to begin with!) or whatever. And the book is funny, believe you me—I laughed out loud in places—but it’s also sad and poignant and moving and serious in a way I wasn’t anticipating.

Bachelder wrote about the difficulty of creating a poetics of engagement (a phrase he borrows from E.L. Doctorow) in a fine Believer article a few years ago; it’s available here and I encourage everyone to read it. U.S.! doesn’t strive to enact that poetics, exactly, as much as it attempts to chronicle the various attempts to enact it over the last century. The novel offers a tour through the myriad aesthetic strategies deployed in the service of political writing over the past century—we see through the camera’s eye of John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, we read a section about Doctorow and Sinclair written in a prose style that evokes Ragtime, and so on. Though his mimicry of the past masters is often funny, parody isn’t Bachelder’s aim. Rather, he’s sifting through these styles, trying to find useful forms and structures, seeking just the right frame for a poetics of beauty and politics.

This search consumes many of the novel’s characters (though not Sinclair, who is pretty sure he has the formula down pat), including Sinclair’s son Albert, “The Last Folksinger,” whose guitar bears the painted message “This machine exhumes dead radicals.” At one show, when Albert decides to indulge the crowd by playing some requests in addition to his more political material, he reflects that he “knew that art must not turn its back on the world. He felt deeply that art—his songs—must address inequity and cruelty and suffering. What was required, he knew, was a poetics of engagement. And yet what was also required was that Journey song, you know the one. And Albert played it as well as he could, resisting the ironic impulse. He was giving the proletariat a good night out, and he tried to see that as a worthy political act” (261-62).

For a relatively short novel, Bachelder does a brilliant job of giving scope and depth to an imagined America in which Sinclair is still raking the muck. The novel’s first section is a miscellany of invented book reviews (snarky pans, naturally), chat-show transcripts with various Sinclair assassins over the years—major celebrities, complete with hangers-on and wannabes—Sinclair’s letters to Arnold Schwarzenegger and NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, calls from anonymous tipsters, and a very funny memo from a video game executive to a game designer explaining that his game would be a lot better if the players could kill the radicals instead of resurrecting them. The second section is the narrative of a Fourth of July book burning sponsored by the Greenville, South Carolina Anti-Socialist League, where the main fuel for the fire will be 500 copies of Sinclair’s latest opus. Sinclair journeys there with the latest in a line of winged and wounded secretaries, mistakenly believing it to be a festival in his honor, and chaos, as it must, ensues, and it’s not giving anything away to say that the typical Sinclair ending is nowhere to be found in this book.

If there is hope in this second section—in the way that the Anti-Socialist league is in many ways organized according to communal principles that should horrify them, in a young boy’s sudden awakening to his complicity in an oppressive economic system—that hope is always undercut, undermined, contradicted by the very complexity that is typically lacking in Sinclair’s novels but that Bachelder cannot leave out. And there’s hope in the fact that, although Sinclair’s novels themselves may no longer have the capacity to move us, a novel about his novels somehow can. We can chuckle at Sinclair’s excesses but still be stirred by his ideals.

I don’t know. It’s a complicated book, it’s a funny book, it’s a great book—well worth your time. Anyone else read it?

Also, don’t confuse U.S.! with U.S. 1.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 10:56 am and is filed under Books, In the Nation, In the South, Professor Fury, Red Stick, Springsteeniana, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.