Author: john mcgowan

Fathers and Sons

I have just finished reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (published in 1862).  I first read the novel some thirty years ago (I really have no idea when, but it must have been somewhere between 1974 and 1984).  I was not very impressed by it, and filed it away in my mind in the bin labeled “overrated.”  Then, for reasons completely obscure to me, I re-read it sometime in the past ten years.  This time I was very moved.  Bazarov, the main character, is a self-proclaimed “nihilist.”  But, in fact, the novel shows that he is a very intelligent, very energetic, very talented young man from a lower middle class background (in so much as that terminology makes any sense in the Russian context).  Through education, Bazarov has acquired what is a perhaps exalted sense of his talents, but his self-conceit (the novel’s term) is justified by the strong impact he has on others.  He is a force.  But he is a baffled force because Russia offers no outlet for his talents.  Turgenev portrays a paralysed society, one that is in the process of dismantling its feudal past.  The novel is set in 1859, even though it was written in the wake of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs.  It clearly presents Russia as incapable of making the transition to modernity, to a rent/wage system of labor, even as Turgenev holds no truck with serfdom.  What moved me was the portrait of a well-meaning (even if boorish) young man frustrated (in the deepest sense of that term) by his dysfunctional society.

So I decided to teach the novel.  My recent re-reading is for my class–and I will be interested to see how they respond to it because, perhaps in the effort to see it through their eyes, I have found the novel less satisfying this time around.

Paralysis certainly seems to describe the US today.  Yes, it is true we live in turbulent times.  But all the sound and fury really seems to signify nothing since our dysfunctional neoliberal order only becomes more entrenched, more immune to any reform or revision.  Our public discourse barely attends to our society’s ills: homelessness, racism, declining wages, ecological disaster (the list could go on).  And the openings for the talented young are being eroded away.  No jobs for our PhDs, for our lawyers, for our idealistic young.  Politics is no place for someone with a conscience, and neither is business.  Where does one get a purchase on this disaster we are inhabiting?  This semester, in both my classes, my students exhibit a world-weary cynicism that alarms me.  They expect nothing from our politics and our society; they view it as rotten to the core, and take attaining their own separate peace, their own precarious niche within it, as the only path forward available to them.

Reading the novel this time, I found it meandering.  True, I now find E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End too formulaic in its presentation of the alternative paths open to England in 1910.  Turgenev, like Forster, is writing a “condition of the nation” novel that ponders its future in relation to question of who shall inherit it.  (Hence the generational focus of the title.)  Unlike Forster, Turgenev offers a much more muddled portrait of the issues.  His characters are harder to allegorize as representatives of concrete alternatives, and his interest in thwarted love affairs undercuts the analysis of larger social questions.  In short, Turgenev can seem as baffled as his characters, lacking himself a clear vision of the social scene he is trying to portray.  Since, like Chekhov, he mostly presents characters who are unable to act, and unlike Joyce in Dubliners, he suppresses any contempt for his paralysed protagonists, the result is a wide-ranging sympathy that seems ineffectual both as a narrative stance and as a political one.  His novel, I think, is not angry enough, is not shot through with indignation.  Even Bazarov tends to me more angry with himself, with his failures to be as tough in reality as he is in imagination, than he is with his society.

Joyce seems cruel because he blames the victims in Dubliners, never really zooming out to consider the social conditions that feed their paralysis, their despair, their pathetic stratagems for getting through the day.  What Turgenev gives us instead is a kind of melancholic despair; he can see the social mess clearly, but sees no way to amend it, and is not inclined to blame anyone for it.  Most everyone in the novel is well-meaning even if ineffectual.  His satire is reserved for social climbers.  And he quite frankly–in a remarkable passage–admits that the peasants are completely incomprehensible.  They exist in a separate universe, their motives and psychology an utter mystery to their betters–and to the novelist himself.  That gulf is unbridgeable in either direction–and seemingly insures that no progress, no planned change, can ever be achieved.

The parallels to our own time are real enough.  There is certainly a gulf between Trump voters and the social worlds that I inhabit.  The economic powers that be have managed to date to reap the whirlwind of racism, xenophobia, and class resentment, have managed to keep the essential structures that underwrite their power in place.  I dislike apocalyptic scenarios, the ones that rely on a day of reckoning to give the “establishment” (as we used to call it) its comeuppance.  Climate disaster is only the latest in a long list of such apocalypses that radicals look toward.  Yet it is impossible to read Turgenev and Chekhov, to inhabit their tales of social paralysis, without thinking of how that paralysis led to 1917.

Right Wing Sensibility

From Jonathan Coe’s 2019 novel, Middle England  (NY: Alfred A. Knopf):

The speaker is an Asian Brit (born and bred in England of Sri Lankan parents), responding to two novelists who, in a panel discussion, have praised British “moderation.”

“These people don’t know what they are talking about.  This so-called ‘tolerance’ . . . Every day you come face to face with people who are not tolerant at all, whether it’s someone serving you in a shop, or just someone you pass on the street.  They may not say anything aggressive but you can see it in their eyes and their whole way of behaving towards you.  And they want to say something.  Oh, yes, they want to use one of those forbidden words on you, or just tell you to fuck off back to your own country–wherever they think that is–but they know they can’t.  They know it’s not allowed.  So as well as hating you, they also hate them–those faceless people who are sitting in judgment over them somewhere, legislating on what they can and can’t say out loud” (30-31).

This seems exactly right to me. It certainly (at least I think so) explains 80% of the animus against the University of North Carolina by the politicians in this state–and the minions that have placed on the university’s Board of Governors.  And it also captures what I have heard Trump voters say.  That he everyday drives the “liberals” nuts is the reason they love him–and willingly blink at all his obvious faults.

A bit later, another (but different) person of color discusses the fact that “there is a lot of anger out there”–and offers her explanation.

“It’s not always to do with race anyway.  People like to get angry about something.  A lot of the time they’re just looking for an excuse.  I feel sorry for them.  I think for a lot of people . . . there’s nothing much going on in their lives.  Emotionally, I mean, maybe their marriages have dried up, or everything they do has become a kind of habit.  I don’t know.  But they don’t feel much.  No emotional stimulation.  We all need to feel things, don’t we?  So, when something makes you angry, at least you’re feeling something.  You get the emotional kick” (44-45).

I hate the condescension of this, the Thoreau-like claim of “lives of quiet desperation.”  But this comment gets at the fact that there is something false about all the staged anger out there–right and left.  It all dissipates so quickly and rarely connects up to action of any sort.  Pure catharsis in so many instances. Anger for it’s own sake, a kind of emotional aestheticism.  Partly an internet effect: the ability to grab the public stage to display your anger, plus the need to be more and more outrageous in order to garner any attention.  How many hits, how many likes, can you grab?  All with some awareness that the internet, like the stage, is not real; it’s a virtual space disconnected from actual interactions with others.

The right does traffic in this anger more than the left (which traffics instead in condescension.)  What seems real enough in the anger–and deeply scary–is the desire to hurt other people.  A kind of indignation tied to fantasies (let’s hope they stay fantasies) of violence.  As long as it all remains a video game, that desire is at least somewhat contained.

Keeping Spirits Bright

I have had a number of responses to my post about the UK elections and my own dispirited despondency facing the current American scene.  The responses ranged from sympathetic to chidings (mostly gentle) for letting the side down.  Despair, people reminded me, is not an option.  We must keep fighting or the other side wins.  I don’t have counter-arguments; it’s not as if I am happy to throw in the towel.  I agree it does no one any good to be defeatist, to say that the other side has already won.  So I am not going to try to defend myself.  Except if saying these three things counts as some kind of defense.

1. The fight itself is soul- and life-destroying.  Again, we must fight against that fact, but there it is.  Being consumed by the fight–and the constant effort to keep fighting–is no way to live.  The daily life of this country has been warped by the ugliness and  cruelty of the right wing.  To step aside from it all is open to well-off people like me, and resisting that temptation to just cultivate indifference, to pursue other interests, requires an effort that is part of the warping.  All around, people are tuned into careerism, consumerism, family, with seemingly nary a care for the cruelty of our society.  Why do I have to care?  And why do I have to agonize over the my inability–and the inability of those like me–to get them to care?  That’s one way of expressing the tiredness I am feeling.

2.  Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect.  It is hard to find the right balance between some kind of clear-eyed realism about the mess we are in and the maintenance of belief in a better future.  The internal battles within the left (another, different fight) are about what is realistically possible in the current moment.  I participate in those battles–and am outflanked to my left by many of my friends.  I think they are deluded about what the American electorate will go for.  I do not believe that Sanders would have beaten Trump in 2016.  And I certainly don’t believe (as I will discuss in a future post) that some alternative to the market is on the horizon.

To be scolded for compromising with the market is a favorite rhetorical move of the “radical left”–and I find it depressing because so untethered to reality.  Whether to have a market society or not is not where the true political battle of this moment in America is being waged.  And the radical left is hors combat (i.e. useless) so long as it refuses to engage in any fights that don’t put the market as its stakes.  To add insult to this injury, the radical left spends way too much of its time and energy scorning “liberals,” those potential allies it loves to hate.  I understand that I am the pot calling the kettle black, that I am upbraiding the radical left for what seem to me to be its sins even as I tell them to stop calling out my sins.  Mostly, I try to avoid that.

Thus, in my book on liberalism, I devote a scant five pages to outlining my differences from the left.  The real enemy–the frighteningly potent enemy–are the conservatives.  But let me confess that it drives me nuts to read various self-appointed leftists talk of Antonin Scalia as a liberal, or to claim that current-day American liberals and conservatives as all members of the same “neo-liberal” club.  It’s a time-honored leftist tradition, and one that is as silly today as it was in 1932, to assert that there is no significant difference between the two political parties in the US.  Since the radical left is such a negligible force in American politics, they can be mostly left to their dreams of utter transformation.  But can I register that they are, as my daughter would say, “annoying”?

3. The problem, I guess, is that politics is difficult, and that progress is so very slow, and that even the battles one thinks are won (getting blacks the right to vote) are never fully won, but have to be fought for over and over again, constantly.  The other side is so relentless, so resistant to ever giving an inch.

The self-righteousness with which privilege defends itself has always amazed me.  In fact, self-righteousness is too weak a descriptor.  Fury seems more apt.  The right (the defenders of privilege, of inequality) are always outraged by assaults (perceived or real) on the prevailing hierarchies and rarely hesitant to use violence to maintain those hierarchies.  The use of violence is almost completely taboo on the left these days, but remains part of the common sense of the right.  They resort to violence without an iota of uneasiness or guilt.  And, as readers of this blog know, I can never decide if the left’s refusal of violence is its shining glory or its fatal weakness.  I do know that I cannot imagine being violent myself, that I must put my faith in the ballot box, in the normal political processes of democracy, to effect political and societal change.  But that faith can seem a mug’s game when the other side cares a rat’s ass for democracy–and do everything in their power to short-circuit democratic processes.  So, as usual, I have written myself into another corner, making it awfully difficult to keep my spirit bright.