Singing the Body Politic
by Alison Powell
Peter Swirski, Ed. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature. McGill University Press, 2009
Author Philip Roth, March, 1962
One December day in 1817, John Keats wrote to his brother the following: “I had not a dispute but a disquisition… on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature… I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” He had, of course, no idea what impact “negative capability” would have on future generations of writers and readers. John Dewey said this letter “contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises.” And indeed, negative capability — when contrasted with the various ideologies of his time and since — holds up impressively well.
It is true that negative capability is a quality we find in all great works of literature: consider John Milton’s sheer awe at the universe in Paradise Lost; the sinners’ inability to comprehend the present in The Inferno; and the brilliant, cyclical Hamlet. That strong authors must be comfortable with “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” holds no less true for contemporary literature (or art in general): Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, for example, rests on the wavering dock of her sanity.
Keats’ concept of negative capability can help us understand the relative dearth of extraordinary fiction with a more-or-less explicit political aim. First, there is the certainty and conviction required for an author to sustain a “message” or political perspective over the course of a novel or book of poems. In addition, it must be a Sisyphean task to achieve this with characters who are three dimensional and negatively capable (if you will). Poetry or fiction which is rooted in the politics of identity risks becoming at best irrelevant, at worst curious or quaint, when our understanding of such identities inevitably shifts — more appropriate for the study of culture, than the study of literature, for example (inasmuch as they can be separated). Whether or not an author is justified in fearing his or her work will cease to be relevant in future generations, or — more important — whether such a fear is productive, is a conundrum that political authors arguably circumvent, in their investment in documenting what is happening right now.
The exceptions are brilliant, outstanding, and integral to American culture and history — Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; but the vast majority of literature which takes on political thought as its main topic falters and dissipates into the ether. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature offers a keyhole view into recent literature and art that grapples with some of the most painful events in recent American history, including the war in Iraq, George W. Bush’s presidency, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The book is less interested in the literary style, or artistic success, of the works it considers than it is in revealing the political valences of their content. Instead, the authors present a boook where “in essays by five senior scholars, major works of American literature and film are analyzed in the context of a larger set of arguments about American injustice at home and across the empire.” The book focuses on some predictable artists and authors: Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Spike Lee, and Michael Moore. It also includes an essay (its strongest) by Michael Zeitlen which compares the memoirs of veterans of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The tone of the book is no-nonsense, and if you don’t know the authors’ and editors’ politics by the end of the introduction, you’re reading it upside-down. Highly critical and full of moral outrage, the authors attempt to demonstrate how political resistance manifests in the work of some of the nation’s most important writers and film makers.
The first chapter, “Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History,” considers Roth’s famous trilogy of I Married a Communist (1998), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000). David Rampton details Roth’s own, diluted version of negative capability:
Where there is an American pastoral, there is the American demonic. Where there are blithe assumptions about upward mobility, there are the workers chained to their stations in the factories. Where there is prosperity for the upper half, the other half, down-sized and staring at the poverty line with no medical insurance, loses out to the forces of globalization. The comforts of the suburbs are simultaneously a cover for seething discontent. The ideals of the founding fathers are used to justify the most blatant kind of imperialism.
(Interestingly, Rampton doesn’t address the most oft-cited criticism of Roth’s work, which is his overt and detailed misogyny.)
The ambivalance or uncertainty in Roth’s political maneuvering — for example, equal helpings of disgust for patriotism and the domestic terrorists of the Sixties — is widely undercut by the consistency of his rant: Americans are stupid, and we’re getting worse. His critique of America’s anti-intellectualism, willful naïveté, gluttonous consumerism, and isolationist ideology comes from the gut. It is as though Roth himself, nudged and cajoled by the international fallout from American ignorance, is at the edge of the cliff that is this country — and he’s decided to make the leap a little bit gleeful, for his trouble. What makes his novels so intensely pleasurable to the reader is this glee — the pure, unapologetic hedonism, the adolescent playing hooky — that characterizes his novels. But of course, as an older white American male, Roth is in a position to elide gracefully the sense of indignation which characterizes much of American far-left politics. The pleasurable sense of irony and freedom in futility woven through his novels, in fact, are largely possible because of Roth’s sensibility — observing, as he does, from outside of the fray.
“Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference,” by Gordon Slethaug, considers and celebrates Lee’s work. His films (focusing mainly on Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing) document the negotiation between militant and nonviolent resistance in the black community over the past fifty years. Unfortunately, much of the essay is an attempt to determine whether the politics of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. are most championed in Do the Right Thing—when the success of the film itself is created by the complexity of the community represented toward each other, toward the other, and toward America. The author concludes that “arguably… this film is not about the possibility of integrating black and white or of sitting down at a table together but about creating black manhood… ‘liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.’”
By far the most moving essay in the collection, “The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq” by Michael Zeitlin compares the memoirs of veterans from these wars, attempting to discern what differences, if any, the soldiers from these wars have experienced upon returning home. Zeitlin is remarkably deft at corralling the many issues at hand, and comes to a conclusion that, impressively, doesn’t awkwardly squash the men’s experience to create some kind of synthesis. Zeitlin offers a chilling perspective on the role that war films have had on generations of American men: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. He quotes one young man: “Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.…We watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills.” One soldier told him “The psy-ops bastards continue playing the loud rock-and-roll music. I like rock music, but I don’t think it belongs in my war. It was fine in the movies, on the boat with Martin Sheen going up the fake Vietnamese Congon or with the grunts patrolling Ho Chi Minh as they take a hill and heavy casualties, but I don’t need The Who and The Doors in my war, as I prepare to fight for or lose my life. Teenage wasteland, my ass. This is the other side.” Culling through the interviews, memoirs, films and music of America’s most recent wars, Zeitlin reminds us that America may not be ready for this new generation of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, with amputated limbs, with broken families. Zeitlin concludes that one difficulty the Iraq veterans face is the cognitive dissonance of coming home to a cheering America. He compares this dynamic to that of the Vietnam vets, who came back to an America that was deeply divided; he concludes that the celebration of the homecoming of our newest generation of veterans is entirely for the media, far from cathartic to those men and women who return exhausted, traumatized, and just glad to be alive.
These three essays — on Roth, Lee, and America’s recent wars — do much to articulate the radically different perspectives on what form liberal criticism might take in the arts (unfortunately, the book ends with an essay on Michael Moore — who could single-handedly destroy Keats’ ideal of negative capability. Admittedly, this is his purpose: “Moore’s oeuvre stands or falls on its ability to tell the truth as he sees it…. Moore’s vision of the American political scene is clear, consistent, and plausible and when he puts his thoughts on paper or edits film as a documentarian must, this vision is not betrayed”). The collection reminds us of the difficulty of writing about politics, but also the importance; we should be grateful to those admirable artists who are able to pull it off.
