Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  Book Week, April 9, 1967

  PARANOID POLITICS

  Of the many words with which the mental therapists have enriched our language, “paranoia” is one of the most used if not useful. According to authority, a paranoiac is one who suffers from delusions of persecution or grandeur. Everyone, of course, has paranoid tendencies. In fact, a sizable minority of the people in the world maintain sanity by focusing their fears and sense of outrage upon some vague enemy usually referred to simply as “them.” Once the source of distress has been identified as the Jews or the Communists or the Establishment, the moderate paranoiac is then able to function normally—until the magic word is said, as in that famous vaudeville sketch where mention of the town Kokomo makes mad the timid comic, who begins ominously to intone: “Then slowly I turned…”

  If the poet of the paranoid style is Kafka, one of its best contemporary critics is Professor Richard Hofstadter, whose new book illuminates various aspects of a style which has always flourished in God’s country, possibly because the North American continent was meant, literally, to be God’s country, a haven for seventeenth-century Protestant fundamentalists who did not understand, as Hölderlin so sweetly put it, what a sin it is “to make the state a school of morals. The state has always been made a hell by man’s wanting to make it his heaven.” Into this heaven, they came: the secular-minded eighteenth-century skeptics who proceeded to organize the United States along freethinking lines. Since then, the paranoid style has been a constant in the affairs of the American Republic. Though it originated with Christian fundamentalists, who could not bear to see their heaven made hell by a national majority which now includes those very elements that caused them to flee the old world in the first place, the style is by no means peculiar to them. Western farmers denouncing Eastern banks, Jews trying to censor the film of Oliver Twist, uneasy heterosexuals fearful of a homosexual take-over—all demonstrate that the paranoid style has at one time or another been the preferred manner of nearly every one of the groups that comprise the nation, and in a most engaging essay Professor Hofstadter traces the main line of this illness from the persecution of the Bavarian Illuminati in the eighteenth century to the current obsession with the Communist conspiracy.

  It is ironic that a nation which has never experienced a coup d’état should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy. From the John Birchers who regard General Eisenhower as a crypto-Communist to those liberals who find it thrilling to believe that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for Kennedy’s murder, paranoid delusions afflict millions. Knowing this, even the most responsible of politicians finds it difficult not to play upon the collective madness of the electorate.

  “There is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

  Although this sounds like Joseph McCarthy at his most eloquent, it is actually Woodrow Wilson at his least responsible, warning against “the special interests” (that what he was warning against might indeed exist to some degree is irrelevant; it is the manner in which he exploits the fears of the electorate that gives away the game).

  According to Professor Hofstadter, the paranoid style is popular not only with that minority which is prone “to secularize a religiously derived view of the world,” but also from time to time with the great majority which has never had any clear sense of national identity. For the American there is no motherland or fatherland to be shared with others of his tribe, for the excellent reason that he has no tribe; all that he holds in common with other United Statesmen is something called “the American way of life,” an economic system involving the constant purchase of consumer goods on credit to maintain a high standard of living involving the constant purchase, etc. But though this materialistic, even sybaritic ethos does far less damage in the world than old-fashioned tribalism, it fails to satisfy all sorts of atavistic yearnings. A man might gladly give his life for a totem like the flag or the Cross, but who would give so much as a breath for a washing machine not yet paid for?

  As a result, not only are the paranoid stylists of both Left and Right appalled by the soullessness of American society, but a good many nonparanoids are equally concerned by the lack of “national purpose,” a phrase whose innocent implication is that a human society is like a factory with a quota to be met. Among the simple, this absence of traditional identity has let some strange obsessions flourish, particularly today when the national majority is made up of third-generation citizens uncertain of just what’s expected of them. Not unnaturally, those of a passionate and idealistic nature are driven to displays of one hundred per cent Americanism, ranging from frequent hand-on-heart pledges of allegiance to the country’s proto-Op-art flag to the joyous persecution of those suspected of being un-American (the only other society to have such a concept was Nazi Germany).

  Analyzing the identity crisis, as the mental therapists would say, Professor Hofstadter makes a distinction between what he terms status politics and interest politics. In times of economic or military distress (that is to say, “normal” times), people vote their economic interests, and new deals are possible. But when the voters are affluent, they feel free to vote not their interests but their prejudices. The election of 1928 was such a time, and in an orgy of anti-Romanism the majority chose Herbert Hoover over Al Smith. Three years ago, when all seemed to be going smoothly for the nation, the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, quite aware that not only was he the most radical politician in the country (Supreme Court decisions are not, he declared, “necessarily the law of the land”) but also the most consistent morally. Fiercely militant in the holy war against world Communism (“we will never reconcile ourselves to the Communist possession of power of any kind in any part of the world”), he was even more emphatic in his desire to repeal a hundred years of social legislation in order to create a society in which every man has the inalienable right not to give a sucker an even break. The fact that by living the “wrong” sort of economic life the United States had become incredibly rich did not disturb him; as a status politician he spoke for virtue, and the millions that heeded him were quite willing (or so they thought) to sacrifice their material prosperity in order to gain spiritual health by obeying the “natural law” of the marketplace.

  According to Professor Hofstadter, those going up or down the social scale are the most prone to paranoia. When white Anglo-Saxon Protestants lose status, they often suspect a conspiracy aimed at depriving them of their ancient primacy, while Irish Catholics, moving up, are often disappointed to find that their new riches do not entitle them to more of a say in the governing of the country, and so suspect the Protestant old guard or the Jews of conspiring to deny them dignity. Religious (as well as ethnic) prejudices often decide the way these people vote. Since Americans lack an agreed-upon class system, status tends to originate in race and religion.

  The fact that each of Professor Hofstadter’s essays was written for an occasion other than the present ought to have inspired him to make some sort of link from piece to piece. Unfortunately, he has not made the effort, even though the paranoid style would have provided a fine common denominator. Nevertheless, he is interesting on such subjects as “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny”: skillfully, he gives the background to the Spanish-American War, and shows how the paranoid style helped make possible the war, which gave birth to the American empire.

  Like most empires, this one was the result of trouble at home. With the settling of California, the frontier shut down and there was no place new to go, a matter of poignant concern to a nomadic and adventurous people. Then came the depression of ’93. To those of faint heart, the last best hope of earth appeared to be fading fast. At such times the shrewd politician can usually be counted upon to obscure domestic crises with foreign pageants. Or, as Henry Cabot Lodge confided to a friend, “Should there be a war, we will not hear much of th
e currency question in the election.” Between Lodge’s practicality and Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of empire (“All the great masterful races have been fighting races. No triumph of peace is quite as great as the supreme triumphs of war!”), history required a war. But who was there to fight? Fortunately, Cuba wanted to be free of Spain; and so the United States, a Goliath posing as David, struck down Spain, a David hardly able to pose at all, and thus was Cuba freed to become a client state, the Philippines conquered and occupied, and westward the course of empire flowed. The Pacific Ocean, at first thought to be the end of the road, proved to be a new frontier whose end is not yet in sight, though it is heartening to know that downtown Hanoi is currently off limits.

  The American empire began in a blaze of rhetoric, much of it paranoid. Witness Senator Albert J. Beveridge:

  “God has been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years [to he] master organizers of the world. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.”

  Even thoughtful commentators felt that though “we risk Caesarism, Caesarism is preferable to anarchy.” And so, to avoid anarchy (and socialism), the United States chose empire, and contrary to the famous witticism, empires are the deliberate creation of an adroit presence—not absence—of mind. Franklin Roosevelt, in his way, was quite as imperial as his cousin Theodore. Beneath a genuine high-mindedness (puzzling to foreigners who find the American nonparanoid style either hypocritical or unrealistic), American leaders have unconsciously accepted the “English-speaking, Teutonic” role of world conquerors for the world’s good. With the result that the Americans are in this age the barbarian horde, as the English were in the last century.

  Happily enough, it would also appear that the United States is destined to be the last empire on earth (in the best if not the apocalyptic sense), and there are now stirrings within the camp of the Great Khan at Washington to the effect that new necessities do not always require military force. Barring unexpected catastrophe, the hordes may soon achieve, if not peace, an uneasy stasis which one hopes should endure until the human race begins the infection of other worlds. For more and more do we resemble a proliferating virus, destructive of other organisms, incapable of arresting itself, and so destined—manifestly!—to prevail or vanish furiously in space and time.

  New Statesman, January 13, 1967

  FRENCH LETTERS: THEORIES OF THE NEW NOVEL

  To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of “fact.” But then, Americans have never been enthusiastic readers. According to Dr. Gallup, only five per cent of our population can be regarded as habitual readers. This five per cent is probably a constant minority from generation to generation, despite the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century there were as many bookstores in the United States as there are today. It is true that novels in paperback often reach a very large audience. But that public is hardly serious, if one is to believe a recent New York Times symposium on paperback publishing. Apparently novels sell not according to who wrote them but according to how they are presented, which means that Boys and Girls Together will outsell Pale Fire, something it did not do in hard cover. Except for a handful of entertainers like the late Ian Fleming, the mass audience knows nothing of authors. They buy titles, and most of those titles are not of novels but of nonfiction: books about the Kennedys, doctors, and vivid murders are preferred to the work of anyone’s imagination no matter how agreeably debased.

  In this, if nothing else, the large public resembles the clerks, one of whom, Norman Podhoretz, observed nine years ago that “A feeling of dissatisfaction and impatience, irritation and boredom with contemporary serious fiction is very widespread,” and he made the point that the magazine article is preferred to the novel because the article is useful, specific, relevant—something that most novels are not. This liking for fact may explain why some of our best-known novelists are read with attention only when they comment on literary or social matters. In the highest intellectual circles, a new novel by James Baldwin or William Gass or Norman Mailer—to name at random three celebrated novelists—is apt to be regarded with a certain embarrassment, hostage to a fortune often too crudely gained, and bearing little relation to its author’s distinguished commentaries.

  An even odder situation exists in the academy. At a time when the works of living writers are used promiscuously as classroom texts, the students themselves do little voluntary reading. “I hate to read,” said a Harvard senior to a New York Times reporter, “and I never buy any paperbacks.” The undergraduates’ dislike of reading novels is partly due to the laborious way in which novels are taught: the slow killing of the work through a close textual analysis. Between the work and the reader comes the explication, and the explicator is prone to regard the object of analysis as being somehow inferior to the analysis itself.

  In fact, according to Saul Bellow, “Critics and professors have declared themselves the true heirs and successors of the modern classic authors.” And so, in order to maintain their usurped dignity, they are given “to redescribing everything downward, blackening the present age and denying creative scope to their contemporaries.” Although Mr. Bellow overstates the case, the fact remains that the novel as currently practiced does not appeal to the intellectuals any more than it does to the large public, and it may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age which Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed post-Gutenberg. Whether or not the Professor’s engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today’s student often experiences difficulty in reading and writing. Linear type’s warm glow, so comforting to Gutenberg man, makes his successors uncomfortably hot. Needless to say, that bright minority which continues the literary culture exists as always, but it is no secret that even they prefer watching movies to reading novels. John Barth ought to interest them more than Antonioni, but he doesn’t.

  For the serious novelist, however, the loss of the audience should not be disturbing. “I write,” declared one of them serenely. “Let the reader learn to read.” And contrary to Whitman, great audiences are not necessary for the creation of a high literature. The last fifty years have been a particularly good time for poetry in English, yet even that public which can read intelligently knows very little of what has been done. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more. Unhappily, the novelist, by the very nature of his coarse art, is greedy and immodest; unless he is read by everyone, he cannot delight, instruct, reform, destroy a world he wants, at the least, to be different for his having lived in it. Writers as various as Dickens and Joyce, as George Eliot and Proust, have suffered from this madness. It is the nature of the beast. But now the beast is caged, confined by old forms that have ceased to attract. And so the question is: can those forms be changed, and the beast set free?

  Since the Second World War, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, among others, have attempted to change not only the form of the novel but the relationship between book and reader, and though their experiments are taken most seriously on the Continent, they are still too little known and thought about in those countries the late General de Gaulle believed to be largely populated by Anglo-Saxons. Among American commentators, only Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, published in 1966, has made a sustained effort to understand what the French are doing, and her occasional essays on their work are well worth reading, not only as reflections of an interesting and interested mind but also
because she shares with the New Novelists (as they loosely describe themselves) a desire for the novel to become “what it is not in England and America, with rare and unrelated exceptions: a form of art which people with serious and sophisticated [sic] taste in the other arts can take seriously.” Certainly Miss Sontag finds nothing adventurous or serious in “the work of the American writers most admired today: for example, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William Styron, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud.” They are “essentially unconcerned with the problems of the novel as an art form. Their main concern is with their ‘subjects.’ ” And because of this, she finds them “essentially unserious and unambitious.” By this criterion, to be serious and ambitious in the novel, the writer must create works of prose comparable to those experiments in painting which have brought us to Pop and Op art and in music to the strategic silences of John Cage. Whether or not these experiments succeed or fail is irrelevant. It is enough, if the artist is serious, to attempt new forms; certainly he must not repeat old ones.

  The two chief theorists of the New Novel are Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. As novelists, their works do not much resemble one another or, for that matter, conform to each other’s strictures. But it is as theorists not as novelists that they shall concern us here. Of the two, Alain Robbe-Grillet has done the most to explain what he thinks the New Novel is and is not, in Snapshots and For a New Novel, translated by Richard Howard (1965). To begin with, he believes that any attempt at controlling the world by assigning it a meaning (the accepted task of the traditional novelist) is no longer possible. At best, meaning was