American Pastoral and the Logic of the Small Room

I've written about how both DeLillo's Libra and Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker establish and reinforce the cultural logic of the conspirator's "small room," as site where masculine identity is solidified against masculinity's others and sutured to a national (paranoid) identity. The men in these rooms take refuge from a continually destabilizing world; the room delimits boundaries for male identity, and offers a reassuring meaning and structure. The room at home maps onto a hidden room of power located in a national site. Both DeLillo's Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee's Henry Park feel outside of America, primarily for reasons of class and ethnicity. Both feel, somehow, that they are less than fully men, and both turn to conspiratorial small rooms as a means of both connecting themselves to a national imaginary and reinforcing their sense of what it means to be a man. With no women or real other men in the room, the room serves as a blank space onto which ideas of connectedness and meaning can be imposed.

I'll now turn to a text by another well-known postwar writer often compared to DeLillo, whose concerns, in some ways, bridge those of DeLillo and Lee. Philip Roth's American Pastoral, similarly engages issues of masculine identity in relation to national imaginaries, but essentially effects a reversal. Like many of Roth's works, American Pastoral focuses on his native Newark, but, as its title indicates, invokes a wider American historical experience, spanning the mid-forties to the mid-90s. Narrated by novelist (and recurring Roth character) Nathan Zuckerman, the novel focuses on the life of Zuckerman's boyhood hero, the star athlete Seymour "Swede" Levov, who shines brightly in the Jewish neighborhood in which both Zuckerman and Levov grow up, and who becomes head of the successful Newark Maid glove company.

Levov's story takes place against a national history that serves to shape--though not determine--his family's relationships. Roth pegs Levov's identity to a national imaginary almost immediately: Levov emerges as a sports star amidst the end of World War II, and victory in the war is bound to Levov's victory on the field. Newark Glove experiences a familiar trajectory in American manufacturing, becoming implicated in the uprisings of the late 60s (with Amiri Baraka at its helm, Newark was at the forefront of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and experienced six days of riots in July of 1967), outsourcing (Newark Maid moves its manufacturing to Puerto Rico once labor becomes too expensive) and white flight (Newark Maid is one of the last productive companies in Newark).

As his nickname indicates, Levov enjoys, at least initially, the full privileges of being white and male in the United States. Indeed, Levov is the American male ideal: successful at sports, wealthy, well liked--he is even married to Miss New Jersey. The "pastoral" of Roth's title refers to the good life that Levov aquires for himself and his wife, the big farmhouse in an WASP enclave called Old Rimrock to which the Levovs move from Newark (located in historically affluent Morris County. In many ways, then, Levov is the opposite of Oswald and Park: his identity, at the beginning of the book, is secure and connected. So Levov has no need for the supplement provided by the small room: his identity is complete unto itself. Nevertheless, Roth finds another set of small rooms operating, these by his politically active daughter Merry, who seeks her own connection with a national imaginary by the (admittedly unlikely) act of blowing up the local post office. Roth depicts Merry's political life as a search for meaning; she is forced into a series of small rooms when she becomes a fugitive from the FBI. Roth describes Merry's friends, from Levov's point of view, as uncontrollable and feminine, "girls who become just as militant as the boys," and whose logic Levov (and perhaps Roth) finds inscrutable.

In place of the network of male-occupied small rooms that appears in Libra and Native Son, then, we see in American Pastoral the small room functioning as a site of unknowable femininity, something both more and less than feminism. Merry's actions are tied to the anti-Oedipal impulses of the late 60s. While to be sure, the counterculture contained its own masculinity-reinforcing structures, the movement nevertheless served for many Americans as a site of strange semiotic energies, where gender identities and national coherence broke down. Merry, and the Vietnam War itself, function as anti-Oedipal forces--what Roth calls the American berserk--to the Oedipal identifications that circulate around Swede Levov.

The law/Them

“The law is not born of nature, and it was not born near the fountains that the first shepherds frequented: the law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests, which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at break of day” (50).

--Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

“There’s something still on, don’t call it a ‘war’ if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago … but Their enterprise goes on” (628).

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

The conspiracy of literary criticism

As I continue to crawl through prep for the intro to theory course, I keep finding specters of conspiracy haunting [literary] theory. Latest: in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt writes of the fiction of the totalizing society, what he describes as "posit[ing] an occult network linking all human, natural, and cosmic powers and that claims on behalf of its ruling elite a privileged place in this network. Such a society generates vivid dreams of access to the linked powers and vests control of this access in a religious and state bureaucracy at whose pinnacle is the symbolic figure of the monarch" (Lodge 558). Thewriter here, in the conventional view of Great Literature, has privileged access to the "occult network" by virtue of representing the dreams and wishes of the ruling elite, and by extension granting access to the mysteriously inaccessible figure of the monarch. The desire of literature, then, is desire for access to a sense of totality, a sense of wholeness that one can associate, without too much critical wrangling, with the figure of the big Other, who guarantees order and meaning for the subject. This is a wildly wonderful way to account for the desire of conspiracy theory and its accompanying narratives.

Greenblatt continues: "The great attraction of [the author or text as authority] is that it appears to bind and fix the energies we prize, to identify a stable and permanent source of literary power, to offer an escape from shared contingency" (Lodge 559). Replace "text" with "conspiracy theory" and "literary power" with "political power" and we've got a nicely encapsulated description of CT.

Or, the play is a conspiracy:

"[O]ne of the ideological fictions of the theater was precisely to create in its audience the sense that what seemed spontaneous or accidental was in fact fully plotted ahead of time by a playwright carefully calculating his effects, taht behind experienced uncertainty there was design, whether the design of the human patriarchs--the fathers and rulers who unceasingly watched over the errant courses of their subjects--or the overarching design of the divine patriarch. the theater when would confirm the structure of human experiences as proclaimed by those on top and would urge us to reconfirm this structure in our pleasure" (Lodge 568).

Play, like conspiracy theory, confirms that all is (patriarchically) ordered with the world.

Another version of a They

Said:

Yet--and here we must be very clear--Orientalism overode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet mutliplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran woudl be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Msulim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch)from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never
revise itself (Lodge 370).

Here Said astutely figures a Western view of the Other, as, in particular, unchanging. It's only a short leap to figure this Other as unchanging in its desire: what Muslims want is Shariah law, because all Muslims are irrationally religious. The note about the specific human detail being abstracted to a transhuman one is also worth recalling re: CT, with its voracious habit of elevating minor details into a carefully orchestrated plan.

De Beauvoir: Women are "natural" conspiracy theorists

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir muses on woman's dependence and disempowerment, and how such powerlessness breeds resentment and confusion. Obliged to "regard the male universe"--the universe of power in which she does not share, because "she would feel in danger without a roof over her head," but because she is "passive [and] out of the game" she believes "the good should be realized, and if it is not, there must be some wrongdoing for which those to blame must be punished" (109). This leaves her open to what, in de Beauvoir's view are clearly unsophisticated positions: “[W]oman thinks that ‘it is all the Jews’ fault,’ or the Freemasons’ or the Bolsheviks’, or the government’s; she is always against someone or something. They do not always know just where the evil principle may lie, but what they expect of a ‘good government’ is to sweep it out as they sweep dust out of the house” (109).

De Beauvoir, deliberately provoking male stereotypes of women, argues that women are denied access to a privileged male realm, and so are prone to imagine this male realm in terms of their immediate experience: the black and white world of prewar housekeeping. The material circumstances of woman's position have, of course, changed, and yet the paradigms here likely persist. Moreover, the general structure of her formulation--that those denied power are apt to imagine it in polarized forms--is useful for conceptualizing one facet of my argument in regards to disempowered men and conspiracy theory.

Master of puppets

Jodi Dean's Icite blog alerted me to the fascinatingly scary phenom of automated "sockpuppeting," a process whereby a political operation or operatives use Web 2.0 technology to generate hundreds of "individuals" online with, apparently, their own Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, emails, and so on. This phenomenon, while visible for some time because of a publicly-revealed government bid for "persona management software," was recently reinforced because of the triumphant document-dump accomplished by hacktivists Anonymous on the security firm HB Gary, written about by the Daily Kos here.

In the words of an actual government bid for the software, summarized nicely by Alison Diana at Information Week:

Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.

Such individuals would then be able to generate the appearance of consensus on a political issue without needing to mobilize supporters--as a Daily Kos poster put it, it would allow for "Brooks Brothers riots" online with ease.The idea of sockpuppeting--creating fake online personas to support, or in some cases oppose, one's own issues--is almost twenty years old, but the level of sophistication referred to in the HBGary leaks is terrifying in its ability to subvert public opinion. And in the current environment, where some largish portion of public opinion is formed across blogs, Twitter, comments sections, and the like, the ability to generate and manipulate a range of online personas could theoretically shift the perception (the Overton window?) of a wider public's stand on an issue. To put this in real terms, if a wide array of voices on the Web emerge in opposition to the 2010 health care act, participants in the pro-health-care struggle may lose energy--as did the Left throughout 2009 and 2010, in the wake of the Tea Party "uprising."

It's interesting, actually, that this issue surfaces in the context of Wikileaks, an organization that promotes a utopia of absolute informational transparency, a conspiracy theorist's paradise where all of the facts are available--where nothing is classified. There are opposing ideas about information online here, one located in the promise of absolute sharing proferred by Wikileaks and one located in the phenomenal level of distrust generated by the prospect of any given Twitter or Facebook user being faked, and consensus developing from such faked users. It's particularly frightening, perhaps, in an era of leveled authority, where journalists have begun to be eclipsed by bloggers, and the "real" location of authority is online (a state of affairs which Wikileaks promotes). Crowdsourcing doesn't work if the "crowd" is one person with an agenda. This promotes, and intersects with, the "Astroturf" label often slapped on the "grassroots" Tea Party. Where is the "people"? Who can know what "everyone" believes? How soon before they can fake polls, generating a host of faked cell phones? What I believe about, say, the tenor of union-bashing matters; the Tea Party was able to drive the Left into submission in part because they seized control of a narrative.

Finally, of course, sockpuppeting is also just a metaphor for the everyday generated consensus that occurs on the Right and Left, who both repeat talking points (if they're smart) until the talking points become truth. In this sense, sockpuppeting as a phenomenon is something like the statue of Stalin atop the factory, thereby crushing the workers, that Zizek analyzes in The Plague of Fantasies: a seemingly incontrovertible proof of the system's functioning that, by working too overtly, exposes the very logic of the system. Ergo, we want wide democratic participation, but we'd be happier with a monopoly on opinion. State-sponsored social media.

...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Jesus Arrabal describes Pierce Inverarity as the exact enemy his anarchist rebels need to keep hope: capitalist, money-hungry, American, Pierce represents everything against which the anarchists struggle, and so renews their cause. One might say the same for the Tea Party and the Left; but the recent King hearings on Muslim extremism point me to what Sarah Posner calls the "Shariah conspiracy industry," whose paranoid fears are manifested perfectly in the site www.shariah4america.com. Apparently--though not certainly--created by the Muslim opportunist Ahmed Choudary, the site depicts wild results of a "Shariah takeover," in particular draping a burkah over the Statue of Liberty. This exact enemy manifesting would seem to be another example of the "sock puppet" phenomenon, whereby my exact enemy appears, confirming all my worst fears.

Meet the new conspiracy, same as the old conspiracy

Generally, conspiracy theory is framed as an equal opportunity fallacy, propagated equally on the Left and Right. First comes Michael Moore and the 9/11 Truthers, soon after comes Glenn Beck and the Obama Birthers. And historically, JFK conspiracy theorists tend to be slightly left of center, while anti-New-Dealers are squarely right. All that said, there's something fascinatingly ironic, but also familiar, in terms of the CTs that circulated around Roosevelt and Clinton, in Glenn Beck's broad appeal. As with many conspiracy theorists, Beck constructs a wide-ranging conspiracy out of assorted truths and half-truths: the Cloward-Piven strategy, Van Jones' early Marxism, ACORN's community organizing, and so on. The irony here is that the Right represents the most powerful interests in the culture-interests who benefit most from the Right's relentless agenda of more tax cuts and less regulation. So it makes sense, in many ways, that Beck has to create an agenda against people like himself, because otherwise the equation doesn't work.