Anarchist novels, part 1: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

    Platypus Bill

What is an anarchist novel? Even if we include those that merely feature an anarchist main character, or an anarchist mode of thought, the list is fairly short. Caleb Williams by William Godwin, penned some two-hundred years ago might qualify as the first case in point. The Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy is also often mentioned. Then there are several modern examples, especially within the genre of cyberpunk. However, if we limit the definition to stories that describe an anarchic society, the list shrinks down considerably. I can only think of two examples: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, and The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. And since Le Guin considers her book to be the first to deal with the topic of an anarchist society [reference required], I can only assume that she would opt for an even shorter list. Or maybe she excludes The Moon on the grounds that it describes an anarchist revolution, that once it has succeeded in overthrowing the old guards, quickly adopts a parliamentary system.

The Dispossessed is certainly the only novel I know of that deals extensively with the structure and functioning of an anarchic society.

 By Peggy Tibbetts

The problem is, I can’t get an agent to take it on. One agent loved the story but didn’t think he could find a publisher for it. Another agent said she was riveted and couldn’t put it down but she declined. Agent after agent praises it, then passes. An editor compared it to Syriana, then said he was looking for a story about a female soldier but not necessarily about the war.

Oh, God forbid we should talk about the war with the kids.

I never understood his Syriana reference. I wrote the novel before the movie came out. I saw the movie and there’s no female soldier character in it. He also said it was complex so maybe that’s what he meant. So, yeah, war is like that. Complex. As in, not all black and white.

Discouraging? Yup. But also disturbing. So I’ve been wondering lately. Is it possible the Iraq War is taboo for teens?

Apparently it’s perfectly ok to recruit teens into military service to fight the war but it’s not ok for them to understand and explore their feelings about the war. Or in the case of my novel, to read about the war. For me, the situation in Connecticut really points to that.

Are educators and the media (publishers) shielding young people from the realities of this war? I think so. In the case of PFC Liberty Stryker, it isn’t about whether or not it’s a good story. It is. It’s that publishers aren’t publishing stories about the Iraq War for teens.

Yet they are of enlistment age and many have parents serving in this war, so why not? I don’t understand.

Now in Connecticut, the high school principal doesn’t want students performing their interpretation of the war through (a mostly female cast!) soldiers’ eyes.

From Counterpunch 

My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeare’s characters. The good guys in Shakespeare’s plays have become ever less attractive, ever more portentous, ever more sinister as the years go by. Henry V seems more than ever a butcher. “Now, herald, are the dead number’d?” he asks.

“This note doth tell me of ten thousand French
That in the field lie slain: of princes, in this number,
And nobles bearing banners, there lie dead / One hundred twenty six: added to these
Of knights, esquires, and gallant gentlemen,
Eight thousand and four hundred…”

Henry is doing “body counts”. When the herald presents another list–this time of the English dead, Henry reads off the names of Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire:

“None else of name: and, of all other men,
but five and twenty… O God, thy arm was here…
Was ever known so great and little loss,
On one part and on th’other?”

This is pure Gulf War Part One, when General Norman Schwarzkopf was gloating at the disparate casualty figures–while claiming, of course, that he was “not in the business of body counts”–while General Peter de la Billière was telling Britons to celebrate victory by ringing their church bells.

Shakespeare can still be used to remind ourselves of an earlier, “safer” (if nonexistent) world, a reassurance of our own ultimate survival. It was not by chance that Olivier’s Henry V was filmed during the Second World War. The Bastard’s final promise in King John is simple enough:

“Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”

But the true believers–the Osamas and Bushes–probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear–betrayed by two of his daughters just as bin Laden felt he was betrayed by the Saudi royal family when they rejected his offer to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation without American military assistance–shouts that he will:

“…do such things,
What they are yet, I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!”

Lear, of course, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a “terrorist” conspiracy with potential September 11 consequences.

…

INTERVIEW WITH HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES

DAMAGE REPORT: VEITCH TALKS “ARMY@LOVE”
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=10185 
   Jonah Weiland

300 seen as a tool to work up anti-Iran sentiment
   John Burke

The fatal flaw

So far, most imaginative portrayals of Tony Blair have been comedies, but would tragedy be more fitting? Blake Morrison considers the prime minister’s legacy in fiction as he approaches a decade in office

ZNet Commentary
Uniting the Movements: Atlanta, Ga. in Late June 
     Ted Glick

How will we bring about significant change in the USA? There are a number of things that need to happen, but one bottom-line, essential requirement is the coming together of a critical mass of organizers and activists into a grassroots-based, politically independent, popular and progressive network, alliance and/or party. Given what we are up against here in the belly of empire, it’s hard to see how we have any hope of change absent such a development.

Some of us got an idea of the impact such an alliance could have 20 years ago during the period from 1983 to 1989. During that time, because of the 1984 and 1988 Presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson, a grassroots-based National Rainbow Coalition began to emerge. This African American-based and African American-led formation brought together leaders and groups from a mix of constituencies and movements-Latinos, labor, farmers, women, lesbian and gay people, peace activists, community groups and more. Between 1986 and 1988 it began to take root via local and state coalitions, developing as a progressive alternative to two-party politics-as-usual. It was a grouping which consciously linked activists operating in the Democratic Party with activists building independent organizational forms and parties, united behind a consistently progressive political program.

This type of a Rainbow Coalition movement no longer exists, but there is an important initiative underway that has the potential to advance a different kind of unity- and alliance-building process across lines of race, culture, issue and geographic region, a process that we desperately need: the United States Social Forum, happening in Atlanta, Ga. June 27 to July 1.

Organizing toward this event was initiated by Grassroots Global Justice, an alliance of over 50 grassroots organizations representing people of color and low-income communities in the U.S. Over the last couple of years it has been putting the pieces in place to make this major event possible.

World Social Forum Origins

It is significant that the US Social Forum is emerging out of many years of World Social Forums that have been happening in countries of the Global South. Originally begun in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, the first World Social Forum (WSF) was organized as an alternative to the world ruling elite’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The second and third WSF’s were held in Porto Alegre, the fourth one in Mumbai, India and the fifth one back in Porto Alegre. Beginning with 12,000 people in 2001, it grew to 155,000 registered participants in 2005. The sixth World Social Forum was “polycentric,” held in January 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela and Bamako, Mali, and in March 2006, in Karachi, Pakistan. The Forum in Pakistan was delayed to March because of the Kashmir earthquake that had recently occurred in the area. Earlier this year, in late January, the seventh WSF was held in Nairobi, Kenya, attended by 60,000 people. There have also been regional and national social forums in Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, Italy and, in the USA, in Boston, the Southeast, the Midwest, the Southwest and just recently in Washington, D.C.

This first national social forum in the USA is coming at a particularly auspicious time. Bush, Cheney and the Republicans are on the defensive, struggling to maintain support for their agenda of wars and occupations for oil and empire abroad and, at home, the destruction of basic Constitutional rights and cutbacks to education, healthcare, Social Security and other human needs. Yet there is also widespread, popular dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and with corporate, big money domination of both major political parties. Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman, leaders of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, a key group within the leadership of the US Social Forum process, recently summarized its importance in this way:

“The social forum process was initiated by social movements of oppressed and exploited peoples in the Global South; and no one group in the U.S. ‘owns it.’ Second, the social forum is being brought home to the U.S. by grassroots organizations-with people of color and low-income led organizations in the leadership. Third, the social forum is a convergence process of all our fronts of struggle; it is multi-issue and multi-sector, and inclusive of all who are struggling for justice, equality and peace. Fourth, the social forum is a space where a broad range of political analysis is welcomed-from progressive to revolutionary.

“This is why the US Social Forum is the place to be this summer if you are a movement builder, if you have a vision of another world, if you want to make it happen!”

Let’s make it happen. See you in Atlanta!

(For more information and to register, go to http://www.ussf2007.org)

Ted Glick is a founder and is active with the Climate Crisis Coalition and the Independent Progressive Politics Network. His over seven years of Future Hope columns is archived at http://www.ippn.org. He can be reached at indpol@igc.org.

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Of Shakespeare, Iraq and Afghanistan

   Swaraaj Chauhan

“Step aside, I’ll show thee a president”: George W as Henry V?     Scott Newstrom

Political commentators have been claiming Dubya as a modern-day Prince Hal since the 1990s, eager to ascribe a kingly divine right to a ruler who, from his assumption of the throne to his current crusade, lacks justification.

Censorship in America: High School Principal Shuts Down Controversial Iraq War Play

It’s not an April Fool’s joke, not quite. But a mixup of titles at Romancing the Tome:

SYLVESTER STALLONE: I’m gonna direct “Edgar Allen Poe” [without] being in it. “Yo, Poe!” doesn’t work. I’d like to direct some nice young actor in it who can get the soul of Poe. It’s a dark story, but the challenge is how to make it enjoyable, so it isn’t that depressing. And then there’s a book I’ve been looking at for a while called Homefront, which is pretty good….

(I’m thinking “Homefront” may be the book by Tony Christini about the Iraq war, f.y.i.) — Amy

Actually, Stallone was probably referring to Chuck Logan’s novel Homefront. At that point, couldn’t have been Kristen Tsetsi’s Homefront.

Stallone would be good in Homefront as the father, or as U.S. Senator Sam Washburn. He would be better in Glory, as Jim Fielder.

Or does it unite?

Cross-posted from The Valve thread, “Kill One, Save Five”: 

I just want to add that I’m uncomfortable with the word “emotion” as it’s used in this thread. Novels are more, fundamentally more, than “emotional gyms.” (And morality may well be hardwired in our brains to be primary to emotion, to an extent, as well.) If we want to broaden the word from emotion to say “impulse,” it seems to me that novels are still far more than “impulse gyms.” They have to be if they are to reveal “the full human person,” for starters, let alone “the full human condition” (which includes not insubstantial insight into society, facts, and some concepts or ideologies, etc, healthy or decayed, useful or destructive, and all shades in between). Novels are gyms of facts and concepts in addition to being gyms of various impulses far beyond the emotional – aesthetic impulses not least, and principled moral impulses that may cause any variety of emotional impulses to conflict (with each other and other impulses, such as the aesthetic, or intellectual).

So, if we want to stick with the gym trope, it’s more accurate, I would say, to think of novels as knowledge gyms – a term which includes emotional knowledge and knowledge of impulses of all sorts, and conceptual knowledge, and factual knowledge, etc. Novels are special types of knowledge gyms of course, for the label could be applied to all sorts of texts. Novels are, I suppose, personally-based knowledge gyms, intra- and inter-personally based, and situated in narrative (as the larger body is known in all its extraordinary diversity). Or “human condition” knowledge gyms.

I don’t think the emotional component makes novels distinctive as a form any more then it makes emotionally compelling and insightful nonfiction distinctive as a form.

Rather, “the full human condition” imaginatively and aesthetically rendered — that is, the full human condition rendered as aesthetic make-believe, at narrative length (and however often fact-based and fact-filled) — is what makes novels distinct as a type and form of knowledge from any other type and form of knowledge.

Well, what of the human condition?

Just a couple quotes:

In Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, edited by Philomena Mariani, “The Novel’s Next Step” is the title Maxine Hong Kingston gives to her reflections on a type of novel needed for current times. She writes:

I’m going to give you a head start on the book that somebody ought to be working on. The hands of the clock are minutes away from nuclear midnight. And I am slow, each book taking me longer to write… So let me set down what has to be done, and maybe hurry creation, which is about two steps ahead of destruction…. All the writer has to do is make Wittman [hero of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey] grow up, and Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield will grow up. We need a sequel to adolescence – and idea of the humane beings that we may become. And the world will have a sequel…. The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the Global novel.

Kingston further suggests, “The danger is that the Global novel has to imitate chaos: loaded guns, bombs, leaking boats, broken-down civilizations, a hole in the sky, broken English, people who refuse connections with others.” And she worries, “How to stretch the novel to comprehend our times – no guarantees of inherent or eventual order – without having it fall apart? How to integrate the surreal, society, our psyches?”

It seems to me that her concerns should be taken very seriously but that writers have exhausted trying to do something along the lines of what she suggests, “imitate chaos.” The result in part has been what James Wood aptly dissects and excoriates as “hysterical realism.” I find Rebecca West to be perceptive writing in The Strange Necessity when she notes that regarding reality, when it comes to art, “one of the damn thing is ample,” that an inclination to imitation, excessive imitation at least, is ill-advised.

And in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said states:

It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual [including artistic] mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed “counter, original, spare, strange” [Gerard Manley Hopkins]. From this perspective also, one can see “the complete consort dancing together” contrapuntally…

Said adds that

Much of what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its aftermath—in, say, the elaborate interpretative strategies of critical theory or the self-consciousness of literary and musical forms—seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric today. More reliable now are the reports from the front line where struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic and archeological descriptions, explorations in mixed forms (essay, video or film, photograph, memoir, story, aphorism) of unhoused exilic experiences. The major task, then, is to match the new economic and socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale…. The fact is, we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment….

And so, the “imaginative, aesthetic, human condition knowledge gyms” that are novels face both ever more serious, also exciting, challenges to reveal, sustain, and further the human condition — in full, or otherwise.

Mira Nair 

“I’m developing an original screenplay about the war in the world…about the Iraq war etc. Right now it’s just an idea.”

 

Jim Webb plans political book

Senator describes it as populist work, not ‘Capitol Hill novel’

   Peter Hardin

The novelist, screenwriter and former Navy secretary that Virginians elected to the Senate is writing a new book – and it won’t be a tell-all.

Freshman Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., disclosed yesterday that he’s writing what he called a populist’s view of the political situation in the United States today.

He hopes it will hit the bookstores around Memorial Day in 2008….

Webb said the book will touch on many themes he sounded in his underdog Senate campaign in Virginia and in his Democratic response this year to President Bush’s State of the Union speech….

“We talked about the larger need for economic fairness and social justice, in an era where far too much power and money has gravitated to the very top, in both economic and governmental terms.”

 

Anarchist and Libertarian-Socialist Societies Depicted in Science Fiction —

Poul Anderson. “The Last of the Deliverers” (1957; revised version 1976). After the USA and USSR have broken up, thanks to a source of cheap, decentralized solar energy, the highest level of political organization consists of libertarian-socialist townships. In these townships, the community owns the land and such tools of production as tractors, plows, and harvesters, but those who raise the crops own the produce. Others are also self-employed, preferring to produce quality, crafted goods as needed, and spending the rest of their time in other rewarding pursuits, such as making love and hunting deer, rather than worrying about making a profit. In a town in Ohio, the last capitalist debates the last Communist, and everyone else is bored by their irrelevance. Le Carré’s War on Terror By Christian Caryl  (2004) Absolute Friends by John le Carré   The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré The best recent novel about terrorism was published in 1983, and its author was John le Carré, better known at the time as a crafter of cautionary tales about the intelligence battles of the cold war. The Little Drummer Girl, reissued this year in paperback, tells the story of an Israeli intelligence operation to foil a frighteningly effective Palestinian terror cell. The leader of the Palestinian group, an expert bomb-maker known only as Khalil, is obsessively security-conscious, and he has succeeded in wrapping himself so deeply in layers of deception and camouflage that the Israelis decide they can track him down only by resorting to the most unorthodox of scams. As their unlikely agent they choose Charlie, a small-time British actress of romantic left-wing politics whose interest in radical causes has brought her into brief contact with one of the terrorists. Kurtz, the mastermind behind the Israeli operation, explains himself to a colleague in a passage that is worth quoting at length: “‘Put in an agent, Schulmann,’ Misha Gavron shrieks at me from halfway inside his desk. ‘Sure, General,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll find you an agent. I’ll train him, help him trail his coat, gain attention in the right places, feed him to the opposition. I’ll do whatever you ask. And you know the first thing they’ll do?’ I say to him. ‘They’ll invite him to authenticate himself. To go shoot a bank guard or an American soldier. Or bomb a restaurant. Or deliver a nice suitcase to someone. Blow him up. Is that what you want? Is that what you are inviting me to do, General —put in an agent, then sit back and watch him kill our people for the enemy?'” Once again, he cast Alexis the unhappy smile of someone who was also at the mercy of unreasonable superiors. “Terrorist organisations don’t carry passengers, Paul. I told Misha this. They don’t have secretaries, typists, coding clerks, or any of the people who would normally make natural agents without being in the front line. They require a special kind of penetration. ‘You want to crack the terror target these days,’ I told him, ‘you practically have to build yourself your own terrorist first.'”

…

The President Of The United States quite reasonably proposes that his loyal public servants meet privately with Congress – under no oath and with no transcript allowed – and thereby be allowed to lie through their spinning teeth to cover up the firing of U.S. attorneys who were intent upon investigating the president’s administration for criminal activity.

POTUS quite reasonably proposes that Congress continue to fund – as it has all these many years – the ongoing Oil Wars in Iraq, and everywhere else.

POTUS quite reasonably cautions – no, warns – no, threatens – that if he does not get his way in these or other matters, he will carpet bomb Iran in a show of patriotic zeal, and then in close conjunction further carpet bomb the economy of the United States so that the nation comes crawling ever more desperately back to him on its hands and knees begging for relief, which he will piously deny.

POTUS regrets that Congress has chosen to raise a partisan specter in these difficult times. He quite reasonably remains confident that Congress will once again soon change its tune and soften its whistle after a few show trials and showboat votes, and little else. This is the proper nonpartisan function of Congress, after all. The quite reasonable duty of Congress is to betray the people – nothing less, plenty more.

The politics of the man behind “24.” —

“The military loves our show,” [Joel Surnow] said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a “soul patch”—a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He’s got it down. “People in the Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.”

Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914. – Google Books Result
The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel I This paper treats the ways in which Dostoevsky’s social and ideological intentions interacted with certain of his …

Greek Fiction: the Greek novel in context – 
Like many an author of the later ideological novel, Xenophon came to the … Since the key to an ideological novel is its redundancy, a prerequisite for …

Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction – 
…in distinguishing the ideological novel from other novelistic fiction written in a realist mode, Suleiman maintains that, while the number of …

Blood Diamond DVD — “Net effect: like reading Upton Sinclair and passing on the sausage.”

American (U.S.) disaster novel by Jim Crace

Marina Lewycka’s Novels

Jose Saramago’s political novel Blindness to film

V V: Pamuk & After: Who, among us, can confront the lies and silences that lie at the heart of everyone’s lives, including our own? We need to do that if only to come to terms with ourselves. We are all made up of different selves like a broomstick that needs to be tethered to be of any use.

On a different plane the novel raises a much larger question: the role of nationalist historians who see all history in terms of victories, defeats, triumphs, humiliations, their own side on the upgrade and some hated rival on the downgrade. And they do this without batting an eye-lid, without being conscious of dishonesty. Sadly, political commentators can survive almost any mistake, like astrologers, because their devoted followers don’t look for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalist loyalties. This is what has happened in Turkey as it would elsewhere where nationalists take over. To paraphrase Joyce, “history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake”.

“Crossing Color Barriers…a growing genre of novels” — see also: Ron Jacob’s forthcoming Short Order Frame Up

War violence and movies: 300

 

The Times They Are a Changin’: The Shifting Winds of Protest Music 

   Alexander Billet 

The subject has been brought up by so many writers that by now that it’s almost cliché. It’s been asked by musicians, activists old and new, and music journalists alike. And as it’s become obvious just how devastating the US’ very presence in Iraq has become, it’s a question with a quickly growing urgency: “where are the protest songs?”

It’s not a simple question to answer. Writers are quick to call up memories of the late 60s and early 70s; the height of the movement against the Vietnam War. Duncan Campbell of the Guardian did when he wrote an article this past February as tens of thousands turned out in London and Glasgow against the occupation, and were entertained by renditions of Edwin Starr’s “War” (what is it good for…? You know the rest) and Dylan’s iconic and still-scathing “Masters of War.”

“These are all great songs,” Campbell pines, “but where is the defining anti-war anthem of today?” Campbell is by no means dismissive of the myriad artists that are putting out good, sometimes great, anti-war material. Instead, he puts forth that there has yet to be an anti-war song that “somehow captures the moment and the mood.”

Nit-picky? Maybe, but he brings up a good point. It’s not that there aren’t any protest songs. It’s that most of them aren’t on the same level as the tunes that conjure up the timeless images of rebellion from the days of the Panthers and SDS. Where is our “Masters of War,” our “What’s Going On,” our “Give Peace a Chance?”

The answer lies in the very fabric of the modern music industry, and in our readiness to take it head on. So, this weekend as tens of thousands will once again turn out all over the country to stick it to Bush and co, it’s worth taking a look around and asking ourselves if we are going to ever hear that perfect soundtrack as we march in the streets.

You Hide Behind Words, You Hide Behind Desks…

But why would any of the major outlets we get our music from ever want to bestow such an anthem upon us? MTV has all but banned most anti-war videos. System of a Down’s “Boom” was neglected airplay because it contained facts and figures about the invasion of Iraq. MIA was told that her video for “Sunshowers” would not be aired until she took out references to the PLO. And PunkVoter.com was promptly told to screw right off by MTV when they asked to advertise their Rock Against Bush compilation in 2004.

The radio dial won’t yield any better results. Since the deregulation of the airwaves ten years ago, media behemoth Clear Channel now owns around sixty percent of local stations. Bad enough in itself, but the shameless radio tyrant’s hard pro-war stance makes it even worse. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Clear Channel paid for advertising pro-war rallies in Fort Wayne, Philly, Atlanta and Cleveland, and provided the entertainment. And then, of course, there was their infamous post 9/11 do-not-play list, not to mention their ban on the Dixie Chicks.

Moves like this are especially frightening considering the company’s increasing venture into live entertainment. When one of the most outspoken and successful radical artists of our time, Ani DiFranco, played a show the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2003, Clear Channel, a main sponsor of the show, told her she would have her microphone cut off if she said anything political!

Free speech? Sorry, only for those who can afford it….

[Continues here.]

This is a ZNet Commentary.

In the two previous posts of Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer, it seems to me that Geismar is primarily critiquing the political or ideological component of Mailer’s work — which is easy to understand coming from a literary critic whose work and livelihood were threatened, then destroyed, for political, ideological reasons during the Cold War. In my view, Geismar correctly and astutely calls Mailer on these shortcomings. 

I think Armies of the Night and Executioner’s Song are highly accomplished non-fiction works, essentially, aesthetically and otherwise. However, Armies does have the political shortcomings that Geismar points out. From a broad political point of view it is largely disappointing, empty. 

Otherwise (not focusing solely on the political), I think the best of Mailer’s nonfiction is very good, and an order of magnitude better than the best of his fiction. Mailer has high regard for his second novel Barbary Shore and that happens to be his only novel that much works for me. That said, I scarcely remember a thing about the ideas in Barbary Shore. If trying to work as allegory the novel seemed to me to fail to engage, or to be slight, but I did find engaging and curious the day-in and day-out self trials of the young writer/narrator’s thought. 

All in all, I think Geismar profiles Mailer perceptively. Mailer is a weak novelist and a politically limited nonfiction writer. In his nonfiction (and Barbary Shore), Mailer can be especially exciting and perceptive, and thus he became one of the leading writers. However I think Geismar is correct in pointing out that much of the early influence of Mailer, aside from the commercial success of The Naked and the Dead, came from the cult of personality that Mailer cultivated before his writing skills matured and were displayed best at book-length in the late sixties with Armies of the Night, two decades after The Naked and the Dead, and seemingly after many more decades of hype that Geismar usefully cuts to size. 

Geismar could give more credit to the liveliness and aesthetic accomplishment of Armies of the Night and some of Mailer’s other nonfiction, but, again, Mailer’s fiction, with little exception, has always been rather weak in my view, as in Geismar’s (and that of many others) and Geismar is correct to point out some limits of the political vision of Mailer’s celebrated works. Those are real problems for art and society both – quite evident in one of the better writers, and certainly one of the most renowned, of the time.

 Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer in his memoir Reluctant Radical (continued from Part One):

What I couldn’t understand was that given the conditions of Mailer’s career, how could he become such a huge literary influence on his time? How could he be described as the contemporary equivalent of Hemingway?

It made no sense to me, as I say, and I hardly paid any attention to Mailer’s developing reputation, until I realized that this reputation and literary stature had grown so much that people — especially young authors — were swallowing it. He was the influence on his generation, far more than Styron or Jones. Writers of the sixties were taking him seriously, having known nothing better.

I remember one evening when we had gone with our friend Jakov Lind to see a Joseph Papp production of the original rock musical Hair. Papp was also about to produce one of Jakov’s books in play form, so the evening was a gala one for us. Then Jakov proposed we go to another party, being given after the first production of a play which later became famous, The Beard. The play was being produced by Jakov’s publisher at the time, Barney Rosset, of Grove Press, then at the height of his fame, with his imported blue movies like I Am Curious Yellow and his new plays. The party was near the Grove Press offices and was a rather fancy late evening affair given while waiting for the first reviews of the play.

I was seated across from a young man in a mod-cowboy outfit whom I assumed to be one of the actors in the play. He started to rave about Norman Mailer. I listened awhile in silence and then finally said: “No!” He responded. “No, what?” “Mailer is not all that good,” said I. “What?” said my cowboy friend, and we were in the midst of so furious an argument that I finally decided to terminate it by getting up and leaving the table. Looking back, I heard my Wild West friend ask loudly: “Who is that character?” And I heard Anne [Geismar] answer him: “He’s just another obscure author like you!”

It was in fact Michael McClure, the author of The Beard. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Norman Mailer, for better or for worse, and it caused me to think and to watch for other young writers who shared this same adulation for Mailer. The problem of Mailer’s preeminence on the contemporary literary scene, and his impact on American authors, continued to occupy my thoughts. And it was only just recently, reading an essay sent to me by a New Left academic, Robert Meredith, whom I knew through his work on Truman Nelson, that I began to get the story straight.

The admiration of a group of young writers for Mailer, and of some older critics, stems from just those traits that my critical standards had found wanting. Meredith, a product of the sixties, tells of his early infatuation with Mailer as a major influence on the period and on the New Left itself.

The key book in this was Advertisements for Myself. “My god!” I wondered while reading this. “Did they take this book seriously?”

According to Meredith’s essay, printed in Modern Fiction Studies, they had indeed. “Since 1959, appropriately on the verge of a new decade,” Meredith had written, “thousands of readers, mostly students, have been psychically and politically turned on not so much by Mailer’s qualities as a writer in Advertisements, not so much by Mailer’s qualities as he describes himself in Armies of the Night…as by…”

By what? I thought. “…as by Mailer’s confessional projection of himself as Hemingway’s successor, a personage, a romantic image of a writer attempting out of existential depths to tell the complex masculine truth about himself and his time.”

Mailer compared himself to Walt Whitman. He said he had been thinking for ten years of running for president of the United States. He confided he was imprisoned “with a perception” that would settle for nothing less “than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” But as to what kind of revolutionary consciousness Mailer was seeking to create, neither he nor Meredith seems to clarify.

Mailer compared himself in Advertisements to Truman Capote, James Jones, and Jack Kerouac, as well as to Hemingway. He talked about “our totalitarian time,” in which he was correct, and compared it with his “creative rage” — which, however beneficial to the artist, is no satisfactory political alternative to totalitarianism.

What Mailer displays in Armies of the Night is not even so much a concern for his idea of himself as a concern for his image. And this concern either for self or for image is at the opposite pole from radical or revolutionary thought. How could Armies of the Night, an antiwar critique still dominated by Cold War ideology and by Mailer’s own ego-posturing, how could such a book be characterized by serious reviewers as a masterpiece, comparable to the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Henry Adams, Faulkner, Henry James, and Scott Fitzgerald?

What Armies of the Night did, in fact, was to swallow the radical protest whole and regurgitate it, half consumed, as a synthetic radical manifesto of the period. But to those who educated themselves, whose radicalism was genuine, he became a mockery. If he did survive in the national letters it would be as another, luminous example of the literary fakery that characterized the Cold War era. Seduced by and a victim of that corrupt period, during which a dishonest society aped the mores of a lost and long-gone American democracy, he became a parody of all that we had once believed in.

Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer (part one)

From Maxwell Geismar’s memoir: Reluctant Radical —

Norman Mailer was never part of our lives as were the [William] Styrons and the [James] Joneses, but we did see him around and he was always associated in my mind with the same group of writers who emerged in the fifties….

…

I had already reviewed The Naked and the Dead in the Saturday Review in 1949, and Barbary Shore in the same magazine in 1951, and would write about The Deer Park (1955) in American Moderns. I had praised Mailer’s first novel while noting it was consciously literary and derived from such writers as Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos…. I had panned Barbary Shore as being a novel of ideas that were “fashionable by current standards” but that were also mistaken….

As early as this second book Mailer had cut himself off from the revolutionary currents of the world historical scene around him. Becoming as he did one of the sharpest critics of American capitalism, knowing it was a corrupt and rotten social system — as he said over and over again — he had no feasible alternative to what he was condemning.

Hence his own work became infested with the corruption he was describing. Even more important, all that he could place against this decadent society was the solitary image of himself apart from it. Apart, but basically no different from it in his motivation and his literary achievement. In turn that treacherous ego of Mailer’s would increase and enlarge itself into monstrous proportions.

That was the mistake I sensed in Barbary Shore as far back as 1951. Mailer was far smarter than either Styron or Jones in seeing what was wrong around him, but that intellectual brilliance was supported by no vision or ideological framework.

As a social critic, Mailer was also a failed novelist. That special poison, which can paralyze a creative personality, also contaminated his other writing, his values, and his personality. In this sense Mailer’s career can be described as one long ego trip designed to keep the failure of the artist away from the artist’s own consciousness.

[Geismar on Mailer continued in the next Geismar post]

 

When the current editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel’s father, William vanden Heuvel, tag-teamed with current regular FOX political pundit William Kristol’s father Irving Kristol (who has come to be known as the “father of American neoconservatism”) – when these two figures of the social and political establishment hastened to appear on national TV over four decades ago to attack directly to the face of the silenced progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar, on the occasion of the publication of his book of criticism about Henry James (“a primary Cold War literary figure”), Kristol and vanden Heuvel, two exemplars of the status quo, serving the retrograde interests of the state, executed a prominent role in destroying Geismar’s highly accomplished literary career and ending his run on a national literary television show, Books on Trial (“or something similar,” in Geismar’s recollection).

Geismar posits William vanden Heuvel as “a rich, cultivated, charming, and liberal member of the upper echelons of the CIA [who] had a large hand in embroiling [the U. S.] in Vietnam,” while Irving Kristol “as it later turned out was almost always affiliated with many State Department or CIA literary projects in editing, publishing, and the academic world…a hired hand of the establishment.”

This combined liberal and reactionary political literary attack against the increasingly progressive literary stalwart Maxwell Geismar, having occurred on national TV no less, is one of the most significant moments in all of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century – yet it remains virtually unknown. Details may be found in Geismar’s decades-delayed, invaluable memoir, Reluctant Radical (2002).

Along with the trajectory of Maxwell Geismar’s career and vital latter work, similarly shot down the memory hole are several landmark books of progressive literary criticism from the first half of the twentieth century. Sheer scandal is the burial of Upton Sinclair’s studied book of economic literary criticism, Mammonart (1924). Another inexcusable and great loss is the virtual disappearance of two other landmarks of progressive literary criticism – V. F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature (1932) and Bernard Smith’s Forces in American Criticism (1939).

It’s difficult to be ignorant of these three landmark books and yet be able to fully appreciate Kenneth Burke’s tremendous collection of 1930’s essays, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book that in a sense consummates the progressive literary tradition, among others, of the 1930s and of the preceding several decades as well.

Ignorance of the three landmark books by Sinclair, Calverton, and Smith makes it similarly difficult to understand the significance and tremendous isolation and direct political persecution of the once prominent (when liberal) accomplished literary critic Maxwell Geismar, as he was marginalized and forgotten through the sixties and seventies and today – especially as he worked increasingly with white and black progressives and revolutionaries, and wrote ever more about progressive and reactionary aspects of American literature and culture.

Overall, it’s difficult to be ignorant of the three early books of criticism (still almost entirely disappeared, despite much renewed interest in the 1930s) and yet be able to make full sense of the especially vital socially engaged critical tradition prior to the 1940s that was forcefully curtailed in the subsequent decades. Despite some progressive accomplishments and gains of recent decades, these crucial books remain buried, no matter their integral nature to the most vital literary strains of their time, and no matter the extreme degree of need for them in our time.

Other, sometimes better known, notable works in a crucial progressive literary tradition date back at least to Frank Norris’ The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903) and extend to Emma Goldman’s rather mild book of theater reviews, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), then continue on through John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism (1937) – and are found in progressive criticism by W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke, Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, and so on – heading into the 1940s with works that include Edmund Wilson’s highly useful overview essay “The Historical Interpretation of Literature” (1940), and Alex Comfort’s Art and Social Responsibility (1946), and on into the 1950s and ’60s with Maxwell Geismar’s incisive line-in-the-sand book, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (1958), followed by his lucid and controversial critique, Henry James and the Jacobites (1963), the book that led immediately to that nationally televised yet unknown watershed moment.

At a time when the influence of T. S. Eliot’s ostensible critical views continues to hold something akin to preeminent sway in so many poetry workshops, hand in glove with a similar ethos throughout many creative writing programs and other literary institutions, Bernard Smith’s comprehensive study and analysis of literary movements, capped by critical comments on Eliot’s views, could help clarify, and advance, a lot of creative and critical thought. With Eliot (as with the “New Critics,” as Gordon Hutner notes in his anthology of classic American literary criticism American Literature, American Culture), many people would be surprised at how deeply – and in Eliot’s case, utterly – invested in religious (and retrograde) ideology such highly and widely admired “literary” thought is.

In the meantime, some of the most vital books of American literature – if not, interestingly, the time period in which they flourished – have been shoveled under. Some offspring of the progressive literary understandings explored in these landmark books are alive of course, and in fact in ever more diverse ways, but they are disconnected from crucial intellectual roots (not excluding passing mentions in the high quality work by Michael Denning, Barbara Foley, Vincent Leitch, and others) roots that could provide more power, focus, and energy to the somewhat progressive creative and critical efflorescence of today that is ironically and unfortunately often spotty and thin, and, as always, under attack, and subject to quite effective suppression, conscious and otherwise – not least from within the literary establishment itself.

—–

(As James Petras points out, in this related link: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited)

Two.

One to destroy Iraq with sanctions.

The other to destroy Iraq with bombs.

And someone else to do the work that needs done.