History is a Nightmare

In a Times opinion piece that has attracted a good deal of attention, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory, argues that, like little children, the electorate needs a good bedtime story. Obama, in his mind, is a bad storyteller (“What Happened to Obama, NYT, 8/6/11). “When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters,” Westen writes. “Americans were scared and angry…. In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.” In his address at the 1936 Democratic Convention, FDR said, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Fiorello LaGuardia was famous for reading comic strips to the denizens of his beleaguered city. But ultimately the subject is not storytelling but history. Do great historical figures still create history, with Roosevelt and Churchill being forces of good and Hitler and Mussolini representing the axis of evil? Or has the world become so complex that there are no simple stories to be created by men? Lately, history seems to be making the decisions, with men merely taking credit or being assigned blame. Computer-generated stock market programs are capable of causing huge gyrations in markets that have little relation to industrial productivity. In a world in which information can become a virus that takes on a life of its own, it’s becoming apparent that the objects of man’s creation have beat him to the punch. It would be nice if Barack Obama had been able to create a reassuring narrative that would satisfy what Professor Westen calls the brain’s expectation for “stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought.” However, if President Obama were to tell a story that could explain what is actually occurring outside our windows, it might be written in the ironic postmodern style of Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace or Nicholson Baker, or even in the complex, poetically reticulated prose of Joyce. And it would not likely be consoling or even understandable. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus presciently states, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

The Men and Women Without Qualities

So who will embody the New Man or New Woman of our age? Parameters are generally established after the fact. Thus, the Victorian era was encapsulated by the Queen because of the monarch’s strength and the morality and counter-morality that it spawned. The fifties were the Eisenhower years, characterized as of the era of silent conformism, in which Americans basked in era of post-war prosperity. This smugness created its own counter-reformation, evidenced in the ennui and rebellion documented in the work of Saul Bellow, John Updike and John Cheever. Here are the opening lines of Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953): “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Cheever’s famous story, “The Swimmer,” in which the protagonist’s escape takes the form of a journey through his neighbor’s swimming pools, creates myth out of the trivial details of suburban life. When and how will our present age be defined? Hints may come the work of yet another writer, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand in 2008, just as the economy was teetering on collapse. Tennis and AA were two of the themes of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, while his unfinished final novel, The Pale King, is partially set in the world of the IRS bureaucracy. Don Delillo’s Falling Man, an obvious reference to an iconic photograph, dealt with the aftermath of 9/11. But perhaps we should look to another continent and age for clues. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz capture civilizations on the verge of collapse. A suburbanite, a recovering alcoholic, a thinker, an IRS agent, a thief—which of these sensibilities will be emblematic of our times, which of these characters are we likely to encounter in art as well as in life?