Over at n+1, Benjamin Nugent wonders "Why Don't Republicans Write Fiction?" There must, he writes,
be somebody who can write a decent character-driven short story who also thinks George W. Bush is a good president.
I wanted to find these conservative somebodies: I wanted to talk to them, to find out what they thought of their minority status—whether they thought the publishing world was arrayed against them, or had other explanations for the apparent predominance of their liberal counterparts. And I wanted to read their work, to see whether it could illuminate the contemporary conservative experience in ways that Republican-penned potboilers and political columns just don’t.
But I couldn't find them.
With the smug air of someone who's spent five hours reading bad literary criticism, I let loose an exaggerated sigh punctuated by Mark Helprin's name. Somehow anticipating this reaction, Nugent proceeds to spend the rest of the essay discussing Helprin's most popular novel, Winter's Tale (1983). He convincingly argues that reading it provides "a sense for how being a conservative feels." Convincing, but not entirely correct.
Winter's Tale is one of those books adolescents on the cusp of protraction clutch to their chests while mumbling gushing words about the beauty of its prose and its purity of spirit. The novel appeals to those blessed (or cursed) with the conviction that the world is meaningful but ultimately unknowable—everything has its place so everything will work out in the end. Cosmic justice works so long as the technocrats keep their compassionate corruption to themselves. Nugent is absolutely correct to invoke Sean McCann and Michael Szalay's "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking and the New Left." But the invocation of my co-blogger and my advisor in an article about my favorite novel from 1991 until my sophomore year of college points to the other source of Helprin's appeal: an implicit faith in order.
Gravity's Rainbow might never offer a full account of who They are, but people who spend years trying to decipher Their Plan believe in its existence. It can be understood, we only lack the tools or vision to do so. Helprin approaches the same problem from a different angle: he convinces readers that order reins but will always be ineffable. It is a magic realism based on a naive notion of karma. Call it "folk karma" if you will—and Rich will—but I think it (or something like it) is largely responsible for the appeal of both Winter's Tale and Gravity's Rainbow. Readers of both feel connections impervious to rational explanation. Is this what being a conservative feels like? I honestly don't know.
However, not only do I frequently feel like this, I do so at the urging of someone not usually listed among the great conservative thinkers: Walter Benjamin. I'm thinking of his seventeenth thesis on the philosophy of history here:
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration [Konstellation] a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad.
I slyly inserted the German Konstellation in there because it better accords with the rest of Benjamin's notion of non-linear history. My attraction to Benjaminian thought—The Arcades Project in particular—originates with his obsession with Konstellation as a legitimate intellectual position. Only I'm at loss to defend it as such, since for me, this mode of thought is inherently literary. Just watch.
In 1995, I graduated from high school. My favorite books were Winter's Tale and Gravity's Rainbow. In my final semester, I had what could only be called a crushing crush of a crush on the student teacher in my English class. She and I bonded over mutual recognition of our taste in jackets, withering remarks about my classmates and her favorite book, Winter's Tale. When the school year ended, she said her husband—I was crushed—was about to open a used bookstore. So the summer before my freshman year, I applied for a job at Caliban's Books. We talked about books for a while, and it turned out his favorite book was Gravity's Rainbow. (Later that year, he and I would transcribe and index The Crying of Lot 49 in Microsoft Word to be better able to break the code.) So Winter's Tale landed me a job at Caliban's Books working for a guy whose favorite novel was Gravity's Rainbow. This all seemed—still seems—somehow meaningful.
A Konstellation observed.
This is the power of a Helprin novel, and despite all the nods to political conservatism Nugent points out, I'm not convinced that this will-to-order is necessarily conservative.
[Actually, I am, but the self-deprecation didn't shine through. It's a misreading of Benjamin I'm selling here; but it's not one you're meant to buy. My fault entirely, though, as I vagued up the second-to-last paragraph too much to make that point clear.]
Ha! Your description of Helprin's ideal reader put me in mind of a group of friends (former friends, frankly) who call themselves the 'Helprin Mafia' - always insisting on seeing all the beautiful beauty in the world, equating suffering with nobility, staying quiet when their Republican parents say the most godawful things...
Anyhow, I'm wondering: do you still read the man's writing? I've failed to get through a couple of his novels, and was nauseated by the 'I am pierced by the delicacy of the snow and this Russian immigrant girl's remembered smile' short stories, seemingly written by a Joyce knockoff who only ever had missionary sex. Blah. But am I missing something? If I make another pass at the novels, is Winter's Tale the one to go for? It's sitting on the shelf in front of me in a grotesque QPB omnibus edition with Refiner's Fire and Ellis Island like a remember of what a bad ex-boyfriend I and every other man ever born have turned out to be. Do I bother? Where shall wisdom be found?
Posted by: Wax Banks | Sunday, 11 March 2007 at 10:45 PM
However, not only do I frequently feel like this, I do so at the urging of someone not usually listed among the great conservative thinkers: Walter Benjamin.
Hmmm. At these moments I usually think of Matthew Arnold. Who wasn't in his day a great "conservative" thinker either, but in some of his moods *nowadays* could pass for one. Anyway, that "ignorant armies clash by night" line gets me in the breadbasket every time. That line, and Yeats's about modern fish gasping on the strand -- 21st century conservatives just wish they could get that poetic.
Helprin's occasional Claremont Review commentaries are very depressing. I don't mind the ideology so much, but the writing is just so appalling -- mixed metaphors, lazy allusions, flaccid imagery. The man has wandered into one of those sad literary dead ends.
Posted by: Andrew Haggerty | Tuesday, 13 March 2007 at 01:01 AM