October 24, 2006

REVIEW: Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! (2006)

So, is it OK for art to be political again? Yet? Since when? Who said it ever wasn’t? What rock have you been under?

As an amateur advocate of radical social change (it’s hard to get work as a professional revolutionary these days) with artistic inclinations, I struggle daily with this question—one morning I was stuffing my bookbag with antiwar leaflets (Don’t Talk About War Unless You’re Willing to Talk About Capitalism!!![1] and War Is Hell!!! Peace is Better?[2]) and I glanced over at the picture of Leon Trotsky on my wall. You know the one. In Mexico. Where he’s clearly breaking down some heavy science, probably a fine point of aesthetic theory, gesticulating mildly to the most certainly rapt interlocutor just out the frame. Maybe it’s Diego Rivera. He’s hunched over slightly to the left, to emphasize some delicate distinction or other. Smirk? Sometimes his eyes seem to flash accusatorily with a sort of self-righteous judgment—the end of his van dyke seeming sharper, more pointed, than it is. It’s actually pretty frizzy. Other times it seems like I caught him just having winked, hiding a twinkle in his deep black eyes, and I know he’s laughing inside. Smug, safe, and secure in the pantheon of working class heroes. He’ll never again struggle to throw off the dead weight of revolutionaries like himself or of revolutions like 1917 (jazz was “the other revolution” of 1917). He didn’t struggle too hard against Stalin either, but that’s another story.

I mean revolutionaries of the art world as well. The twentieth century was just full of revolutions, you know. Yes, sometimes it even feels like history may be speeding up. Second time farce and all that jazz. Or maybe it’s more like fast forwarding through cable dramas on TiVo.

Thank goodness there’s a novelist that feels sort of the same way. I’m talking about Chris Bachelder, whose U.S.! promises to knock this one out like Johnson did Jeffries in Reno, 1910.

It’s a regular rubber romper room of a ride, this book. Basically, the left keeps resurrecting Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle (1906)—grave-robbing, dusty clothes, and all—and the right keeps killing him—three-name assassins, sensational media, and all. Hilarity ensues. Some profundity is registered. There’s a question remaining at the end.

I don’t think that question is born of fashionable noncommitment though, because Bachelder takes such glee in dredging up old dirt, opening up old wounds, spitting in the wrong people’s faces. At least that’s what it looks like to me, perched here on the outskirts of the culture industry. For all I know, political is in this season, and there’s no spitting going on at all. There were jumbled red, white, and blue bicycle parts (?) at the Whitney this year. That Richard Serra silhouette about stopping Bush. That’s got to count for something, right? Slightly less empty gestures in an art world made of hints, an entire realm of interpretation, counterinterpretation, thrusts, parries, redirections and misdirections of purposefully ambiguous and determinedly oblique feints, performed with a subtlety that would have any self-respecting Thomist theologian hanging his head in shame. This game played among art critics (or art critiques, “modes of consumption,” and frames of perception, swapped in and out like slides in a Fisher-Price ViewMaster) and their prized cultural producers makes Gorgias look about as clever as Bill O’Reilly.

Speaking of sleight-of-hand: one of the cleverest running jokes in U.S.! is merely to illustrate it, over and over, like Stephen Colbert does Bill O’Reilly. The classic white American ignoramus is one thing, and there’s plenty of material there (in real life they are sad, and as stereotypes they are perhaps maltreated and overused; Bachelder sticks mostly to the worst of this lot, right-wing fanatics and mercenary types), but Bachelder’s political target is the sophisticate: the cynical manipulator of American ignoramuses, herder of mouthbreathers, marketer of violent videogames, panderer to all baser instincts, keeper of the tattered remains of white-skin privilege, White Man’s Democracy, and a few white men’s money. Bachelder’s aesthetic target is the same sophisticate, but with an MFA.

The joke might make you chuckle when you first read it: After making fun of Sinclair for his politics, for his run for Governor or California in 1934, for his bad writing, etc., a reviewer pans Sinclair’s new book for its clumsy writing. Fair enough. But then there’s that special something extra that lets you know you’re reading propaganda: “It isn’t simply that his ideas are extreme, outdated, and irrelevant (though they are; no serious thinker today takes Socialism seriously). The issue, rather, is aesthetic: Sinclair has never understood that art and polemic do not mix, that great and lasting art has no authorial agenda. Novels are not tracts or pamphlets; they do not serve to convince readers of anything. A novel may ask questions, but a good one never supplies an answer.” It’s so crude! So priggish! So hamfisted! It’s the literary criticism of the street cop. But it passes for intelligent discussion, this lazy leaning against the barricades of official wisdom. So you giggle.

The next time, you may not be so sure, because the argument gets more sophisticated. And you suspect that perhaps Bachelder has saved the best such argument for himself, to ventriloquize through a much more intelligent and thus sympathetic character: the reviewer of the work of visual artist Sam Treadway, whose art-star persona, questionable motives, and exploitative, “hyperrealistic” nudes of the sleeping Sinclair make him quite repulsive: “[W]ith The Sinclair Centerfolds, Treadway crossed a line. Not of decorum or decency, as the stuffy politicians bellow. Rather, an aesthetic line. He crossed out of Art.” It’s a bit harder to cough up a knowing laugh here.

Bachelder pulls the same trick once more before you know it’s definitely a gag. Of all people to deliver the line about stepping outside the bounds of art, he chooses E.L. Doctorow! “Political sentimentality is as bad as any other kind. You have to acknowledge ambiguity, complexity…” Sure thing, Ragtime. This is cheap talk, and you don’t believe him for one second. Sinclair puts him back in his place, and before you know it, you’ve read an unambiguous political statement. Next time you see this “aesthetic” propaganda strategy, you laugh out loud.

So. We have propaganda versus the “committed” work; there’s political theory and then there’s social realism (not to say Socialist Realism). There’s lies and absurdity on the one hand, and then there’s magic realism on the other. There’s the “book of ideas,” which is usually a book of illustrations, and then there’s the perennial American favorite: low-down, grimy, guttersnipe naturalism. From the Ashcan school in painting to the classics of the early twentieth century, to the realest rap of the present, this is the biggest thing going in the U.S.!

Why? “He asks how many of us work more than forty hours per week with no overtime pay. We slap our thighs. He is a religious man, ultimately. He asks how many of us are too tired at the end of the day to spend good time with our families. Our thighs are sore from the beating. And how many of us grow further and further in debt each year, he asks. It is true, yes, all of it. Sinclair has become a character in his fiction and maybe it’s bad fiction, like the reviewers say, maybe it’s embarrassing. But it isn’t fiction. This is our lives.”

Upton Sinclair was reaching for this naturalism in his work—to put “the content of Shelley into the form of Zola” [3]—although he would be the first to admit that he didn’t quite make it. But considering the number and variety of navel-gazing tricksters calling themselves artists, you understand where he’s coming from when he says, “The proletarian [artist] writer is [an artist] a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of ‘art for art’s sake’ than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore—and then there will be time enough for [your clever] art.”[4] I’m sure Trotsky would have been down with that, at least in principle, but he probably wouldn’t have liked The Jungle. No matter how much “active world attitude and active life-attitude”[5] go into it, “proletarian art should not be second-rate art.”[6]

U.S.! deals with all that stuff, which is not to say Bachelder ain’t got jokes. He’s not as naïve as Sinclair. That wouldn’t go over well these days. We’re not all anti-ironic New Sincerists again yet. But he loves Upton Sinclair—this much is obvious—enough to characterize him as strongly as I’ve ever seen such an important and symbolic character treated. A lot could go wrong in the fictitious treatment of a repeatedly resurrected old author, rebel, and muckraker whose purpose in the narrative is merely to bear the weight of the hopes of billions for a better life, thousands (on the Left) for a particular vision of the better life, and the entire conceit of the novel.

Those thousands cheer each time Upton is resurrected, because as long as he keeps coming back, hope is alive. He’s an old, washed-up has-been, ridiculous in many ways, but perhaps just a bit less ridiculous than “capitalism still stampeding unchecked over the bodies and lives of the workers.” He’s from what William Burroughs, in the preface to Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926), called “old, weird America.” You know the one: with all the nutritional fads, strange religious practices, machines that stimulate weight loss, pills for everything that ails you. But after all he’s been through, he remains trusting and optimistic, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s from Modernity in the same way that George Bush and I are from Texas—but we’re like the Chinese monk on punishment in the proverb, eating a bowl of plain rice flavored with the aroma of cooking fish from his master’s stovepipe, except our rice is thin malnourishing gruel, and the aroma is that of the decaying corpse of the hopes unleashed in 1905, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1925, the hopes that gave birth to every stream of contemporary thought and artistic endeavor, the hopes Upton was alive to foster and enjoy! Firsthand!—he is from the worldwide working-class upsurge of the years between 1900 and 1930. Decisive. You think the Red Thirties were something: Well, the Wobblies wouldn’t even sign contracts with their employers—not because they didn’t trust the law, although that’s obvious. The main reason is cause they didn’t want a piece of the pie. They wanted the whole thing!!!

What happened? A whole hell of a lot. Mostly bad. But Bachelder shows us that even Upton Sinclair—milquetoast Socialist, semi-anticommunist, by no measure a firebreathing prophet of proletarian revolution—could never have imagined that the working class would not have overthrown capital by now. Someone alive today may find it hard to believe that there was ever such hope in the world, even among moldy, overripe social democrats like Sinclair.

Which brings us to the question at the end of Bachelder’s book (SPOILER).

It is—I hate to say it—a pastiche, stitched of forms of writing from eBay listings to e-mails, song lyrics to interview transcripts, straight prose to Dos Passos ripoffs. Trotsky said something about how an artist trying to express new social realities “will need all the methods and processes evolved in the past, as well as a few supplementary ones.”[7] And that’s just the way the words are presented on the page. The book also swings from hope to horror, though mostly humorously, and from “Politics” to “Art,” and all this is in a story about resurrection!!! The impossible is made real, like sudden irrefutable evidence of E.S.P. The “politics” is mostly stated in the narration of the events, while the “art” is embodied in this formal construction, which is itself humorous, considering the politics and content of the novel: the formal construction ends up being an instance of the aesthetic joke described above. A big middle finger to the art cops. But Bachelder’s great triumph is in using the most articulated and elaborate technique in such a way that a purely formal development—the necessary ending of the book!—instantly transforms into a matter of content that we find suddenly to have been loaded and prepared throughout the novel.

After the final assassination attempt, Upton and his cohorts narrowly escape legendary reactionary backwater Greenville, South Carolina, and disappear from the narrative. Sinclair must escape the danger, because if he did not, the book would never end. We know that in this universe, he is resurrected over and over again. So, for this particular novel to end, his escape is a formal necessity. Greenville remains a cesspool of stupidity, prejudice and ignorance. The barbarians dance, obdurate and almost entirely unreflecting. The book ends.

The question is “What happens now?” In the very moment in which Bachelder removes Upton Sinclair, the “prop” that made the novel a satire, that made it absurd and fantastic—which he had to do to end the book—we are left with a downright naturalistic rendition of the U.S.! It’s so old-fashioned! It’s so…dialectical! In this instant the technical elaboration is unveiled to be much more than “artistic eclecticism.”[8] The most advanced forms have been used to render our “new life, new vices, and new stupidity.”[9] He has come all this way to show us a high-relief impression of the world in which we live—that red-state “heartland” world of white American ignoramuses, that “inner city” world of black and brown delinquency, that “elite” world of corrupt media, bosses, and politicians: this world built on the defeats of the working class over the past century. Once the bizarre ride ends, as it must, this world stands naked, on its embarrassing own, all its business hanging out. This is not enough, yet, again, to inspire those ignoramuses and delinquents to acknowledge their true conditions of life, but it is more than enough for an already hilarious and exciting novel. It’s that special something extra that lets you know you’ve read a damned good book.

October 21, 2006

Notes

1. Internationalist Perspectives, http://users.skynet.be/ippi/Leafletip.htm.

2. Race Traitor, http://racetraitor.org/warishell.html.

3. Cosmopolitan, October 1906.

4. Cosmopolitan, October 1906. Bachelder added emphasis and modified this quote with the material in brackets on page 116-117 of U.S.!.

5. Leon Trotsky, “Revolutionary and Socialist Art,” in Literature and Revolution (2005), p. 193.

6. Leon Trotsky, “Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art,” in Literature and Revolution (2005), p. 169.

7. Trotsky, “Revolutionary and Socialist Art,” p. 193.

8. Trotsky, “Revolutionary and Socialist Art,” p. 193.

9. Trotsky, “Revolutionary and Socialist Art,” p. 195.































































upton.sinclair politics marxism revolution literature lit.crit chris.bachelder postmodernism