The
world has become too much in the aftermath of
the 2000 election and 9-11. We
lose Columbia. We gird for war. We bust our
budget. The market sags. The poor get poorer.
The comedy of democracy turns dark. Tragedy
lurks in the wings. We resuscitate
"evil" as the measure of
geopolitical relations. We forget the frolics
of Monica and rakish Willie.
Now I
remember why in the 1950s New Criticism was
important. It relieved our minds of assured
mutual destruction. Better to search out the
patterns and symbols in the work of art
itself than to build a bridge from it to the
awful arena, where evil wore red. Better
arcane art than the raw pain of impossible
politics.
The
brief Bush era already has worn me down. I
don't turn on the set. I boycott CNN, Fox,
Nightline. I skip the News section of the Times
and go straight to Arts. Instead of leaving
Fiction until last, a practice of long
standing, I now open The
New Yorker first to the
short story. This helps break the deadly
spell. It may offer escape from the dismal
state of the Bush era.
George
Saunders in the 27 January 2003 issue takes
me to his imaginative space for refreshment. Jon
is arguably the best
short story I've read in a year.
I say to
myself: Think of the classic 1970s movie, Brazil.
Think of George Orwell's 1984.
Remember B. F. Skinner's
operant conditioning experiments. Revisit
"Biosphere 2" under the Arizona sky
with its sealed-in inhabitants.
Here,
the natural world known to common sense vies
with a counterworld of disciplined human
intention.
Alas,
you say, is there no escape from themes of
socio-political manipulation? Can't a New
Yorker story give us a
break? It can. Saunders does. This is a love
story.
Randy
and Carolyn inhabit a facility for assessing
products. They represent the
"demographic category of White
Teens" in the Midwest Region. They can
see the real world selectively through a
window but never leave the facility.
They
have been in the facility since infancy,
turned over by needy parents. The parents
agreed never to see their children as long as
they were inside. The children become members
of the elite Assessors of products, with
comfort and security ensured for life.
Through
the window, they see what kind of life goes
on at the Rustic Village Apartments. The men
are "bummed-out-looking" in
non-designer clothes, the women are yelling
and smoking, and the children are pressing
against the glass to seek the attention of
Randy and Carolyn and their fellow Assessors.
They are
celebrities to the children, for they have
the awesome duty to assess the products that
make life go round outside. Their faces
appear on gum cards carried by the
kids—celebrity heroes. The public knows
them across the land as "Trend Setters
& Taste Makers."
"Luminaries" from the great world
outside visit them.
To make
sure that these teenage Assessors are happy
while doing their heroic work, Coordinators
hook them into "Aurabon," a
registered mood-altering drug. Randy and
Carolyn, like the other teenage Assessors,
get their drug by direct feed. They hook in
to apparatus on their wall that feeds them
through a surgical hole in their necks.
Experience
inside the facility consists primarily of
exposure to advertised products. Assessors
access them through numbered Location
Indicators (LIs). LI 34321 takes them to an
experience with Honey Grahams, for example.
Swiss Rain Chocolate is at LI 10003.
Randy
and Carolyn have learned English mainly from
the commercials surrounding these
commodities. Indeed, the rhetoric of
commodities determines the range of their
expressiveness. When they want to put their
feelings into words, they are incapable of
saying anything beyond what they have learned
at the Location Indicators.
"Oh
Gadzooks" is their most intense term of
endearment. It comes from LI 38492 for
Zookers Gum. "The guy blows a bubble so
Zookified that it ingests a whole city and
the city goes floating up to Mars."
Randy,
who narrates, uses a fractured syntax that
derives from this unique learning experience.
"Which" is his all-purpose
conjunction. Sentences run on at length,
untamed by timely end-stops. Phonetic
approximations of words serve:
"ourselfs" for
"ourselves"; "trumpet
cart" for "trump card."
Redundancies slip easily in: "nightfall
would fall." Verb forms suffer
confusion: "the most romantic thing you
had ever underwent." Unsure which is
which, Randy regularly uses "laying or
lying" for "laying" or
"lying." Singular and plural blur:
"All of our feelings was high."
The
Coordinators keep the natural hormonal
urgencies of the teenagers under control by a
strict segregation of the sexes. They require
the girls to wear a Velcro chastity guard. To
relieve the predictable tension, the
Coordinators teach their charges how to
masturbate by requiring them to watch an
educational video, "It's Yours to Do
With What You Like!"
Alas,
masturbation and segregation fail. Randy and
Carolyn, following the example of another
couple in love, manage to get together, with
a predictable real-world result. Pregnancy
changes Carolyn. She begins to see things
differently when her condition prevents her
from hooking in for her daily dose of
Aurabon. Then the infant of the other overly
adventuresome couple dies; a double dose of
Aurabon all around quickly wipes away the
memory of cute little Baby Amber. This
experience drives Carolyn to become fiercely
protective of the child within her.
Exit
from the facility is an option, but the
Coordinators do all they can to prevent it.
Each Assessor represents a great investment
in training. When Carolyn persuades Randy
that they should make their life outside, the
Coordinators send them to the Lerner Center,
a kind of half-way house, for a taste of what
to expect. They meet erstwhile Assessors in
various states of frightening withdrawal.
Mainly their expressive power is scrambled.
Without Location Indicators to prop up their
linguistic requirements, they cannot talk
sensibly. Their walk and talk seem psychotic.
They cannot yet handle unmediated interaction
with the outside environment.
Reluctant
Randy chickens out in the face of these
casualties of withdrawal. Carolyn, however,
takes to heart the advice of a "Year
Two" exiting woman. She urges patience.
After the second year, she says she is able
to see a bug as a bug and a paint chip as a
paint chip. "There is no
distraction," she says, "and it is
so sweet, nothing in one's field of vision
but what one opts to put there via moving
one's eyes."
Carolyn
exits for the Lerner Center, never to return,
leaving Randy behind. But one of the
Coordinators, Mr. Slippen, has come to
sympathize with Carolyn's desire for a life
outside. He empathizes with the young lovers'
plight. So, against all the rules, he gives
Randy a brief chance to go outside for a
meeting with her.
And that
leads to Randy's epiphany. First, the real
flowers and grass blow his mind. Then Carolyn
appears, belly bigger, hair bedraggled, with
"a gaping hole in her neck" where
her Aurabon intake disk has been surgically
removed. She is babbling the usual verbal
salad that accompanies withdrawal. But she is
radiant anyway in her new freedom. Randy
"persees" as much and he fills his
mind with LIs, trying to express his delight.
She calls him Jon, the name his mother gave
him, rather than Randy, the name the
Coordinators assigned to him.
So, love
overcomes the managed and secure life of the
Assessors. The happy couple will face the
hazards of fortune freely outside, come what
may. Jon hopes they "can come to be
normal" and riffs through a whole bunch
of LIs to guess how it might feel. Right now,
he doesn’t know what--or how--they will
think, but "I am curious, I think I am
ready to try."
I end
the story with the upbeat impression that,
with their spunk and pluck, they will have a
happy life out there in the real world.
Saunders's
imaginative little love story carries me away
momentarily, anyway, from the nation's angst.
His art has its way with me. He slices
through the darkness and inserts a delightful
moment of light. He restates the tradition of
humanistic solidarity with the world. His
satirical creation of an awful counterworld
underscores the brightness of that
hard-to-kill tradition.
The
imperatives of commodified capitalist culture
maim the young lovers almost beyond repair.
But Jon/Randy's irrepressible good humor and
Carolyn's fierce integrity prevent their
controlled setting from producing tragedy.
They
make it out of the facility by the skin of
their teeth. The limits of his language
prevent Jon/Randy from giving voice to the
ultimate value of modern life--the freedom to
choose
how to live. Left to himself, he would
acquiesce in his managed life for good. He
lacks the private fire of motive that
Carolyn's pregnancy confers on her. It takes
the seditious impulse of Mr. Slippen to push
Jon/Randy forward.
Happy am
I for him that he finds the flowers, the
grass, the freely given love of his life. The
lovers snatch the human condition from the
jaws of an inhumanly manipulated fate. In
time, Saunders makes me think, the happy
couple will develop the power to speak what
freedom means.
And
yet. The easeful horror of life in the
facility will not leave my mind, glad though
I am that Jon/Randy and Carolyn get out.
Beware, Saunders whispers--I've made their
experience sound outrageously amusing, but
don't be fooled.
Okay.
Their life as Assessors is a logical outcome
of the separations imposed by modernity. They
play the role of Assessor at the expense of
functioning as fully developed human beings
"outside." The Coordinators make
them specialists to a fault. They epitomize
specialization, that unmistakable mark of the
modern.
As the
modern world emerged, the individual was its
bearer and its glory. Yet, as Saunders's
story illustrates, the specialization of
individual endeavor, carried beyond common
sense, threatens to destroy the individual,
which brought us to modernity in the first
place.
Sad to
say, then, even this brief break into a
fictional universe is not allowing me to
escape completely from contemporary angst.
The West
is heading into a long cultural engagement
with the Muslim world. We do not know how
bellicose it will be. We do not know when, if
ever, it will transform into a creative
sharing of cultural perspectives, leading to
a better world order yet unimaginable. But we
do know that this engagement will require our
respective cultures to justify themselves to
one another as they never have done before.
The
postmodern impulses of Western culture are
driving capitalism to extremes that always
have lurked within it. We will have to
explain them satisfactorily to the other half
of the world.
At the
first extreme, capitalism in its
"late" contemporary form
voraciously seeks to commodify more and more
of the natural world, including the human
person, and humanity's creations. The
imagined experience of Jon/Randy and Carolyn
remind us of this real-world process. The
freeing up of capital through new forms of
finance--what David Harvey calls
"flexible accumulation"--is
accelerating the process of commodification
around the world. That is disrupting
traditional social orders such as those found
in Muslim parts of the world. It is behind
much of the resentment of the West and of the
US in particular.
Second,
capitalist accumulation is mostly process
without specific content. It is no longer
clear to people that capitalist development
is a sure means to "progress" and
"happiness." Those terms have less
meaning than they did in the bright dawn of
the Enlightenment. The West, in other words,
can appear to be hell-bent on going in
circles as fast as possible.
"Freedom" threatens to be Newspeak
for "Western domination of Muslim
culture."
Jon/Randy
and Carolyn face a life of indeterminacy
after they leave the facility. They choose to
abandon the security of a controlled and
wholly purposeful existence as Assessors;
they choose to jump into the dark hole that
the outside culture offers them. They trust
that their feeling of freedom in itself will
take them to a safe and surprising landing.
But they do not know what the great
capitalistic world outside holds for them.
The
extremes of Western capitalist organization
are being severely tested as the Islam-West
engagement intensifies. Islamic voices will
claim to know what the content of social life
should be. They will look into the soul of
the West and find a freedom that leads to
triviality. They will find a separation of
functions that denies the wholeness of
existence and sets up the individual for
control and manipulation. They will offer an
alternative vision of wholeness, a society
held together by explicit purpose rooted in
belief.
They
will answer the West's question: "Can we
derive substantive meaning from our
commitment to the procedural freedom of the
individual?" No, they will say, you
cannot learn enough to do that on your own.
Come visit our metanarrative of God and gain
a world for yourself.
The
story Jon shows
us that the separation and distance of the
individual under capitalist conditions lie at
the heart of the West's system of
understanding. In doing so, it also shows us
what will happen when the individual becomes
too separated at too great a distance from
the totality of the exploitable natural
world.
While
inside, Jon/Randy and Carolyn could see the
world only through the glass—it was
separate and distant from them. When they
finally can smell a real flower and see the
uniqueness of a blade of real grass, they
begin to close the distance between
themselves and the natural world, where
actual life occurs. They leave a controlled
and predictable existence behind them. They
choose an uncontrolled and unpredictable
alternative because it makes them feel better
than they felt as Assessors.
They are
going to have a baby outside, where real
flowers grow. Their baby will start humanity
again--shades of the hope that rises at the
climax of John Steinbeck's The
Grapes of Wrath. And
maybe that's the sense of the story I want to
take away.
David
Kolb in The Critique of
Pure Modernity (Chicago:
1986) shows me how to close. We may bring
more to the West-Islam engagement than I
think. From Kolb I learn that modernity and
its postmodern extension are not as cut off
from traditional human life as its critics
sometimes argue. We are not just process
machines, despite the pressure of capitalist
enterprise to make us so. Kolb tells it this
way:
Modernity
is no illusion, but neither is it unique in
one deep way. There are aspects of current
life where structures claiming distanced
individuality or formally pure decision
processes are important. But these are not
everything….(263)
Well, at
least Saunders's story removes the raw
immediacy of the oncoming clash from my mind.
I see in it a small comedic emblem that
stands brightly against the darkness growing
at the center of the Bush era. Although it
will not let me escape the darkness, it
confers a moment's relief. Art forever!
