In What Book or Story Are We Now Living?
As is often the case, the arrow of the American literary impulse has fallen short of the mark. When the Trump administration invoked “alternative facts,” sales of George Orwell’s 1984 soared and many bookstores placed it next to Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here on the check-out counter. At first glance, these novels simply lack the literary weight and depth to approach the cultural, social, and political ever-erupting volcano that is Donald Trump. Being allegories, their scope is too narrow to encompass the more broadly and diversely tropological meanings that gush from the relationships between the American people and our President and the world. Even within the merely didactic context of those novels, President Trump does not appear to be cunningly forcing a planned agenda on the country. Rather, he appears to be something along the lines of an idiot savant of authoritarianism.
Some critics and pundits strike nearer to the target when they invoke Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland. Certainly, a character that is a narcissistic brat, lost in the childish dream of himself, and who becomes a ruler would fit quite well within either of Carroll’s two great books. “You’re fired” has the ring of “Off with her head.” Carroll wrote nonsense as a defense against time and perhaps against reality, and though there is a great deal of nonsense in the antics of the current leader of the free world, there is also far too much reality; and danger, destruction, malice and imminence. We merely laugh at the misadventures of Alice, so perhaps Lewis Carroll’s books might best be invoked as a parallel only to the treatment of President Trump that is done on “Saturday Night Live.”
A writer with more powerfully poetic powers is required, so one is tempted to invoke the greatest creator of tragicomedy, William Shakespeare, in describing our current situation. There is certainly some of the self-dramatizing and self-immolating Cleopatra in our Commander in Chief. Trump supporters seem to have forsworn our normal and jubilant American good-natured self-interest in order to embrace a prince who will inevitably destroy us, as Falstaff embraced Prince Hal. Though Kellyanne Conway may seem the Fool, she lacks his wisdom. Mr. Trump also lacks the weight and depth and fire of King Lear. There may be Gonerils and Reagans and an Edmund or two in the administration, but these real life persons are pale reflections of the all too real Shakespearean characters who seem to walk among us. And unlike Macbeth, who too easily imagined himself king, Donald Trump’s imagination seems only to leap backward, as he constantly evokes the language of a candidate and not of the President.
No, we are in the terrain of Franz Kafka, the Jewish Czech who wrote, in German, short stories of threateningly absurd displacement. We find ourselves specifically in the marvelous story, “The Country Doctor.” As in the much of the rest of Kafka, the protagonist goes about his daily business and does not react when it turns into a concatenation of surreal violence, shifting versions of the facts, intimidating surprises, utter betrayals, and the almost farcical destruction of his career and home life. We are incongruously dislocated and yet we go about our daily business, turning on the television and our computers, only to sigh and move on from one threat to the environment, to another attack on the free press, to another unfounded accusation, to a betrayal of our values and our place in the world, to attacks on those least able to withstand them, the poor, the elderly, and minorities. Yet, like Kafka’s country doctor, we go to work and do what is expected of us, all the while the nuclear codes are in the hands of an apparent third-grade playground bully.
Kafka’s country doctor must make a winter evening house call, but his horse is dead. Horses miraculously appear and he must take them, knowing that the price will be the violent assault of his servant girl by the groom who supplied them. That is just the beginning. The boy patient wants to die but is actually well, making the doctor’s servant’s sacrifice meaningless. The patient’s family attacks the doctor and strips him naked, and then he finds the patient suddenly has a wound. The patient wants to claw out the doctor’s eyes. The villagers all turn against him. The previously vigorous horses slow to snail’s pace as he attempts to return to his home to save his servant. If this has a familiar feeling, it is Kafka at his finest. The unimaginable and the inexplicable, and the imminent threat of destruction, have become quotidian and ordinary. The short story has an end: “ . . . it cannot be made good, not ever.”
In terms of our position in the world, yet another Kafka short story is applicable, his most famous one, “The Metamorphosis.” The United States of America awoke one morning to discover that it had been turned into a hideous vermin.
(Gerald Weaver is the author of the novel, The First First Gentleman, August 2016, London Wall Publishing. It is among other things a sly tribute to almost all the novels of Charles Dickens. His well-received first novel, Gospel Prism, was published in May 2015. Each of its twelve chapters paraphrases a great work, by Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, etc. Harold Bloom said it was “remarkable” and “charming but disturbing.”)
