Author: Andrew Sullivan

In response to Lawrence Buell’s essay on the “Great American Novel,” David L. Ulin calls the term into question, writing that, as a concept, the GAN “misreads the fundamental function of literature, which is less about the grand defining statement than it is about empathy”:

What literature offers is not an overview; it is not a way to understand the broad movements of the world. Such aspects may be represented — we can learn a lot about what it was like to live in 19th century London by reading Dickens, or St. Petersburg under the czars by reading Gogol — but they are not the point. No, literature is a connection-making mechanism: We read about people, individuals, and inhabit their lives, their struggles, their desires. We see that they are not unlike we are. This creates both identity and identification, allowing us to step (for a moment, anyway) outside ourselves.

The Great American Novel is something different; it signifies a belief in literature as all-encompassing, as able to gather the diverse strands of an inexplicable and unruly nation, and make sense of them in a single work. That this is impossible should go without saying; it’s more than a little reductive as well. Consciousness is chaos and life has no meaning, and the stories we tell — including the big ones: faith, statehood, family, history — are just a series of dreams we make up to give shape to the shapeless, to build a firewall against the void. That it all falls to pieces is part of the point; we are alone together, after all.

Though he says he would “rather talk about a novel in any other conceivable terms,” Scott Esposito sees some significance in the concept of the GAN:

There are places out there that are both small enough and have young enough literary scenes that such-and-such an author can legitimately be considered the “Great _______ Novelist,” having written the “Great _______ Novel.” One upon a time this was what was meant by the epic, though that’s long, long over now. So in a sense it maybe was possible somewhere, although, in a completely different literary genre and back when people sacrificed bulls. … [A]t some point way, way back, the literary world was small enough that a single figure could dominate a literature for a even a large and diverse country like the U.S. in a way that’s just completely incomprehensible now.

Previous Dish on the topic here, here, and here.

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Yesterday marked the assassination of Malcolm X, at age 39, on February 21, 1965. In the words of Robert Hayden, Malcolm X “became/much more than there was time for him to be,” and his death inspired many to write poems in his honor, including Gwendolyn Brooks (“He had the hawk-man’s eyes./ We gasped. We saw the maleness./ The maleness raking out and making guttural the air/ And pushing us to walls,”), and Margaret Walker, whose debut collection For My People, was selected by Stephen Vincent Benét in 1942 as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

A new volume of Walker’s poetry, This is My Century: New and Selected Poems has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press, with a moving introduction by Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split. (You can watch Finney give a stirring reading of Walker’s poetry here.) Our poem for today is Walker’s tribute to Malcolm X, included in This is My Century.

“For Malcolm X” by Margaret Walker:

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery
bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.
Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!

Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our
brains.
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

(From This is My Century: New and Collected Poems by Margaret Walker © by Margaret Walker Alexander. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Georgia Press. Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, March 26, 1964, from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division via Wikimedia Commons)

Breece D’J Pancake’s short story “Trilobites” was one of the first the Dish highlighted for our Saturday feature. Jon Michaud declares that it’s “high time for a Pancake revival,” praising the writer’s depictions of hard-scrabble life in West Virginia in The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake:

While deeply tied to the details of its Appalachian setting, the book offers a broader portrait of the personal and societal wreckage left behind by mass industrialization. Grim, work-related deaths and ailments abound in Pancake’s fiction: lungs bleed from coal dust; mine gas turns a man “blue as jeans”; another is killed by fragments of metal lodged in his brain. When I heard the news, last month, of the chemical spill that left three hundred thousand West Virginians without usable water for a week, I thought immediately of this sentence from “The Scrapper”: “He could see where the wives had planted flowers, but the plants were all dead or dying from the constant shower of coal dust.” Nearly all of Pancake’s stories share a unity of time, taking place in a matter of hours or days, but they are set against an ever-present awareness of geological time, of the epochs and eras that preceded the present moment. His fictions combine the intimacy and specificity of a Vermeer portrait with the grandeur and fierceness of a Bierstadt panoramic.

These bleak qualities may make Pancake’s stories timely, but it is their compressed artistry and distilled feeling that make them timeless. I read the book with no foreknowledge of Pancake’s work or life—always a welcome experience. On my first pass through, I was reminded of an astonishing variety of other writers. Thematically and structurally, the book owed a lot to “Dubliners” and “Winesburg, Ohio,” but, stylistically, Pancake was fully formed, an uncanny hybrid of dirty realism and Southern gothic. A whole world I didn’t know about was opened up for me. After finishing the book, I would have happily gone spelunking in the library basement for more of Pancake’s work, but there was none. This is Pancake’s only book, originally published in 1979, three years after his death, at the age of twenty-seven, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Like the pedestalled feet of a ruined statue, these twelve stories can only hint at the body of work that might have been produced had he lived.

After seeing the movie Ray, Professor Osagie K. Obasogie found himself “struck by the way in which Mr. Charles’s lack of vision did not seem to diminish his racial sensibilities” that Obasogie researched racial awareness in the blind community. In an interview, he discusses the resulting book, Blinded By Sight:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Your research has revealed some of the ways in which blind white people and blind black people first learn how to “see” race conceptually. What were some of the major differences you found in how these two groups experienced race?

Osagie K. Obasogie: The differences track rather closely to the different way that race is experienced by sighted whites and blacks. For example, both sighted and blind White respondents tend to see race as something that other people have, i.e. race is something that minorities experience while being White is thought to be “raceless” and remains the default norm. On the other hand, sighted and blind minorities tend to have a much deeper personal connection to issues of race.

One thing of interest that came out of the interviews is that several blind White people that I spoke with used their physical disability to analogize to the social disabilities associated with being a racial minority. These respondents would describe experiences in which other people discriminated against them because of their blindness and then assert that these experiences gave them insight into what it is like to be Black or any other minority. It’s interesting how some blind White respondents were able to see connections between their discriminatory experiences and other marginalized groups to create a sense of solidarity in how society can develop stereotypes and treat people unfairly. But it’s also interesting to note that none of the blind respondents of color analogized between race and disability in this manner; they viewed their discriminatory experiences connected to race and disability as being largely distinct. So, this perception that being blind provides insight to what it’s like to be Black may very well be a unique way in which Whiteness plays out in the White blind community.

In an excerpt from his book, Obasogie elaborates:

After conducting over a hundred interviews with blind individuals—people who have never seen anything, let alone the physical traits that typically serve as visual markers for racial difference—one consistent theme resonates throughout the data. Blind people understand and experience race like everyone else: visually. That is, when asked what race is, blind respondents largely define race by visually salient physical cues such as skin color, facial features, and other visual characteristics. But what stands out in particular is not only blind people’s visual understanding of race, but that this visual understanding shapes how they live their lives; daily choices, experiences, and interactions such as where to live and whom to date are meditated by visual understandings of race in the blind community as much as they are among those who are sighted. Despite their physical inability to engage with race on the very visual terms that are thought to define its salience and social significance, blind people’s understanding and experience with race is not unlike that of sighted individuals.

Update from a reader:

No thread titled “How Do The Blind See Race?” is complete without a link to Dave Chapelle’s amazing skit about the black, blind, white supremacist:

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Comic genius.

As part of a lengthy investigation into fraternity culture, Caitlin Flanagan talked to Douglas Fierberg, “the best plaintiff’s attorney in the country when it comes to fraternity-related litigation”:

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.” As for the risk-management policies themselves: “They are primarily designed to take the nationals’ fingerprints off the injury and deaths, and I don’t believe that they offer any meaningful provisions.” The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

Flanagan also consulted Fierberg’s adversary, Peter Smithhisler, the CEO of the North-American Interfraternity Conference and “senior fraternity man ne plus ultra“:

One way you become a man, Smithhisler suggests, is by taking responsibility for your own mistakes, no matter how small or how large they might be. If a young man wants to join a fraternity to gain extensive drinking experience, he’s making a very bad choice. “A policy is a policy is a policy,” he said of the six-beer rule: either follow it, get out of the fraternity, or prepare to face the consequences if you get caught. Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

Though Luke Harding took precautions while writing The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, he supposedly found himself confronting a mysterious, intrusive cyber-censor:

By September the book was going well – 30,000 words done. A Christmas deadline loomed. I was writing a chapter on the NSA’s close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.

Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA. All authors expect criticism. But criticism before publication by an anonymous, divine third party is something novel. I began to leave notes for my secret reader. I tried to be polite, but irritation crept in. Once I wrote: “Good morning. I don’t mind you reading my manuscript – you’re doing so already – but I’d be grateful if you don’t delete it. Thank you.” There was no reply. A month later the mysterious reader – him, her, they? – abruptly disappeared. …

In idle moments I wonder who might have been my surreptitious editor. An aggrieved analyst at the NSA’s Fort Meade spy city? GCHQ? A Russian hacker? Someone else intent on mischief? Whoever you are, what did you think of my book? I’d genuinely like to know.

Update from a reader:

Luke Harding’s story of remote censorship reeks of dishonesty. If I was writing something and someone showed that they had access to my computer I’d immediately, physically disconnect it from the internet and then back up my work before wiping it and putting a clean install of the OS back on it. After that I’d certainly continue my work unconnected from the internet. That Mr. Harding claims to have put up with this for an extended period of time shows he’s either a moron or a fabulist.

David Blair gave Harding’s book a two-star review, saying the prose “lapses into the breathless style of an airport blockbuster”:

Harding’s story crackles with verve, but complexity and nuance are banished. In particular, the real dilemmas of intelligence work are ignored. If GCHQ and the NSA share everything, they risk Snowden-style breaches. If they restore pre-9/11 restrictions, then vital information that might prevent attacks is bottled up. If the agencies store data, they are accused of threatening privacy; if they do not, then the communications of terrorists simply vanish. Harding considers none of this; only when Snowden flies to Russia does he voice any unease.

Reviewing the book earlier this month, Michiko Kakutani was less harsh (NYT):

Portions of “The Snowden Files” seem particularly aimed at a British audience, focusing at length on the surveillance activities of the GCHQ and its eager-to-please relationship with its wealthy American counterpart. But the book still gives readers, who have not been following the Snowden story closely, a succinct overview of the momentous events of the past year. And if it leans toward dramatizing everything in thrillerlike terms, the book also manages to leave readers with an acute understanding of the serious issues involved: the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities and voluminous collection of data, and the consequences that this sifting of bigger and bigger haystacks for tiny needles has had on the public and its right to privacy.

Extracts from The Snowden Files are here and here.