Fact and Counterfact

“Here’s the thing,” says one of Hillary’s more likeable apparatchiks, “We can spend years pondering why American voters can be dipshits or we can take advantage of it.”  I won’t tell you what the particular dipshittery is here at the end of Curtis Sittenfeld’s hip and witty counterfactual novel Rodham, except that it is brilliantly hip and witty.  It is not really possible to play “spoiler” to a narrative already preemptively spoiled by fifty years of actual history; but authorial ingenuity always commands respect.  Here’s the thing.  I don’t read many contemporary novels.  I know I must be missing a lot of really good stuff, but the finitude of one’s reading life demands the application of some rational principle of selection.  If there is still a buzz about a book twenty or, better yet, two hundred years after its publication, I feel more confident about investing my rapidly diminishing time in it.  But I just had a birthday, and my spouse gave me a copy of Rodham, and I have been reading it with pleasure and admiration.

In giving me a copy of this particular book, Joan had her reasons.  She knows that I have a certain semi- or pseudo-connection both with the writer and with her subject—the imaginary lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Not that I know Curtis Sittenfeld even through her earlier books, let alone in person, but it so happens that I knew both her father and her brother when they were at Princeton.  Both of them, in addition to being memorable students, went on to become splendid community-minded movers and shakers, and I am inclined to suppose that the entire family is notable for talent and achievement.  I do have a personal connection with the Clintons.  I am among their most intimate five hundred thousand friends.  President Clinton and I are both Rhodes Scholars from Arkansas, though not contemporaries at Oxford, the president being just ten years younger than I.  I was once their guest at the gubernatorial residence in Little Rock, and from that experience I have a couple of minor Clinton anecdotes.  They cannot live up to the ones the whole world knows about, let alone the frequently X-rated ones imagined by Curtis Sittenfeld, but they are not without their instructive or amusing aspects.  The anecdotes, however, are stolidly factual and thus fall outside the remit of the day, which is the counterfactual.

Very early in the Trump administration, perhaps even on its opening day as I recall, Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary, started a huge brouhaha with several confidently announced statements, including the claim that the crowd gathered on the Washington Mall on the occasion in Mr. Trump’s swearing in on January 20, 2017, was the largest in American history, period.  Photographs taken at the swearing in of President Obama in 2009, which were readily available for purposes of comparison, seemed to many in the sighted community to cast doubt upon the accuracy of this assertion.  Very soon thereafter Kellyanne Conway, the presidential porte-parole, while locked in argument with the journalist Chuck Todd on the news program “Meet the Press,” explained that Spicer’s characterization of the crowd size was not an untruth but an “alternative fact”—alternative, that is, to the fact that the Obama crowd was manifestly larger. 

I do wish that there were more serious students of literature in the corridors of the state—and here I refer to the state in its shallow no less than in its deep forms.  Kellyanne Conway has not to this day escaped the derision brought down upon her by alternative facts.  The pettifoggers of Foggy Bottom cannot be expected to appreciate so elegant a concept.  Perhaps she should have used the more common literary critical term exemplary fiction--that is, a story the moral truth of which is not constrained by prosaic and vastly over-rated reality.  I have spent a lifetime reading such works.

All fiction, after all, might be considered as constructs of alternative facts, not simply because it is not “true” but because it has to choose among alternative untruths.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles might after all alternatively been Tom of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure could even more easily been Judy.  But how about Hillary Rodham?  Certainly, she is a real person?  Would she still be Hillary Rodham if she had dumped Bill, if she had indeed become President Rodham?  Read Sittenfeld’s book and let me know.

“Counterfactual” or “alternative” history is hardly a new thing among novelists.  (According to some historians I know, it is not a new thing among historians either.)  What if John Wilkes Booth’s pistol had jammed?  Is it not reasonable to assume that we would live in a much more just country today?  But on the whole, our American novelists have preferred pessimistic “counterfactuals” to optimistic ones.  They are especially big on imagined fascist takeovers.  I think particularly of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. (2004), both of which reimagine American political history of the 1930’s.  In the first of these a coded version of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, and in the second an enhanced delineation (as in “enhanced interrogation”) of Charles Lindbergh get their authoritarian mitts on the levers of American power, with predictable results.  The predictability is a problem.  In my view it finally condemns two very fine novels to a kind of political conventionality if not triviality. 

The masterpiece of the genre in my opinion, and by any reckoning a truly extraordinary novel, is Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962).  Lewis and Roth may make you shudder and wonder; but Dick will make you think.  Dick had the dubious fate of being regarded as a “science fiction” writer.  That is not wrong, exactly.  He wrote many shelf feet of science fiction, not only out of his life-long interest in it, but because he could sell it.  Most people probably know about him on account of the movie “Bladerunner”.  I probably would never have read him if the Library of America had not published him.

As the novel begins, the fascist take-over of America has already taken place.  In fact there are two fascist take-overs.  The victorious Axis Powers of 1947—the German Third Reich and the Japanese Empire--have treated the American continent rather as Germany and Russia had treated Poland in 1939.  The Germans have occupied the eastern seaboard and the Japanese the Pacific rim.  The ostensibly unoccupied center of the continent (essentially today’s “flyover country”)  is a tenuous “independent” state and buffer between the uneasy Axis allies.  The counterfactuals of these arrangements are brilliantly inventive, but that’s only the beginning.  The “man in the high castle” is a writer living in Wyoming, part of the American Vichy or Neutral Zone, and the author of a counterfactual novel (The Grasshopper Lies Heavy) in which America defeats Germany and Japan in World War II.   So you have a counterfactual novel in which a counterfactual counterfactual novel plays a prominent role.  Any confusion engendered by the necessary breathlessness of this summary will vanish when I tell you that Dick was quite erudite, and that reading his book requires at least superficial knowledge of the nature and uses of the ancient Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes.  Indeed, “Book of Changes” would be a pretty fair subtitle for any counterfactual novel like Sittenfeld’s or Dick’s.  In its weirdness, furthermore, the I Ching is perfect for brief daily readings in time of plague.

Bambuseaephagy, or the alimentary consumption of bamboo: a brief report

My last post concluded with the intention of eating some steamed bamboo tips gathered from my back yard.  That happened, and I yet live.  The good friend who (appropriately distanced) shared my mess declared it to be “about as tasty as a water chestnut”—a judgment that redeemed with its candor what it lacked in enthusiasm.  I later consulted a couple of Malaysian internet videos and discovered the superior mode of dressing and cooking the bamboo.  It should be seriously boiled for quite a while in some kind of yucky rice-water.  A second lunch thus prepared—though in New Jersey tap-water, our indigenous  yuck--was crunchier and sweeter, and from the tactile point of view closer to crisp asparagus or parsnip.  As for taste, kind of like a water chestnut; but it’s got to be absolutely loaded with vitamins.