I have been finding it very hard lately to read any novels from start to finish. I begin five novels for every one that I actually complete. Most things I pick up to read strike me as thin in any number of ways: in character development, in linguistic texture, or just jejune in their portrayal of human motives and emotions. I can recommend The Known World by Edward Jones, a book I think is an absolute masterpiece. Jones imagines a whole world out of whole cloth, and presents it in an intricate tapestry of fragmented events spread over five or six years time. The writing is spare, but that heightens its impact. He has a terrible story to tell, but the artistic mastery is exhilarating. Especially when there are so many bad novels out there.
I just finished reading The Noise of Time, a 2016 novel by Julian Barnes. It is a fictional retelling of the life and career of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I have, in the past, found Barnes’ work fey at times, but I do get to the end of his novels (of which I have read maybe three or four.) I picked up this one at the public library out of despair, needing to find something, anything, that I would actually read to the end.
What a pleasant surprise then to find it one of the best things I have read in ages. The basic conceit of the novel centers around the compromises Shostakovich has to make to stay alive in the murderous world of Stalin and then Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. The novel is a meditation on Power (always capitalized in the novel) and the demands it makes upon those over whom it holds dominion. In some sense, it is pure Hegelian master/slave. Power can—and will—kill you. So what will you do to stay alive? And if you do manage to do what’s necessary to stay alive, Power will have shredded any and all threads of self-respect. You will have groveled, lied, betrayed others as well as yourself, and have proved to yourself and all observers your abject cowardice. Even all that self-abasement may not be enough. Power is fickle and may choose to execute you anyway at any moment when it no longer deems you useful to its ends—or when its paranoia sends it on one of its periodic killing sprees.
The idea that Power craves dominion, that it feasts upon demonstrating to its underlings their submission, comes through loud and clear in the novel. And can only make one think of Trump and his need to publicly humiliate his underlings. The latest example is making RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s burgers.
One source of Power’s power (so to speak) is its total lack of conscience, its complete inability (refusal?) to feel remorse, its disconnect between self-respect and any assessment of its own deeds. Maybe this is wrong; maybe Power walks in deluded self-righteousness, truly believing in the evil of its enemies and the beneficence of its own actions. Power, of course, feeds on the production of enemy lists just as much as it feeds on the abjection of its underlings. In any case, Barnes’ Shostakovich thinks that conscience and remorse did once hold some sway in human affairs. Think of Henry IV in the Shakespeare plays, haunted by his crime against his lawful sovereign Richard, whom Henry drove from the throne and then killed. But, Shostakovich thinks, such is no longer the case.
“He had judged [Shakespeare] sentimental because his tyrants suffered guilt, bad dreams, remorse. Now that he had seen more of life, and been defeated by the noise of time, he thought it likely that Shakespeare had been right, had been truthful: but only for his own times. In the world’s younger days, when magic and religion held sway, it was plausible that monsters might have consciences. Not anymore. The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found” (178-79).
I don’t credit the analysis; there is no evidence at all that a religious world is more moral than an irreligious one. The barbarities of past history should put that notion to rest. But that leaves us with the mystery. The victim of crime is more haunted, more susceptible to self-questioning and self-collapse, than the perpetrator. The raped is undone; not so much the rapist. The total lack of conscience, of any portion of self-respect being tied to acting in good faith or with generosity or with kindness, comes to seem a source of power’s power, not a defect from which it will suffer. As Edmund in King Lear puts it, the very credulousness of the good, along with their desire to actually be good, makes them easier targets for the fully and cheerfully unscrupulous. There are no limits tyranny will not transgress.
That still leaves us the question of why others go along. Fear of death, certainly, in the most extreme instance. And once tyranny is established, fear of other less dire consequences for resisting: prison, loss of livelihood, loss of wealth. Ducking one’s head and trying to live out of power’s notice will be the strategy adopted by many. But why enable power to gain its seat in the first place? Why the cult of the strong, even abusive, leader?
When I was still teaching, I would ask my students how many of them had experienced a sports coach yelling at them. Now that girls are almost as likely to have participated in sports as boys, it was usually 75% of my students who had had that experience. And, almost to a person, they would defend the coach’s yelling, even his (or her; although it was much less frequently a her) humiliating a particular person in front of the whole group. The coach’s actions showed he cared, they’d say—and then claim the yelling did produce better play from the team. So, I would then ask, you want me to yell at you, to show I care, and as a good way to get better results from you? No, they didn’t want teachers who yelled or humiliated students as part of their pedagogy. But they were hard put to explain why such behavior was OK for the sports coach, but not for the teacher. Or why they hated the few teachers who had deployed such tactics while admiring the coaches who did similar things.
Barnes considers the admiration for tyrants by having Shostakovich think not of sports coaches, but of orchestra conductors, especially the notorious, but much lauded, Toscanini.
“Such conductors screamed and cursed at orchestras, made scenes, threatened to sack the principal clarinet for coming in late. And the orchestra, compelled to put up with it, responded by telling stories behind the conductor’s back—stories that made him out to be a ‘real character.’ Then they came to believe what this emperor of the baton himself believed: that they were only playing well because they were being whipped. They huddled together in a masochistic herd, occasionally dropping an ironic remark to one another, but essentially admiring their leader for his nobility and idealism, his sense of purpose, his ability to see more widely than those who just scraped and blew behind their desks. The maestro, harsh though he might of necessity be from time to time, was a great leader who must be followed. Now, who would still deny that an orchestra was a microcosm of society?” (87).
Irony, the novel makes abundantly clear, is pitifully inadequate response to tyranny. Yes, while trying to keep your head low, you will try to salvage some self-respect by only offering your assent ironically. You always reserve to yourself the knowledge that you see through them, and don’t assent in the deepest recesses of your soul. But not only is irony totally ineffective, accomplishing nothing, but you can only trick yourself for so long if you are one of the unfortunates who truly values self-respect. It won’t take much to recognize how cheap irony is, how pathetic a dodge.
“And irony has its limits. For instance, you could not be an ironic torturer; or an ironic victim of torture. Equally, you could not join the Party ironically. You could join the Party honestly, or you could join it cynically; those were the only two possibilities. And to an outsider, it might not matter which was the case, because both might seem contemptible. . . . If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony that had lost its soul” (190-91).
John Quiggan, the Australian economist and blogger, tells us Trump will be a dictator. (Find his short post here: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/11/19/trumps-dictatorship-is-a-fait-accompli/#comments)
Right now, in the brief interlude before Trump takes office, the Americans I talk to are fearful, but don’t really believe that full-blown tyranny is our future. We might very well be sleep walking; Quiggan may be right. And then we will have to learn the awful expedients to which one resorts to in order to live under tyranny—and learn just how much self-respect each of us is willing to sacrifice to insure survival.
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