To anyone who lives in New York, the strangest feature of the 2016 election was seeing our local corrupt buffoon transformed into a tribune of the people. I’m still trying to figure out how the con was run. I’m told it helps to have seen The Apprentice. I imagine so. It would at least remind us how willingly people buy into a reality that’s obviously been constructed for them.
More help can be got from Timothy Snyder who, in The Road to Unfreedom, sees it as a problem of fiction. “Emerging from fiction,” he writes about Vladimir Putin, “the redeemer disregards the facts of the world and creates a myth around himself.” And if that sounds too mystic, too Russian, for American politics, Snyder argues that “Donald Trump, successful businessman” is also a fictional character, given his string of business failures. And anyone who saw his Triumph of the Will speech at the Republican convention felt the clammy swaths of myth his writers wrapped him in. “I alone can fix it,” the redeemer told us. “I AM YOUR VOICE.”
I got a lot of things wrong during the election, and one was my response to that speech. “Americans don’t like to be talked to like that,” I told the people I watched it with. Turns out a sizable percentage of them do. As Snyder says, Putin may have helped “escort a fictional character to power,” but “Americans were asking for it.”
Why Americans were asking for it—or how—is a vexing question. For Snyder the answer has to do with rising inequality, which produces oligarchs, who need fiction to disguise kleptocracy, and a populace alternately soothed and agitated by tales of a great nation besieged by enemies within and without.
This is persuasive, but I’m not sure it accounts for a recurrent sense I had throughout the election, from both left and right, that I was dealing with children. You can argue back and forth about whether Bernie would have been a better candidate or president than Hillary, but what struck me about Bernie’s most adamant supporters was their tendency to see the fight in storybook terms: good vs. evil. Hillary as wicked witch. Bernie as white knight, poised to pierce neoliberalism with his lance.
It will be rightly objected that the Bernie bros were nothing compared to the legions on the right who for quite some time had been imbibing and sharing stories that bore no relation to reality. For them, it had become gospel that Barack Obama, perhaps our most eloquent preacher of America’s unifying values, had done nothing but sow division. Climate change was the invention of liberal scientists. An attempt to provide healthcare to millions of Americans while keeping the insurance companies in the game was socialist tyranny—with death panels! These people were easy to fool not because they were gullible, but because they actively sought out these fictions. They conspired in their creation. They were not just asking, but begging for a character like Trump. Why?
Among the Hannah Arendt quotes making the rounds these days is this: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” That’s deeply unsettling because it so aptly captures the phenomenon we’ve been witnessing. What happens when a significant portion of a nation decides that these distinctions are no longer useful, are, in fact, an intolerable burden? This is about more than inequality. It’s a childish insistence that the world be other than it is, a narcissistic need for world to be mirror. I’m not sure fiction is the right word for that.
Arendt contrasts fiction with the “the reality of experience,” but fiction, good fiction, is all about the reality of experience. Or is that an old-fashioned humanist belief?
Comes a story in The New Yorker by Zadie Smith, perhaps the last of our great humanists and also, importantly, a fiction writer, though this story might more accurately be described as an allegorical essay. She comes out fighting: “Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem, death itself—these are out of fashion.” And though she is in a fight against the highly attuned, the highly informed, the highly woke, who see the world, always and forever, as an easily diagrammable problem of black and white, good and bad, oppressed and oppressor, she is also in a fight for fiction. Her example is George Stevens’ Hollywood melodrama A Place in the Sun. As she watches it, she is needled by a woke conscience named Scout who scolds her for sympathizing with “the rich and the happy” and “perpetrators instead of victims.” Smith argues that sympathy is “not a zero sum game, or it didn’t used to be, in the past,” but suspects that she might “instinctively sympathize with the guilty.” Which may be just to say that the movie elicits the complex responses of fiction. (Though, like all fictions, it has blind spots. Smith has to imagine a lynched brother for Elizabeth Taylor’s cheery black maid.)
Good fiction forces not just its readers but its writers to imagine a human complexity that is larger than our attempts to compass it. You begin to write a novel about the perils of adultery. You sketch in a plain and foolish heroine to drive your point home. You end up with Anna Karenina.
Perhaps Trump is bad fiction. Bad fiction constructs the world as we think we know it, not how we discover it to be. Great novels, Smith has written elsewhere, “force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives.” “Bad writing,” she goes on, “does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry—we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it.”
I’m not sure even this is enough to explain the world we’ve been plunged into. There are stories that go beyond the lazy and the rote and enter the realm of nightmare, of delusion and dark fantasy. Here is Arendt on the concentration camps: “The difficult thing to understand is that…these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sensual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data.”
We are very far from the world of the concentration camps, but I wonder how far we are from a world that lacks the structure of consequence and responsibility. E. M. Forster distinguished plot from story on the grounds of consequence: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” The stories we tell now are free of consequence. We’ve lost the plot. We are not required to see how one action led to another, how one life is entangled in another. We rip facts from the weave of reality and shake them at each other, or worse turn facts on their heads, insisting straight-faced that they mean the opposite of what they appear to.
What better hero for these new stories than a man who seems radically freed from consequence, who has not so much survived disasters as walked through them unscathed while rubble buried the less mystically inured behind him. This deeply ignorant man is capable of preternatural insight. When he told us he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a follower, he was telling us something essential: his followers craved a world without consequence, they craved a hero to whom consequence did not apply.
To enter this world is to enter a world without gravity, in both senses, a world best summed up in the sardonic Twitter meme “LOL nothing matters.”
Fiction, good fiction, returns us to a world of gravity. It matters that Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker and Emma insults Miss Bates. Why it matters—or why these things matter more than, say, who killed Roger Ackroyd, or who Trump will fire next week (on his show or in his administration)—is hard to say without getting all humanistic and Zadie-esque. It matters because a living human consciousness—less woke than awake and attentive—has tried, through story, through language, to represent the world. You cannot do this, to borrow Snyder’s phrase, by disregarding the facts of the world.
Without these facts, we risk entering Arendt’s “phantom world.” All our stories become “and then and then and then and then” with no cause or consequence connecting the events. They make no—they do not labor to create—sense. In whose interest is it to make nonsense of the world? In whose interest is it to deprive the world of consequence? To reduce it to “a mass of incomprehensible data”?
Towards the end of her story, Smith plays with the fact that Film Forum will soon have a fourth screen: “That’s what I need, I thought as I walked. A fourth screen. If I had a fourth screen, no reality could get through the cracks at all, I would be able to live only in symbol, and then surely everything would be easier.” Easier for a time, I guess. But, as Smith herself might tell you, symbols cut off from reality soon become phantoms, emptied of any meaning besides their power to provoke or terrify or flatter. What happens when, surrounded by those screens as in a cave, we see nothing but leaping images of our fear and rage and self-delusions? What stories will save us then?