Yesteryear - The Novel That Promotes The Very Thing it is Railing against.

 Yesteryear, Novel, Art, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Don't Read This Book, Current Culture, Tradwife, human striving

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND READING THIS BOOK.  You are welcome to read the review and decide for yourself, and this is a book that it makes sense to be aware of – it will soon be a motion picture from Amazon starring Ann Hathaway and it is being pushed in all sorts of venues, but the book reading pleasure is limited and you will likely get as much (or more) from the film as from the book.

One of the advantages of belonging to book clubs like the one I belong to, a neighborhood club where the hosts rotate and choose the book when it is their turn to host, is that you get to read a variety of books that you might otherwise not run across.  This book, as referenced above, is likely to be hard to avoid running into, but would not have fallen into my hands of my own accord.  The club was certainly surprised (and many said very pleasantly surprised) to read about prosthetic (glass) eyes when it was last my turn.  It was a book my friend wrote – and a very good book, indeed.

I am glad to have been exposed to the ideas in this book – it helps me get a better sense of current popular visions of our aberrant America that seems to be becoming mainstream, but is – I think and hope – largely performative.  Of course, when it is being performed in the Oval Office, that is a very big stage, but I don’t think our country, as we approach our 250^th anniversary, is currently functioning as itself and I anticipate that this perturbation will resolve into a novel culture – that will be informed by, but not primarily determined by, the current performative, virtual and unreal/surreal culture that this book purports to reflect.

This is not a novel – in the usual sense.  It is a script for a movie.  We are not in the hands of a craftsperson who is writing this – nor in the hands of an editorial team that is concerned about the craft of writing.  This is advertised on the first page.  After a two dimensional introduction of the character who will be our narrator and hero, says "...the radiator was puffing hot air”. 

This is not a person who has lived with radiant heat.  She does not understand HVAC – or perhaps more accurately, she is used to living with modern HVAC and has never been cognizant of what it is like to have a radiator heat a room.  And she is about to tell us what it is like to live in house that is heated by a fireplace? 

The craft of writing springs from a visceral understanding of the human experience.  I became an analyst because of a hunger to understand that visceral experience.  In this, I think I emulated Freud who, as a bench scientist, wanted to scientifically understand people.  Of course, people are not the kinds of relatively simple systems that scientists study.  They are complex and gushy, not neat and clean.

Neal DeGrasse Tyson, in his latest book about extraterrestrial life, suggests that if we want to demonstrate our own perhaps puny understanding of the universe to E.T.s, we should communicate in the universal language of the universe – math and physics.  Even if another species can’t decode the symbols for the elements, they will understand the shape of the periodic table as something that is familiar to them.  The elements are universal and any other civilization will have had to figure them out and arrange them - in just the way we have done.  

DeGrasse Tyson goes on to explain that while physics and math are the basic building blocks, human life is just one form that life might take.  There is no evidence that our DNA produces the ultimate living creature; indeed, other biological worlds might create creatures that don’t even have DNA!  And DNA creates a wide range of creatures who then create cultures who then create an infinite array of individual subjectivities, and it is the writer’s responsibility to capture something about the particulars of a few of those subjectivities and illustrate how they interact. 

I am not a writer because my understanding of the human condition is clunky and, as Freud said about every one of his discoveries about the human condition, the artists had beaten him to that discovery.  Frued (and I) are just able, when we are lucky, to articulate some aspect of the human condition in clunky terms.

Well, this author is clunky, and I don’t think I would have minded reading this book if she was, as it were, a good engineer – but she doesn’t understand HVAC, much less the human condition.  That said, there is a nugget buried in the middle of this mess that I think is worth thinking about, so a quick rendition of the plot, as it were, and then on to the meat:

A woman goes off from Idaho and being poorly understood by her family to Harvard where she is poorly understood by the people that are assumed to be her peers, but, in fact, have no kinship with her.  For a masterful first person telling of this kind of experience by someone who lived it, please read Educated, by Tara Westover.  In the current, Yesteryear, rendition, the shy, smart Christian girl, upset by the vacuous ways of the cultural elite girls she is thrown in with, becomes smitten with a stupid, rich, vacuous son of a Senator.

Realizing that she has made a huge mistake, she gets his father to invest in a ranch for them in Idaho where she can hide this embarrassing idiot away from the world, and then decides to advertise her presence in this remote wasteland by streaming her experience as a tradwife to the world – pretending that her family and ranch life is ideal when, in fact, she and it are a fiction – one that she is creating almost in spite of herself.

Not surprisingly this flimsy construction crashes.  What seems promising about the novel is that the heroine is telling her tradwife story in the past tense – as recollections – then in alternate chapters is moving forward in time in an alternate universe where she is actually living in a frontier home – not one that she has created – and she (and we) see how grim that existence actually was.

OK, that is an interesting vehicle – and I won’t reveal the twist that we as readers are trying to figure out through the book.  If you’ve read it, you know, and if I haven’t convinced you not to read it yet, I don’t want to spoil it for you, except to say that I didn’t see it coming because it didn’t actually make any more sense than a radiator puffing heat.  I’m just saying.

So, the meat?  Or perhaps, rather, the morsel?  The central thing that author promises is that we are all experiencing ourselves as living in a maze with no way out.  We feel trapped in a world that is controlled by billionaires who have no understanding that it is our labor that allows them to have the wealthy perks that make their lives seem so enviable.  Having a tradwife be constructed as having the perfect life on social media helps us whether we have “traditional values” which conflict with our actual, miserable existence; or, we have more elite, snobbish values that allow us to look down on the traditional world so that we can believe that our vacuous existences are worth living – even though the pleasures they provide are thin and we are headed towards the grave without having found any meaning in our lives.

I think this is a trope, but a powerful one, used by the media and politicians alike to inform us that we are not what I believe us to be: humans living human lives.  Until 200 years ago, most of us lived not so differently from the domesticated animals that were likely sharing our living quarters.  And we were, if not happy, deeply invested in our lives and the continuation of the species.  Unlike the spoiled protagonist in this book, who whined and whimpered about her previous superior life when confronted with a lack of creature comforts, we strove to improve our lot – we were deeply engaged in our lives; nasty and brutish and short though they may have been.

Similarly, I think that, as much as we complain about not having enough time, money, or pleasure, we are currently living lives that kings and queens would have envied.  We can travel in ways that were unimaginable until recently, and we have more information in our pockets than were contained in the greatest libraries of all time.  Are we happy?  Not necessarily.  Happiness is a feeling state that comes and goes.  But are we invested in our lives?  I think we are every bit as invested as our ancestors were – and we are every bit as ambivalently as they were.

Sometimes this means that we are invested in our online lives - as if those were our real lives, rather than pale imitations, and distortions, of the lives we are actually leading.  Am I concerned that the opinions I present in these posts are two dimensional or don't reflect all that I feel about any subject?  Am I too pollyannaish, including in this current evaluation of our condition?  I think all of those criticisms are accurate.  The truth of the human condition is complicated, and our minds do much better with manipulating simple things, like how pure chemicals interact in pristine environments.  Hydrogen and oxygen makes water.  Simple and clean.

Human life, on the other hand, continues to be messy – and I anticipate that it will be as long as it continues.  Living viscerally in that life, as complicated and challenging as that is – is our fate.  Art’s role is to help us in that struggle.  This book articulates a vision – the maze and then later the labyrinth – that is certainly a way of reducing a very complex relationship of our lives to our culture, and creating a simple equation to describe out engagement with a new and very complicated future – but it neither provides a way out, nor does it accurately describe our current halting complicated trek through it.  Instead, it celebrates, reifies, and simplifies the complexity of living, reducing it to a kind of periodic table of the human elements that is the very thing it appears to be railing against.  We deserve better from our artists and the empires that billionaires are exploiting to expand their influence, which might, with a certain amount of irony, actually be the point of this book…

I am curious if a movie version will actually enhance it.  Will Ann Hathaway bring something to the character - as an actual human being enacting an imaginary one and thereby infusing the imaginary character with life - unlike the conceptualist - which I think this author is - creating a cartoon and putting it through its paces, an actress will have to confront, as she engages in the role, the complexities that it exposes in herself.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

 

                                                                                            

Amistad and the importance of an independent judiciary...

 

Amistad, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Judiciary, Independence, Social Contract, Independence

I have long wanted to see this film, and when it popped up on our queue, the reluctant wife and I agreed to take a look.  It is a Steven Spielberg film that, along with Schindler’s List, is one of those films that you ought to see, but, that said, do you really want to?  It is showing, in this case, in living color, how corrupt and brutal we can be.  I also “ought” to see it because one of my high school buddies was one of the film editors.  When Spielberg said cut here, he did.

Much to our surprise, this film packs a powerful contemporary message in Trump II’s America.  Yes, it is about slavery and the slave trade, yes, it is about a boat full of Africans illegally enslaved and illegally transported.  But mostly it is about the need for an independent judiciary.  Again and again, the eleven year old Queen Isabella of Spain (Played by a very young Anna Paquin in a minor role) is held up as being a more powerful ruler than our President, Martin Van Buren, because Queen Isabella controls her courts while Van Buren does not, try as he might.

At the time of this film, the transatlantic slave trade was illegal, but slavery was alive and well in the United States.  Slavery here would not be outlawed until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then, after the civil war, the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 banned slavery entirely.  Kentucky, near me, outlawed selling slaves relatively early in the 1800s, but most of the legislative action up until the civil war was granting exceptions to the law so that particular transactions could take place.

The Amistad was a ship carrying Africans that had been transferred from the illegal transatlantic ship Tecora to a local ship in Havana, Cuba, a Spanish Colony.  The Africans commandeered the Amistad, sparing two crew members who agreed to take them back to Africa, but those crew members instead steered them into American Waters, where the ship was commandeered by the US Navy and taken to Boston, where a series of Judicial proceedings took place.  The first trial was a criminal trial to determine if the Africans were guilty of murdering most of the crew.  As the killings of the crew members took place in international waters, the court decided it did not have jurisdiction.  But that left the matter of what to do with the Africans.

Queen Isabella supported the claim of the remaining crew that the Africans were indeed slaves and belonged to the crew members and that they were being ferried between Spanish colonies and should be returned.  Martin Van Buren, both to support his relationship with Spain, and to curry favor with Southern Voters, supported this claim.  But an abolitionist group became concerned about the Africans.  They approached the retired president John Quincy Adams to defend them, but he demurred, preferring to stay away from the issue of slavery and wanting to remain in retirement.  So, they hired a local attorney, played by a young Matthew McConaughey (who did a credible job, losing his Texas accent by the end of the movie); an expert in property law which, much to the chagrin of the abolitionists, was exactly what they needed when the court was considering the Africans to be slaves.

The complicating factor here, is that the Africans did not speak English.  The attorney was able to find an ex-slave who spoke the language of some of the slaves – the Africans had broken into tribal groups in the group prison cell and Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) became their spokesman (at least as portrayed in the film).  The attorney found a sympathetic ear in the judge, so Van Buren changed judges, but that judge, too, was swayed by the discovered documentation of the Africans having been illegally transported from Africa, and released the Africans.  Van Buren, again trying to hang onto the South, appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

At this point, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) finally agreed to get involved.  He argued the case before the Supreme Court.  Historically, he had 4 and ½ hours of opening arguments, and 4 hours in his closing arguments.  The filmed version was more concise.  It was also what I would like to focus on in thinking about the film.  In doing this, I am not addressing the brutal (but also historically accurate) depiction of the middle passage from Africa to the Americas.  I am also not addressing the issue of people as property - for that, see a discussion of James Cone’s the Cross as the Lynching Tree.

The issue of an independent judiciary is both political and, I will argue in a moment, intrapsychic.  Trump had the judiciary in his pocket when he arrived for his first term.  As the New York Times recently revealed, Chief Justice Roberts ushered in the era of the shadow docket when he put the kibosh on Obama’s use of the EPA to reduce the use of coal in electricity production and thereby blocked the transition to renewable energy sources by 2030.  After that, Mitch McConnell oversaw the revamping of the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court during Trump I, and the court has become a rubber stamp of the more and more outlandish executive orders of Trump II.  The No Kings marches are partly an objection to Trump’s having achieved the position that Queen Isabella enjoyed – the court that matters does not disagree with him, and will disagree with itself to support him.

John Adams, in his closing statement, argued persuasively that we need to remember the founding fathers.  The power of this statement was amplified in that one of those founding fathers was his own Dad.  These men, many of them slaveholders, argued for the freedom of men.  He was reminding the justices of the principles that are the cornerstone for a free country and the importance of following the law.  In this case, even in a country that continued to own and trade slaves internally, it was internationally illegal to enslave and trans-oceanically transport slaves.  The rule of law supercedes the will of the majority – at least it used to.  Everyone, including the President, was required to live within the confines of laws that were determined by Congress, a body that was representing the people.  The only exceptions are when Congress enacts laws that violates the constitution and rights that are spelled out in that document.  The People’s will, therefore, is at the heart of the law.  We have a social contract not with a king who commands us, but with ourselves – or more closely – with each other and with our better angels, as spelled out in the constitution, and especially the amendments to it.

When we enter into a social contract, we agree to tame our instincts.  Freud famously argued that this was the source of our discontent.  Yes, we are less happy in the moment when our internal judge rules that this or that action is out of bounds because it simply is not allowed as part of being a member of society.  Hopefully, we are also connected enough with the members of our society that we would not want to harm them.  This higher form of moral functioning, one that is based in basic attachment, is not one that Freud had conceptual access to, but it should be something that we are evolving towards, individually, and as a state.

This week, the reluctant wife, who used to be a member of the deep state, cohosted a meeting in our house of a group of people meeting to discuss the ideals – the principles (not the policies) that make us America.  A central component of that, in my mind, is that he, as citizens, enter into a social contract and, as an essential element of that contract, no person is above the law.  The question to the group was whether we have outlived the ideals that were influential in founding the country.  We may have done that in some areas, but this movie helped me realize that the rule of law – and the independence of the judiciary is not something that we can afford to give up.  This is still, in my mind, an essential part of being an American.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.