Picture it: a popular demagogue seizes power from the democratically elected government of a vast and prosperous, but also dysfunctional and corrupt republic. Realizing they have been reduced to a rubber stamp, the senators of this nation conspire to assassinate the would-be tyrant. The tyrant dies, but democracy is not saved: in the ensuing power struggle, a 19-year-old boy manages to outmaneuver powerful rivals to claim the title of Emperor. He instigates an era of enlightened dictatorship, and, decades later, when he finally succumbs to old age, the power that he has painstakingly consolidated and used to the best of his wisdom falls into the hands of a series of buffoonish despots. A once wise and mighty republic is transformed into a domineering empire.

What I have just sketched out for you is how Rome saw its democratic government overthrown by Julius Caesar and claimed by Emperor Augustus. This story of a democracy turning to empire is what American author John Williams chose to tell in his 1972 novel Augustus, and it is one that feels more and more relevant given today’s politics.

Williams may be familiar to you: he has reached posthumous celebrity for his novel Stoner, which has sold in the hundreds of thousands and become a worldwide phenomenon. By comparison, Augustus is little known, although it is a great work, possibly better than Stoner. The co-recipient of the 1973 National Book Award (Williams shared it with John Barth’s Chimera), it is a strange work that grafts the historical record to the author’s fecund imagination, telling the life of Emperor Augustus through the machinations of those around him. Williams narrates it wholly in documents—letters, journals, decrees, and the like—and his technical mastery in recreating the diction and rhetoric of the era is only matched by his exquisite insight into the minds of half-a-dozen major characters.

Augustus is one of the most compelling novels I have ever read on the exercise of power: its effective use, its moral and personal limitations, and its need to balance commands with persuasion, even for the most powerful dictator. Augustus reveals the personalities behind the use of enormous, naked power, showing the exceptional challenges to wielding that power effectively, and the grave danger of it falling into incapable hands. If you discern any similarities between these historical events and our own times, then I would have you pair Augustus with All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning, classic fictionalization of the would-be American demagogue Huey Long. They are two of the best historical novels you can read on the functioning of power politics in a time of weakening democracy.

Before going any further, I’d like to stop and ask a question that cuts to the quick of that recommendation: what does the art of fiction bring to historical events? After all, we already have more than enough histories of Augustus, including those from the classic authors Tacitus and Plutarch, whose lives very nearly overlapped with the Emperor’s. What gain is there in departing from the facts and inserting the novelist’s mind into the historical record? Why do talented novelists enter the genre of historical fiction, and why are these books lionized with our highest literary awards? Or, to put it a different way, what, if any, place is there for fiction in history?

Williams himself offers some insight into these questions. The dissolution of the Roman Republic and the reign of Augustus have some clear overtones to the years in which he wrote Augustus: in the 1960s and early 70s, the American Presidency had used internal turmoil and foreign conflicts to seize unprecedented and (many argued) dangerous powers, leading to the popularization of the term “Imperial Presidency”; this culminated in a demagogic Richard Nixon suffering a tragedy worthy of the Romans in the Oval Office, his final abuses of power ensuring his downfall and Congress’s reclamation of powers. While those comparisons are quite valid, they were a source of angst for Williams: for all the lessons that Rome might impart regarding our own would-be Caesars, he did not want his book to be a commentary on politics of the day. As Daniel Mendelsohn points out in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Augustus, Williams wrote that he wanted no part of “Henry Kissinger in a toga.”

If Williams is clear about what he intended to avoid, he also gives us some clues about what he intended to do. In a curious, exceedingly brief note that heads the novel, he writes that he has freely altered and embellished the historical record when he deemed fit, and he invented whole-cloth virtually all of the documents in the book. “If there are truths in this work,” he writes, “they are the truths of fiction rather than of history.” Which isn’t to say that these truths aren’t grown from the seed of historical fact. Although Augustus is a work of the imagination whose principal concern is to invent its characters as vividly as possible, it nonetheless takes its shape from things that really occurred, and its story is of interest to us primarily because it deals with the life of an Emperor of enormous historical importance.

Williams indicates that historical fact presided over this project. In a 1981 interview in Ploughshares with novelist Dan Wakefield (certainly one of the very first critics to recognize this author’s genius), Williams says it was the painful relationship between Augustus and his exiled daughter Julia that moved him to write the story. He explained that he never imagined he would write about the Emperor, but this historic drama pulled him in, and so he came to know more and more about the life of this man named Augustus. He also learned much about Julia, a remarkable figure who has been portrayed by many great novelists: a powerful woman of enormous beauty, wit, and energy, she nevertheless lived in a martial, male-dominated world, and so she found herself married off to a succession of brutish men to serve the political ends of her father Augustus. Ultimately, trapped in one of these loveless unions, she resorted to adultery; although this was common among aristocratic Roman men, Julie was punished with an extraordinarily harsh exile on a tiny island. The guilt of this choice, Williams implies, was one that dyed Augustus’s reign.

In recreating this relationship—writing dozens of pages of Julie’s journal in exile—Williams gives voice to a marginalized figure who is largely silenced in the historical record. Certainly taking us into the mind of an individual who participated in the formation of our world, but whom history has chosen not to remember, is one of the most imperative tasks of historical fiction. I think of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (one of my favorite historical novels ever), which re-creates the voice Mary, mother of Jesus; though she was the woman at the center of Christianity, her integral place was nevertheless not enough to grant her participation in the authorship of (or much of a role in) that religion’s most sacred text. Tóibín’s version of her voice is eerie and existential, and it has helped me to better understand the foundation of Christianity, and religion in general. By that same token, Williams’s re-creation of the relationship between Augustus and his daughter grants me great insight into the moral and interpersonal forces that cause the mighty to reckon with their choices.

Another thing we see in Augustus is a novelist orchestrating the facts of history in a way no historian ever would, pointing us to conclusions that history is blind to. Williams shrewdly hides Augustus’s voice for much of the book, instead revealing his doings through the reports of a variety of historical actors—some are major, like Mark Antony, a lover of Cleopatra who vied with Augustus for the Emperor’s position and nearly won; and some are minor, like Marcus Agrippa, a confidant to the Emperor. Williams withholds Augustus’s own voice until the last 40 pages of the novel, when we see him as an old man reflecting back upon the deeds that have defined his life. The effect is excellent: after seeing Augustus’s doings described by his peers throughout his reign, we at last see the Emperor, now so greatly distanced from those deeds by age. What a strange window onto power this is, to see the ruler of the largest empire of the known world reckoning with his memories, engaging in Proustian reflections. “One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one’s acts,” he writes, “one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.”

It is to the artist to find the meaning in the deeds about which history can only give us the details. As Williams delved into an archetypical story that had captured his imagination, his duty as a novelist was to make its characters individually compelling while arranging their voices to reveal profound truths about the problems of human governance. I find it remarkable that we can look back 2,000 years and see the same values and fears animating human politics, the same ambitions and failures, the same personalities, so much so that we can enjoy a novel about it. Williams himself admits such continuities when he compares Augustus to his immensely popular Stoner: “I was dealing with governance in both instances, and individual responsibilities, and enmities and friendship . . . . Except in scale, the machinations for power are about the same in a university as in the Roman Empire.”

The very human qualities that make Augustus compelling—the ambitions, the failures, the dilemmas, the reckonings with memory—point to deep continuities between our own political questions and those riddled by ancient humans living in vastly different circumstances. It is to the novelist to find these continuities in order to draw back mystery imposed by time and power. In this way we may become intimate with enduring questions, the cycles of our societies, the problems that come to us again and again in different forms. Very human quagmires that, though we may ameliorate them with better or worse systems and better or worse cultures, we can never completely escape.

“[The moralist] is useless,” writes Augustus’s fellow warrior, and a patron of the arts, Gaius Maecenas. “He would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult.” I like to think of literature as a form that reckons with the difficulty of knowledge. In our era of instant takes and endless castigation swimming down our social media feeds, we all know how quick any of us are to judge. This is not to condemn—we all must respond as best we can to the politics of the day. It is rather to ask that we recognize these quick judgments for what they are—a coping strategy in lieu of true wisdom—and to hope that they will, with time, ferment into something more closely resembling knowledge. This is one of the major tasks of both the historical novelist and the historian (whose work can indeed be literature); they have the opportunity to approach our deeds from a distance and derive from them wisdom that can apply well beyond any one historical situation. Such is the case with Williams’s Augustus, a book that I have always continued to learn from, and one that the tides of history have now thrust to the forefront of my mind.

Works of Historical Fiction That Offer History What Only Fiction Can

Augustus by John Williams
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All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
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The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
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Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
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Antigonick by Anne Carson
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The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
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In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl
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Romola by George Eliot

I was recently in San Francisco’s Mission District with an hour to kill. In general I hate having to kill time—I never know what to do—and to make things worse I was tired and just wanted to be home with a good book. So I wandered along, trying to find something to occupy my attention, and then there it was: big glass windows with bright green trim, behind them row after row of books. Dog Eared Books. I had always heard of this store but had never visited. I smiled and made for its beckoning lights.

I have a tried and true method for testing the quality of a bookstore: how difficult is it for me to walk in and walk back out without buying something? In some shops this is child’s play: they have a sterile, corporate feel to them, and their sterile, corporate wares don’t tempt me in the least.

But my favorite bookstores are just the opposite. When I walk into, say, Moe’s in Berkeley, or Powell’s in Portland, it’s as though I’ve stepped into a unique place full of eye-catching beauty. Immediately my attention is drawn in five different directions, and before I know it I’m bending under the weight of five irresistible books. These stores cast a spell, and once I begin to hunting through their prodigious shelves I know I’m going to latch on to something and not be able to put it back down.

Dog Eared Books is not nearly as big as either Moe’s or Powell’s, but its curation and ambiance are so strong that it quickly put me into buy mode. My first stop was a face-out display of political philosophy: Benjamin, Arendt, Žižek, Rancière, Guattari, and other gems, themselves surrounded by so many more such jewels. I was seduced. From there I was hit with an international literature display: Julio Cortázar, Álvaro Enrigue, Svetlana Alexievich, Antonio di Benedetto, Basma Abdel Aziz, Magda Szabó . . . By that point I was completely taken, and somehow half-an-hour had slipped away. When I made it to the store’s history section, I was dying to find something to purchase. I immediately gravitated toward Wendy Doniger’s history of Hinduism. Did I need 700 densely printed pages on the Hindu religion? Of course not! And how could I even think of leaving without it?

Suddenly it hit me: how many bookstores could I just wander into, find a display of challenging philosophical theory, then an incredible selection of top-notch world literature, and at last an enormous history of Hinduism? Bookstores like this just don’t happen. They are only possible where the ground is fertile.

A bookstore is an embodiment of a community’s values. Looking over its holdings is as personal and intimate an encounter as walking into a friend’s home for the first time and sizing up their bookcases. (If you don’t see any bookcases at all, maybe you should reassess the relationship.) What you find in a bookstore is the food a society wants to feed its mind, the sorts of things its owners and employees (no doubt community residents themselves) hope their neighbors will support.

Out of the many millions of titles that a bookstore might stock, most will only have room for tens of thousands. The books that make it in are a direct reflection of the people around that store. Which ones will prove successful enough to be restocked and justify more such titles? Out of the thousands of new books released each week, which ones will get that coveted front table space? Will the bookstore adopt pay-to-play rules for good placement? What sorts of ideas, values, stories, and aesthetics will its books embody? What titles will the employees take the time to handsell, and will they be passionate about it or scripted? Will they see each book sold as spreading important thoughts, or just so much income on the ledger?

It is easy to see how quickly a bookstore’s profit motive can blur into its mission, and how this sense of mission bleeds over into the shop’s physical space. Is it beckoning and comfortable? Does it have that cultured ambiance that makes bookstores so charming? What kinds of people does it welcome, defend, and champion?

This of course begins with the authors, translators, publishers, and others it showcases for events, and the audiences they cultivate, but it also goes far beyond this: I think of Cody’s Books, which played a major role as a refuge and first-aid station during the Berkeley anti-Vietnam protests of the 1970s, and which in 1989 was firebombed for pointedly supporting Salman Rushdie’s right to free expression when a fatwa was leveled against him for his novel The Satanic Verses. (This was at a time when then dominant chain bookstore, Waldenbooks, with 1,200 nationwide locations, had bent to the fatwa by removing Rushdie from its shelves.) Or I think of the massive Seminary Co-op in Chicago, often referred to as having the greatest collection of academic titles on Earth, and which is a member-owned cooperative with 50,000 US participants and thousands more around the world. Matthew Keesecker’s description of the bookstore, collected in an enterprise called the Seminary Co-op Documentary Project, is worth quoting at length:

When you arrive, you won’t think you’re necessarily at the right place. Then you will see a little sign that guides you to the catacombs of this enchanted world of words. You will descend a set of stairs, and then you will simply stare. Books. Endless row upon row of books. You will duck pipes, dodge faucets, and squeeze between shelves and working furnaces, and you will love every minute of it. It’s as if the books were already there, firmly planted in their rightful spot, and suddenly a building erupted around them. But rather than supplant the books, the building decided to work with the books and have a symbiotic relationship. It’s as if it grew around the tomes of knowledge, integrating itself by weaving and threading its way through the volumes of pulp and ink. They co-exist in harmony, waiting to be discovered by us.

Who can read that and doubt that any good bookstore represents a unique, highly cultivated space that must be carefully tended in order to continue existing? Spaces such as these are only moderately compatible with capitalism, and they are not at all compatible with monoculture, restrictions on free thought, imposed uniformity, intolerance, and least of all authoritarianism. As institutions that need pluralism as much as we need oxygen, they cannot avoid having a de facto political stance.

Even if a place like Dog Eared Books or Seminary Co-op never declared a position for or against Donald Trump, certainly their very way of being makes a statement about their compatibility with the man who cannot name a single book he has ever read, who pledged to ban an entire religion from the United States, and who endlessly demonizes information that runs counter to his beliefs as “fake.” The values these bookstores embody constitute an indispensable rebuke to the sort of governance that President Trump has endorsed through his conduct, his allies, and his words.

Perhaps that in itself is enough, but I am very proud to say that many bookstores in our literary community have done far more than just exist: they have chosen to resist, finding their place in what is popularly called “the resistance” as it pursues its defense of American values and institutions against the wrecking-ball Presidency of Donald Trump. The New York Times has reported on the ways in which indie bookstores across the nation have responded to the President’s actions (pointedly, Barnes & Noble has chosen not to be among them), and Publishers Weekly has also reported on many others. Closer to home, I can say that City Lights Bookstore has opened a new section titled “Pedagogies of Resistance,” and Booksmith co-owners Christin Evans and Praveen Madan have established a new monthly series called “Booksmith Resists.” In my own neighborhood, Diesel, a bookstore that long predated the Trump resistance with numerous politically orientated book displays and events, and it has redoubled its efforts post-Trump.

I will predict that exactly no one is surprised to hear any of this. When hailing from a foreign country is grounds for suspicion, when know-nothing-ism is a core value of the nation’s highest office, when lies are passed off blatantly (the bigger the better) and “alternative facts” are the order of the day, the very act of spreading the information, telling crucial stories about the lives of others, and providing a meeting place for all kinds of people is necessarily a politicized gesture. Bookstores are one of the most politicized businesses we have. They have been the traditional home to the misfit, the free-thinker, the person who prizes knowledge above money and who aspires to wisdom. They are one of the easiest places for diverse cultures to intermingle and forge an understanding. They are a crucial repository of a nation’s ideas, narratives, and lives. Knowing this, it makes me proud to live in a place where the bookstores compete to challenge their audiences with the most intelligent, sensitive, beautiful thoughts they can find. I cannot think it is any coincidence that the places where you find many such bookstores are also places where virtually nobody votes for the likes of Donald Trump.

If independent bookstores really are a key component of a healthy democracy, then we should feel hope, for as I write this they are in the middle of a renaissance. The 1990s and the 00s were a bad period, as the rise of chain bookselling put many indies out of business, and over a thousand of them closed down. But now the business models of Borders and Barnes & Noble have proven short-lived, and once again indies are appearing in communities that prize the qualities a good bookstore brings to a neighborhood.

To take just one example: this is precisely why many of us in my community have invested nearly $200,000 in the future of our own neighborhood bookstore, as Diesel makes the transition to East Bay Booksellers. We are committed to seeing this retail space remain an intelligent, opinionated, very independent bookstore, and to we are ensuring that it remains under ownership that we trust and admire. And we are not alone: such community investment plans are becoming more and more popular as the next generation of bookstore owners takes over. In addition, more than 250 new independent bookstores have come into being since 2009, representing growth of 30 percent. And the US Census Bureau has found that bookstores sales have grown the past two years, reversing seven years of decline as more and more consumers are realizing the benefits of shopping at their local indie.

Books are different from other consumer goods—they contain facts, thoughts, and stories that help shape who we are—and so bookselling is different from other kinds of retail. When I think of bookselling, I think back to something that my friend Brad Johnson, the future owner of East Bay Booksellers, said about the name he chose for his store. He said that he wanted it to represent the fact that bookselling is an art, even at times a calling. Now, while all of us in the literary community have to make ends meet—and no one understands this better than the manager of a bookstore—I think that we are more fundamentally here because we want to see our literary vocation in those exact terms. And our vocation becomes very much a calling when our nation needs the help of our bookish culture to protect it from those who would destroy our civic values. So the next time you are in an independent bookstore, take a moment to think about why it is there, and why you are in it—think about those things, and ask yourself how you will pay those beliefs forward.

Books About Bookstores and Other Book Havens

Upstairs at the Strand: Writers in Conversation at the Legendary Bookstore, edited by Jessica Strand and Andrea Aguilar
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Sixpence House: Lost in A Town Of Books by Paul Collins
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Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach
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My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop, edited by Ronald Rice
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The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History by Lewis Buzbee
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The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky
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Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet (tr. James Salter)
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With Borges by Alberto Manguel
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My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

“I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer.” These are the words of author Scholastique Mukasonga, a Tutsi who lost 27 family members—including her mother and father—when Hutu throughout her nation murdered 800,000 of their fellow citizens, often brutally with nothing more than a machete.

Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile and her autobiographical work Cockroaches bear witness to these events. Mukasonga applies a feather touch to this history, even when writing about the nightmares of genocide that regularly visit her at night, the deeply ingrained, racist beliefs that fed the Hutus as they rose up in murder, or the systemic, prejudicial violence that built from 1959 forward, ultimately erupting in 1994. The simplicity with which Mukasonga states the truth is the foundation of her literary power: “The first pogroms against the Tutsis broke out on All Saints’ Day, 1959. The machinery of genocide had been put into motion. It would never stop. Until the final solution, it would never stop.”

We can call Mukasonga’s books many things, but first of all they are works that bear witness. Their primary function is to bring readers face to face with events that must be understood, and that must never be forgotten. This is not social science—as Mukasonga has said, she is “not a political writer or a historian”—rather, this is literature that delves into the granular level, bringing readers as close as possible to stories that need to be heard. The author’s literary gift is turned toward conveying a vivid sense of what has happened. Comprehension of these terrible acts—and some assurance that they will never be repeated—only begins when they are seared into the reader’s memory.

This work is of great achievement and grave importance—and it is not at all easy to successfully pull off—but witness-bearing literature has often been overlooked and underestimated. To see this we need only examine the reaction to Svetlana Alexievich’s 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, as she has made a career of this genre. Typical of the mixed praise she received, The New York Times wrote, “by placing her work alongside those of international literary giants like Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Alice Munro, and Toni Morrison, the Nobel committee has anointed a genre that is often viewed as a vehicle for information rather than an aesthetic endeavor.”

Nonetheless, the Nobel committee did recognize Alexievich; her powerful words are now widely read in the West, and her genre has received a boost. Similarly, audiences in Europe and America have learned greatly from Mukasonga, and her novel Our Lady of the Nile is even now required reading in Rwanda’s schools.

Clearly, these authors do a great deal more than provide a “vehicle for information.” In fact, I would go much farther than that: I side with South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who calls such work one of the writer’s highest callings. This genre of literature has touched me and influenced how I think more than virtually any other kind of literature I read. And I believe that right now this sort of writing is immensely necessary.

Why now? Well, to start, we can observe that some subjects seem to want this treatment more than others. The master works of witness-bearing literature often come out of the great social tragedies, the mass events that define a society and that reveal the breakdown of politics, the failures of power. Here I would point to Massacre in Mexico by the great Mexican author and journalist Elena Poniatowska: this book is nothing more than a collage of voices collectively narrating the events leading up to Mexico City’s 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens were murdered by their own government. Poniatowska’s witnesses range from ordinary Mexicans to then-President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, and their words collectively form a grand tale of how order disintegrates, enabling horrendous abuses and ending in terrible calamity. The sorcery here is that Poniatowska just listens to people speak—all you will find in this book are quotations from innumerable interviews, news stories, graffiti, and political signs—yet in her method these words become so much more. This is the trick of great witness-bearing literature: it really is made up of the facts—one of its crucial functions is to tell us this has happened—but it tells us things that mere facts are usually ill-equipped to say.

Perhaps when the Nobel committee chose Alexievich in 2015, they sensed that we had entered an era where such literature is now crucial. We are at a point of intense instability, possibly even upheaval: in Latin America, Venezuela has slid toward one-man dictatorial rule, and Brazil has thrown out a democratically elected government, instigating a period of enormous political uncertainty. In Europe, Britain has triggered Article 50, which now gives it two years to negotiate how to leave the European Union, and tension reigns throughout many other member nations. In our own country we are now edging perilously close to war with Syria and maybe even Russia; we are also in the midst of immense protests, massive xenophobia, profound dislocations of immigrants, and uncharted territory as regards Presidential politics. This is a time when the citizens of the world need literary writers to bear witness to the raw history occurring right before our eyes.

One small example: When Donald Trump’s first Muslim Ban was announced on January 27 terrible things began to occur: innocent mothers and children where hauled off flights and into indefinite detention; people with families in the United States were not allowed to come back home; many individuals were even forced into situations that posed grave dangers to their life. As I read of these abuses, one of the first things I began to want was for writers to tell these stories. I felt that it was essential to begin showing the lives that were being destroyed—not only to bring the nation face to face with the consequences of its decision to elect President Trump but also for posterity: so that these lives might become part of the tale history tells of these years.

And indeed, almost instantly reporters began to share 1,000-word articles on people whose lives had been destroyed—or at the least deeply scarred—by the ill-wrought, ultimately illegal ban. These stories are excellent and powerful—they have done immense good in sharing truths that must be seen by all people of this great nation—but they alone are not enough. We must also have a witness-bearing literature of this period that goes beyond the journalistic facts to give a literary understanding of the massive forces that have brought us to this point, and that now determine our politics. We must have our own Alexieviches, Mukasongas, Poniatowskas, and Gordimers to document the lives of this nation and the upheaval that we are going through.

I believe this is a literary task. At the dawn of the modern age, James Joyce wrote that we strive to wake from the nightmare of history, which I take to mean that our societies strive to escape from a world that exists on a tribal, imagistic, mythic sort of order—to leave that world and enter into one that is grounded in peace, justice, and rationality. I do not believe we have yet so escaped, and so long as we continue in this nightmare of history, we will only be able to fully comprehend what is happening with the blessings of art. Writers must help document and explain the endemic forces that have gained momentum and are now drawing us along on their path. They must be witnesses to these deeds for our own sake, so that we can have some meaning and common understanding in this era of confusion, and also so that the future generations will learn from the mistakes we have committed.

Great Works of Witness-Bearing Literature

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Melanie Mauthner)
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Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Jordan Stump)
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Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Bela Shayevich)
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Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Keith Gessen)
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Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (tr. Stuart Woolf)
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
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Hardly War by Don Mee Choi

Two years ago, a good friend of mine lost her adult son. He was a beautiful young man full of life, energy, and potential, and then in one sudden moment he was gone.

How is it possible to overcome the grief of such a monstrous loss? It was terrible to watch this friend try to figure out where to put all the agony and sadness brought on by the death of her son. I felt truly helpless; my efforts to help ease her pain were nothing more than little swats against a thousand-mile fortress. I understood that one does not recover from such things—this sort of grief seizes your life and changes you. It is with you till the end.

My friend is the Danish author Naja Marie Aidt, a very successful novelist, short story writer, and poet. Long a woman who has lived her life through language, Naja found that the death of her son dealt her a particularly vicious blow: she became incapable of reading or writing anything. This would be a disconcerting loss for anyone who values literature, but it was especially cruel for someone who has given so much to our literary community and who has lived her entire adult life from within it.

Well over a year into her grief, Naja was given a copy of Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole. In this lengthy, fragmented, and incomplete work wherein the great poet attempted to reconcile the death of his son, Naja at last found a way back to the language she had so long missed. As she told me over email, “That was the first time reading made any sense to me. I saw how Mallarmé, just like me, was not able to write ‘perfectly’ about the loss of his son. His texts are fragmented, not finished, imperfect, but they carry an enormous power anyway. The raw pain, the raw grief.”

Naja began to read other things, including Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Denise Riley’s examination of the drastic changes in her perception of time following her child’s death. Naja again felt a deep kinship. She could relate to Riley’s sense that, “when you lose a child you feel that you lose your future. You are stuck in a no-time, trying to reach your dead child in its ended time while you are still here, unable to feel time moving forward.”

As she read more and more books about loss, Naja started writing a longer narrative about the death of her son. Literature became her lifeline. Cut off from her normal sense of time and place, unable to do the things that had always brought her joy—unable even to think of what had occurred—Naja had found a way to contemplate her immense grief. “Since I was not able to listen to music or go to museums,” she said, “books that spoke to my heart became some sort of consolation for me. They helped me write. They helped me understand what I was going through.”

As Naja continued writing, her literary response to her son’s death became a full book. Indeed, the only reason I feel comfortable sharing Naja’s story in this column today is because Naja herself has already put it into the public eye: earlier this year she released to great acclaim as har døden taget noget fra dig så giv det tilbage (When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book).

Part of the book tracks the events leading up to Carl’s death, which Naja refers to as the “tree trunk.” Around this trunk grow branches and leaves: “poems, short essays, diary entries from before and after Carl passed away, his own writing, notes, lists, and prose, and other writers’ writing.” Unfortunately, this remarkable text currently only exists in Naja’s native Danish language, but I’m convinced it is a major work, one that will be of immense value to readers when it eventually reaches us in English translation.

Carl’s Book is part of a certain family of literature that we might call the “literature of grief.” These books deal with the most incomprehensible, unjust, and inexplicable episodes in our lives—they are when we, as humans, are working the hardest to answer the question of “Why?” and to reconcile the savage emotions that have taken control of our lives. They are records of burdens that define the very limits of our endurance and our understanding. As Naja explained to me, grief is incomprehensible. When facing a loss like hers, there is nothing so tidy as “five stages” of mourning; rather, life with such grief is wild and unpredictable, the sadness it brings is overpowering. The magnitude of this pain can be terrifying.

This is where great literature can play a unique role. As Naja noted when she read The Epic of Gilgamesh, commonly referred to as the oldest known narrative, “it struck me how humans even thousands of years ago had huge difficulties dealing with loss and death.” Grief has always been a major part of human life, and our literature has always attempted to reckon with it. Such bedrock emotions, borne of the most haunting burdens of the human condition, fundamentally unite us, whether we’re a 21st-century westerner or a Sumerian living 2,000 years before Christ. Through literature these bonds are most evident.

The truest books on grief do not tell the tale of overcoming a burden. Instead, they embrace the experiences one feels in this no-man’s-land. Their wisdom is in the constellation of thoughts and emotions inherent to the process of grieving. Their comfort is in identification with another’s struggles.

For those of us who have not suffered a life-changing loss, reading these books can be shocking. I think of, for instance, when I first read Roland Barthes’s almost unbearable Mourning Diary, about the death of his mother. Barthes was a true mama’s boy, having lived with his mother for virtually all his adult life, counting her his closest friend in the world. When she at last died, it was devastating. Barthes began to manifest this overpowering grief onto the small slips of paper that were later found and published as Mourning Diary. Although the book is little more than a series of thought fragments, these spare words have made a more powerful impression on me than most other books I have read. The vision of a mind attempting to find a place for its pain, and continually failing, is heartbreaking. “Listening to Souzay sing: ‘My heart is full of a terrible sadness,’ I burst into tears.” “I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.” “Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me—O cruelty!—that I didn’t really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn’t true.”

When I first read Mourning Diary as a perfectly happy, healthy young man of 32, I was overcome, for it made me see that with just one loss any of us could be thrown into such a pit. This was one of the first times I had ever confronted this possibility face-to-face, and I remember well what a somber realization it was. I began thinking about how I would respond to such a loss. I began to see how important it was to be fully present with those I loved and to be as honest and compassionate as I could in our relationships.

Not that anyone can ever prepare for the loss of someone we love. Of course we must try, but such intense grief reveals to us just how puny our will is in the face of the strongest emotions. It seems most unfair that we must work to build our lives, always under threat from overpowering grief, but this is purely a fact of our existence. It in inescapable, and I believe that one of literature’s tasks is to help us think through this condition of our lives. These books attempt to make meaning of this condition we all must simply accept.

To fail to take advantage of literature’s blessings is to willfully neglect the most powerful tool we have against the inherent uncertainty and fragility of this world. Words are the only way we will ever give full meaning to incomprehensible, unjustifiable events, and many of the world’s great books are a product of the struggle to find this meaning. I often return to the words Ernest Becker wrote in his study, Denial of Death, where he argues that we are constantly working to process the knowledge that death is a part of our world. In that book, Becker writes that, “Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness.” I would agree: so much of our culture is an attempt to wrestle with the fact that we are creatures fated to live and die in a universe ruled by uncertainty, emotion, and our physical fragility. It is clear to me that books are at the forefront of this struggle.

As much as they frighten me and fill me with dark emotions, I am drawn to books like Naja’s and Barthes’. In part, I think it is important to try and understand these areas of the human condition, simply for our own sake. And I also feel that anyone who believes in the power of words should see what they can do when they are most truly needed. As Naja told me, “I had to write this book to survive. It is as simple as that. I am a writer who lost her language and had to reclaim it.” I want to see such writing—books that perhaps we should not only call the literature of grief, but also the literature of survival. They have saved the life of their author—who knows how many other lives the will save.

Literature Examining Grief and Why We Grieve

A Tomb for Anatole
Stéphane Mallarmé (tr. Paul Auster)
*
Time Lived, Without Its Flow
Denise Riley
*
Mourning Diary
Roland Barthes (tr. Richard Howard)
*
Denial of Death
Ernest Becker
*
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
*
The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend
Sarah Manguso
*
Oblivion
David Foster Wallace
*
Bough Down
Karen Green

I cannot tell you how much I depend on Tony Judt these days. When it came to 20th-century Europe, Judt was without peer. He illuminated the rise of fascism, the triumph of democracy, why the right took power in some places, the left in others. As our contemporary politics gets more and more ominous, his books loom larger in my mind.

Before he died in 2010 of ALS, Judt gave us at least one indispensible book. It is the masterwork known as Postwar, a titanic effort that in 900 pages narrates the six decades in which Europe recoiled from Armageddon and built a prosperous, united continent. This book is the very first thing I would put into the hands of anyone who asked me to explain where our current politics comes from and why so many of our leaders are striving to tear apart the fine civilization that was built in the wake of history’s worst war.

I would then suggest they read Judt’s remarkably prescient collection of essays. He knew just how fragile were the prosperity and peace the West had managed to build, and, in fact, in a 2008 essay he warned that “fear is re-emerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies . . . the politics of insecurity are dangerous.” Had he lived to see the rise of Donald Trump, Theresa May, and their fellow autocrats, he would surely have known that he was proven correct.

Judt was that increasingly rare thing—a true public intellectual who possessed the rigor of the academy but could write for a general audience—and he was only possible because his reading was boundless. Look through his work and you will find, among others: Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian; Primo Levi, an Italian; Hannah Arendt, a German; Albert Camus, a Frenchman; Leszek Kołakowski, a Pole; Amos Elon, an Israeli; Edward Said, a Palestinian. You will see familiarity with Romanian periodicals, with Russian history, with the oft-neglected Belgium, with philosophers of every stripe. Judt was such a voracious reader that for his 13th birthday he received a three-volume study on Trotsky, and demolished it.

Judt inspires me to never stop broadening my boundaries as a reader, and this is something we all need to do these days. It has become a cliché to say that we live in a globalized world—we drink coffee that was grown in Central America, use smartphones whose components are manufactured in dozens of nations, eat cuisine from every corner of the earth, apply Korean beauty products, drink wine from Australia, outsource our customer service to India, and of course wear clothes made in too many nations to name. But only a tiny amount of the books found in our bookstores come from countries other than the United States, largely because our publishers choose to publish so few every year.

It makes no sense to me that we live in a globalized world but seek to understand it through largely monocultural reading. Tony Judt’s astounding knowledge was only possible through a lifetime of globe-spanning curiosity, and his masterful ideas on European and American history were only possible because of what he read. If we do not follow him in reading beyond our borders we will have no chance of comprehending—much less solving—the problems our culture(s) faces today.

The Scottish author A.L. Kennedy said as much when she recently excoriated risk-adverse British publishers for their xenophobia: “Europe reads us, although we don’t return the favor. Britain has little appetite for foreign work. Or, perhaps more accurately, British publishing has little appetite for foreign work.” Kennedy elevated her critique from a purely literary accusation to a political one, calling the lack of foreign literature “dangerous” to Britain and linking this failure to Prime Minister Theresa May’s blatantly anti-immigrant, anti-Europe rhetoric. At length, she celebrated everything readers have to gain by reading beyond their borders:

For more most of my lifetime as a writer, less than five percent of all our books printed in any year are translated from any language. I am a writer built out of Chekhov, Calvino, Levi, Perucho, Vian, Alfau and so many other terribly foreign and European voices. I am writer who walked in Paris, in Moscow, in Granada and had, in a dreamlike way, already been there in books and books and books. There was no culture shock, there was only a larger and larger culture, echoing and debating and rippling before and behind.

It is not hard to see the same critique applying to the rise of Donald Trump in the States. We know that the places where foreign literature tends to do well are generally more diverse, more open to outsiders, and more curious to know about the lives of others. We likewise know that in those places that celebrate diversity Trump fared horribly, whereas in places uneasy with foreigners he scored large victories.

I do not mean to be preachy. I have worked with translated literature for many years, and in that time I’ve heard more than enough dutiful statements about the grave importance of cultural exchange. I never suggest that someone read a book because it’s “good for you,” and I never do so myself. First and foremost, I read so much international literature because it is what appeals to me—I don’t do it to support a political agenda, nor from a sense of personal obligation.

I am simply curious about the way people live elsewhere, and I deeply believe that I have much to gain from the insight people in other societies have brought to the common dilemmas faced by all. No group has a monopoly on the right answers to timeless quandaries, and we would be foolish not to learn from each other’s experiences. Furthermore, we can only put together the full picture—as Judt so masterfully did—if we possess all of the pieces. It is only through world literature that I have come to even partially understand the history that has occurred throughout the globe.

We also do poorly if we are not empathetic to the lives of other people, and in this realm words can be extraordinarily powerful. I think of the winter I visited Manzanar, one of the camps where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Like everyone I had read about this sorry episode in our high school history textbook, and it didn’t make a terribly big impression. But to actually visit the site—and to read and hear the internee’s stories narrated in their own words—brought tears to my eyes. It has been almost four years and I have never stopped feeling dismay at all those lives ruined.

When you read a text you are entering into an intimate relationship with another person’s voice. The encounter requires all of your focus, and it often takes advantage of language’s unique capacity to engage all of your senses. The results can be profound.

Unfortunately, however, such profound experiences can only occur if the words are available to the reader. We in the publishing community have a responsibility to make a deep engagement with the whole world possible here in America. As readers, as publishers, as editors, as librarians, as booksellers, it is up to us to live up to this responsibility. I know that the forces currently seeking to tear us apart fear it when such eye-opening knowledge is spread, and they rest easy when we purvey monoculture that keeps our horizons narrow.

We must always challenge ourselves with books that take us outside of our comfort zone, showing us just how much we don’t know. It is a fact that foreign books have a particular affinity for doing just that. Let me provide one example: I was recently in Houston, where I spent some days with my good friend Mark Haber, who is a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore and who also leads a monthly reading group there. Mark told me about his experiences last summer, when for three months his group read and discussed Roberto Bolaño’s marvelous, thousand-page 2666. Mark first explained that many members of the group chose to read the book in the original Spanish, and I was surprised learn that Houston is so rich in passionate bilingual readers. He also told me that the group boasted Mexican immigrants, who provided particular insight into the large parts of the book that take place in Mexico. Of course there were also many monolingual Americans, no doubt thrilled to have so many original perspectives on this complex book.

To me, what sounded so special about the group was how people of different backgrounds came together around this enormous, global text, each being able to elucidate different parts based on their different backgrounds, experiences, and languages. That is one of the great things about books from foreign cultures: even while they remind native-born Americans how much there is to know about the world, they give outsiders an opportunity recognize their own particular knowledge. This process rips apart the typical dynamics that govern our ideas of citizens and foreigners, opening up spaces for conversations between people of different cultures.

Of course, these conversations can only take place if the books are available. Having worked so long with world literature, I am familiar with all of the arguments about why such books are risky, and why they cost more to produce than home-grown literature. I am sympathetic to these arguments, and I know as well as anyone that publishers survive on razor-thin margins. Still, I would like to ask that we do better. Yes, there is a risk and a cost to doing foreign books, but isn’t the risk and the cost much higher in denying the next Tony Judt the books necessary to feed his or her young imagination? And isn’t the payoff to living in a nation rich with the world’s stories so much greater that just a little more profit on the ledger?

A Few Books for Piecing Together How the World Got Here

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
*
Reappraisals by Tony Judt
*
Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty (tr. Arthur Goldhammer)
*
Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Michael Hulse)
*
Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski (tr. Bill Johnston)
*
River of Fire by Qurratulain Hyder (tr. by the author)
*
Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka
*
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
*
Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (tr. Kaiama L. Glover)
*
A Narco History by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace

Earlier this year I made my first visit to Colombia. During my stay, I became familiar with many of the emblems around which this wonderful nation’s image revolves. There is of course the coffee, some of the best in the world and perhaps primarily known to Americans by the mustachioed Juan Valdez. There are also the ancient indigenous civilizations, whose exquisite artifacts you will see in museums everywhere. Then there is the world-famous painter Fernando Botero, who has adapted his unique style to depict countless national icons, as well as the torture practiced by US soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. And most of all, towering over the rest, is Colombia’s most beloved author, Gabriel García Márquez.

There is an oft-told anecdote that cuts to the heart of this writer’s greatness. As he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, he would regularly meet with his fellow great Colombian author Álvaro Mutis, updating Mutis on his progress by narrating the latest events from his novel. There was just one problem: none of what García Márquez told Mutis actually occurs in the book. He had effectively made up an entire shadow-novel while in the middle of writing one of the most imaginative and jam-packed books in the history of modern literature. This is a measure of how many competing realities existed in García Márquez’s voracious mind.

I am writing about this author today because his greatest work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 50 years old this year, and I would like to understand why it has had such flabbergasting success. This immense novel is claimed to be an effort to express everything that had influenced García Márquez throughout his childhood. It has been called a latter-day Genesis, the greatest thing in Spanish since Don Quixote (by Pablo Neruda, no less), and unique even by the standards of the colossi of the Boom era. García Márquez wrote it in one rapturous year in Mexico City, supposedly chain-smoking 60 cigarettes a day, secluded and reliant on his wife for the necessities of living. To paraphrase critic Harold Bloom, there is not a single line that does not flood with detail: “It is all story, where everything conceivable and inconceivable is happening at once.”

There are hits, and then there are smash hits, and then there are rocket ships to Mars—One Hundred Years of Solitude would qualify as the last. Estimates of its sales are around 50 million worldwide, which would put it in the range of books like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. College syllabi can certainly account for some of this figure, but when one considers by just how much García Márquez’s sales dwarf his fellow Boom greats—Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar—something more than higher education must be called to account. Nor is it easy to explain One Hundred Years of Solitude’s global diffusion: published in at least 44 languages, it is the most translated Spanish-language literary work after Don Quixote.

I think what can be said of this book is that it captured something vital about the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people, not only in Latin America but in other colonized lands as well. Nii Ayikwei Parkes, the award-winning British novelist born to Ghanaian immigrants, has said of the book: “[It] taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-Western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia.” He added that, “Apart from the fact that it’s an amazing book, it taught Western readers tolerance for other perspectives.”

It is indeed true that this book transported something essential about Latin America to far-away places, but I would go farther than that—I would call One Hundred Years of Solitude the most widely read book of Latin American history. I see it as a work in the tradition of ancient foundation stories, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad—or even, while we’re at it, the Bible—a modern version of these works that filtered history through mythic and heroic registers. Reviewing it in 1970 in The New York Times—the year in which North Americans at last received Gregory Rabassa’s “better than the original” translation (to paraphrase García Márquez)—the scholar Robert Kiely said, “the book is a history, not of governments or of formal institutions of the sort which keeps public records, but of a people who, like the earliest descendants of Abraham, are best understood in terms of their relationship to a single family. . . It is a South American Genesis.” Forty-four years later, when García Márquez died, the Times re-upped that opinion in their obituary of the great author, calling One Hundred Years “the defining saga of Latin America’s social and political history.”

The foundation story García Márquez tells is not nearly so heroic as those of Virgil and Homer: rather, his is one of disenchantment and circularity, the slow process of a continent finding its own voice, overcoming efforts to impose a history and trajectory upon it. But though García Márquez would tell history, even incorporate actual historical events into the book, he would not write something that slavishly followed facts. Inspired by Kafka and Joyce, García Márquez believed that in order to speak his truth “it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice.”

Which is to say, even though One Hundred Years of Solitude springs from very real Colombian politics, it far transcends its political context. The author himself has said that the ideal novel should “perturb not only because of its political and social content, but also because of its power of penetrating reality; and better yet, because of its capacity to turn reality upside down so we can see the other side of it.” And this gets right to the heart of his gift: as the leading exponent of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with beguiling treasures that captivate a reader’s imagination. As tall as these tales are—a plague of forgetting, or a woman so graceful and beautiful that she ascends right to heaven—they also have an indisputable connection to our prosaic daily lives. This is what literary myth can do that factual history cannot—as García Márquez puts it, this literature turns reality upside down and shows us what hides beneath.

What could be a better foundation myth for a continent deeply fractured along political, historical, and ethnic lines, yet also desirous of articulating a commonly understood experience? Not only that, this story also allowed those on the opposite end—that is, those who had created the conditions for oppression and exploitation—to comprehend and appreciate this shared experience as well. It was through this feat of imagination that García Márquez forged bonds of community. As he said in 1982 while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, “poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels . . . we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

In giving the world new narratives García Márquez helped alleviate that solitude. This is how books like One Hundred Years of Solitude inspire us: they offer new images, new myths, new ideas, and new forms of understanding that cut against those keeping us in division and incomprehension.

Although an author need not be politically motivated to create such art, this is inherently a political act, for politics is made up of narratives—more than that, it depends on them like nothing else—and whenever art creates new, invasive narratives, it contests our politicians’ authority. Let me explain what I mean. When one hears talk of politicians, political campaigns, legislative politicking, and such, never far away is the idea of “controlling the narrative.” Elections are all about defining the narrative you want and hoping it resonates with the voters; then, once in office, you must hang on to your command of the narrative in order to successfully advocate for the policies you want to drum up support for. Imposing your preferred narrative onto the nation is very much essential for transforming your will into law.

According to this notion of politics, narratives are extremely potent things. This is why wealthy and powerful men (it is almost always men) have invested billions of dollars into building media empires meant to put a stranglehold on certain national narratives. Thus the likes of Fox News and Breitbart have convinced millions of people that certain minorities abuse social aid programs, or that the deficit always requires cutting government spending (except when it comes to the military), and that radical Islamists are perpetually on the verge of overrunning our nation. Against these narratives the left plays its own, and if I count myself as a progressive it is primarily because I find the left’s account of the world far more compelling, compassionate, authentic, honest, and productive than the right’s.

It is in the realm of narratives that art can make its most potent interventions into our politics. I do not mean to reduce a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude to a “liberal vs. conservative” framework—even though this book deals to a very large extent with Colombia’s “Thousand Days’ War,” which was precisely a war between Liberals and Conservatives, like any true work of art it defeats such ready-made binaries to show us that the world is immensely more mysterious and complex. And indeed, this must be another measure of García Márquez’s success: that he has given us books that touch us deeply, even if we know virtually nothing of this source material. His novels have altered our narratives even while they resist simple interpretation, growing with society as it ages and remaining contemporary and relevant. To once again quote Bloom, “García Márquez has given contemporary culture, in North America and Europe, as much as in Latin America, one of its double handful of necessary narratives, without which we will understand neither one another nor our own selves.”

In modern history, great art has always shown other ways of seeing the world. It should always remind us that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, and that even the political narratives that we hold to most steadfastly still only capture at best a portion of this world that is always far more complex than our thought and language can say. To experience a towering work like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to be reminded of the humility we should all feel when trying to assert what is true and what is false.

Of course, this is not to say that progressives should not advocate for the world we want with passion and conviction—politics requires just that—it is to say that our compassion and our empathy should always also be close at hand, no matter who we are dealing with. And we should always look to enlarge our world view through books. Even in this age of media over-saturation—when we have film, TV, Facebook, binge-watching, streaming, Twitter, and so many others—I do not believe there is a better medium for conveying challenging, nuanced, original, and important new narratives to our minds. It is precisely these stories that have kept One Hundred Years of Solitude fresh, and that keeps the world reading it.

More Great Latin American Narratives to Discover

Love in a Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez (tr. Edith Grossman)
*
The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector (tr. Idra Novey)
*
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo
Bioy Casares (tr. Ruth L. C. Simms)
*
Thus Were Their Faces
Silvina Ocampo (tr. Daniel Balderston)
*
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Manuel Puig (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine)
*
Seeing Red
Lina Meruane (tr. Megan McDowell)
*
Fever Dream
Samanta Schweblin (tr. Megan McDowell)
*
Bonsai
Alejandro Zambra (tr. Carolina De Robertis)

Just days after I completed and submitted this column, an enormous controversy broke out over The Public Theater’s staging of William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, which dramatizes the assassination of Caesar and the ensuing chaos and civil war. The controversy was in the choice to make the murdered Caesar a very obvious stand-in for President Donald Trump. (It should be noted that this is far the first such updating of Shakespeare’s play: in 2012, Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater staged a Caesar with an stand-in for then-President Obama in the title role, although there was no notable outcry.)

One could hardly ask for a more apt demonstration of the idea of this essay: namely, theater’s unique ability to retell age-old stories, in the process rendering them relevant to contemporary life. And as it so happened, just as this controversy was reaching fever pitch, I myself was watching a production of Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—an extraordinary performance, and one lacking any overt references to Presidential politics. What most came through in OSF’s beautifully choreographed and emotionally devastating production is the complete futility of the assassination of Caesar, and the utter hell it unleashes on all involved. Having read Caesar numerous times and now seen it live, I feel confident stating that no matter how one interprets Shakespeare, any faithful production would never be one the endorses political assassination. In a nation with a startlingly high number of Presidential assassinations and assassination attempts, no invocation of Presidential murder should be taken lightly.

That said, The Public Theater’s production of Caesar would have to have been an utter travesty to make such an endorsement. One of the reasons Shakespeare’s work has remained so relevant for over 400 years is that it retains its ability to provoke us and make us think, offering no easy answers, a multitude of points of view, and much leeway for interpretation. To the extent that The Public Theater’s production of Caesar has succeeded in doing these things—while not suggesting that violence is the solution to any American political problem—it should be applauded, not condemned.

__________________________________

Joan Didion famously begins her book The White Album with the following words: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” About a year and a half ago I saw a play that made that sentiment literal. I mean literal: for these people, their lives depended on telling stories. It is one of the most incredible plays I can remember seeing in years.

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where they parodied Cape Fear? Before it was a Simpsons episode it was a 1962 thriller starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, and then it was a 1991 remake starring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte. And then—De Niro’s creepy tattooed knuckles still fresh in the American mind—The Simpsons made “Cape Feare.” The idea is simple: a murderer is released from prison, and he immediately sets out to stalk and murder the man whose testimony put him away. In The Simpsons, the murderer is Sideshow Bob, and it’s Bart he’s stalking. There are plenty of visual and vocal allusions to the film, and since it’s an episode of The Simpsons there are also about two dozen other allusions to all sorts of other things from high art to pop culture.

So “Cape Feare” was already about re-telling a popular story, and embellishing it with all sorts of cultural effluvia. And then Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play came along to take this to an extraordinary place.

The apocalypse has come, civilization has fallen, and bands of survivors are roaming the country, trying to locate loved ones and find enough friendly faces to survive. To stay alert through a long night’s watch against deadly marauders, one such group is trying to retell the “Cape Feare” episode. They want to get it exactly right—exactly—so they’re trying to remember every last line, every gesture, every inflection. This is how they entertain themselves in the long, perilous nights. They’re doing something humanity has done for millennia: coming together to enact a cherished, shared story. It’s not just entertainment—it’s a way of bonding, of reassuring one another, of digressing into personal memories, of establishing common fears and hopes.

Fast forward about a decade. Act II. The rudiments of civilization have been put back in place, but the world is still very much anarchic, very much kill-or-be-killed. There is still no mass media, no TV, no electronic communications. One way people make money in this new epoch is to travel around performing famous episodes from celebrated sit-coms. “Cape Feare” is a crowd favorite. The more authentic these re-creations are, the more successful, so they want to get the show perfectly right—so much so that they’ll pay good money to anyone who can give them a line or two that they haven’t managed to remember. Essentially, they’re trying to reassemble the pop culture that fell away with civilization and perform it live. But—crucially—this is all based on living memory, so these stories are mutating as they are being put back together. And of course they are mutating in accordance with the new realities that everyone has to live with.

We have one extraordinary act left to see, but before we get to that, there was something that struck me about Washburn’s story. As I watched, I knew she had keyed in on something fundamental: she was absolutely right, The Simpsons must be among the most widely disseminated and best-understood myths that American culture has ever produced. If civilization ever were to fall, it would be the exact thing we could come together around. After all, who wouldn’t recognize Bart Simpson’s face? Who doesn’t know that Mr. Burns is nefarious? Who has never heard the dejection in Homer’s famous “D’oh!”? As I watched Mr. Burns, I felt chills down my spine: Of course! It made so much sense!

Act III: We’re now roughly 75 years since the end of civilization. Things have advanced from anarchy to a kind of new feudal era, and what we’re watching is a neo–Passion play rooted in “Cape Feare.” However, the “Cape Feare” episode has evolved so much that it’s almost unrecognizable. The Bart character has somehow fused with elements of Eminem. Sideshow Bob has become similarly integrated with Mr. Burns, and other Simpsons characters have evolved. This episode of The Simpsons has developed into a moralistic fable about how civilization went wrong, and how we can redeem ourselves. Mr. Burns has become conflated with fate, with absolute evil, with that dark, anarchic energy that threatens the stability of civilization. And somehow Bart has become the embodiment of youth and energy, the human spirit that will strive to survive in this sad, stricken world.

Obviously there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek to Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play—it’s clearly a work that thrives on a certain level of the ridiculous—but Washburn’s point about the importance of shared stories and how they evolve is serious as can be. What this play captures is the centrality of narratives to our civilizations, how they develop with us and become answers to our deepest questions. The way that we re-tell them again and again. Enacting these master narratives before our eyes is essential to our survival as a species. When we lose everything else, these stories will be the things that we cling to for community, hope, and understanding.

What better place to explore this theme than the theater, which for thousands of years has been the way we come together as a community to share stories? Theater is still a vital force today—a study by the research firm Nielsen Scarborough determined that in spring 2016, over 47 million Americans had attended a live theatre event within the past month. This is many more people than will leave their homes to watch a film every month.

When we come together to hear stories in a community setting, it is the theater that we are going to, and I think there are very powerful reasons for that. As I write this, I am about to drive some 350 miles to Ashland, OR, in order to attend performances of Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights. It is something I have done for years now—the excitement of arriving in Ashland and finding my seat in its theaters is like nothing else I do all year. I cannot imagine myself (or anyone else) ever driving six hours to watch a movie. I am not alone in making this trip: every spring and summer tens of thousands make their own pilgrimage to Ashland, just as millions head to New York City—and elsewhere—to see a show.

The storytelling one encounters in the theater is found nowhere else in life. Because its means of suspending disbelief are so limited, it must be much more creative and seductive in how it captures our senses and draws us into its world. The results can be very potent. When Shakespeare writes, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” as he famously does in A Winter’s Tale, it is up to theater companies to figure out how to put a bear on stage. Will it be menacing? (An enormous, roaring creature built like a Chinese dragon.) Will it be ironic? (A man obviously dressed in a bear suit.) Will it be surreally deadpan? (An actual bear, as was sometimes done in Shakespeare’s day.) It is up to a theater to engineer its own unique solution each and every time it chooses to re-inhabit this age-old tale.

There is no replacement for actually seeing such things with your own two eyes. I recall a summer evening I sat outdoors at dusk in the Orinda hills to watch Beckett’s very ironically titled, Happy Days, in which poor Winnie gives an hour-long monologue buried waist-deep in sand, eventually getting buried up to her eyeballs. Or a truly astonishing performance of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice at the Shotgun Players’ theater in Berkeley, which included a 15-foot leap from a balcony across a precariously stacked wall of gallon-buckets, which of course all came tumbling down as Eurydice desperately attempted to flee the Lord of the Underworld. No other kind of storytelling has ever electrified me as that moment did.

There is a thrilling sense of danger and potential in live theater, and it is elating to see actors sweating with exertion and shaking with emotion. Once you have experienced this, it is impossible to doubt the necessity of our culture’s well-worn words being given new life with each cadre of aspiring performers. There is a renewal, a kind of passing of the torch as each generation accepts its responsibility to propagate our culture’s stories.

And this is why I began this column by saying that the players in Mr. Burns tell stories in order to live. Their performances are indeed their source of sustenance in their harsh, post-apocalyptic world, but even more, without these stories their souls would soon wither. This is the haunting thing about Washburn’s play. It really gives you the feeling of how our stories become us, and of the strange, necessary alchemy that occurs when we experience them.

I want to return to the words of Joan Didion with which I began this piece, but now I will quote her in full:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

These stories are how we come to an agreement about just what is this world is. To experience them together is to renew our shared understanding, and to give ourselves a common point around which to debate life’s big questions. Collectively articulating these stories is indeed a thing we do in order to live. I cannot imagine what life would be life without them.

Great Contemporary Theater

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Anne Washburn
*
In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)
Sarah Ruhl
*
The Coast of Utopia
Tom Stoppard
*
Copenhagen
Michael Frayn
*
Red
John Logan
*
The Arabian Nights
Mary Zimmerman
*
Antigonick
Anne Carson
*
Death and the King’s Horseman
Wole Soyinka
*
36 Views
Naomi Iizuka

Picture it: three mild-mannered academics are having dinner together in London. They’re literary scholars who have deeply bonded over a shared love for an obscure author. The conversation turns to collegial romance, and the two men begin to press their female colleague on whether or not she has fancied a third man known to all. As they drunkenly continue the lewd discussion in the back of a cab, the driver, a Pakistani immigrant, overhears them. He is not pleased. Suddenly the Pakistani declares that the woman is a “slut” and the men are her “pimps.” After a shocked silence, something terrible happens.

This is a scene from Roberto Bolaño’s momentous last novel, 2666. I was reading it just days after the 2008 edition of Book Expo America, where I had reverently acquired a galley. The book would go on to become a huge best-seller, a critical grand slam, and a winner of a prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. It is truly a great novel, but as I read this scene, I could not believe what Bolaño had written. The things the academics were about to do to this cab driver were completely out of character—they were so unthinkable that it seemed like a bizarre error, a rare lapse on Bolaño’s part.

But more and more it has stuck in my mind as prophetic, all too accurate.

So here is what happens. Offended, the academics demand that the driver stop his car. He complies, coolly handing them the bill. This tense moment seems on the verge of fizzling when one of the men opens the driver’s door and drags him out. As if on cue, the beating commences:

as they delivered kick after kick, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mention seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton [the woman] was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head, except the eyes.

Bolaño wrote this in roughly 2003. When I encountered it in 2008, I honestly thought the worst of this was behind us. Civilized, educated Westerners wouldn’t do that sort of thing any longer. But increasingly I have seen that in fact Bolaño was foretelling our future. He had intuited some deep resentment that was beginning to assert itself in 2003, and was maybe a little more visible in 2008, and is now becoming monstrously unleashed in 2017, this year of astonishing animosity toward Muslims, Mexicans, and many others.

As a writer, Bolaño was obsessed with the way fascism had immigrated to South America after it was defeated in Europe. His shorter novels tend to deal with what fascism became in places like Chile, but in 2666 he seems to imply that perhaps fascism has become globalized. The book is stuffed with fascism, albeit not in the sense of goose-stepping thugs and authoritarian leaders, but rather in the texture of daily life. That is, 2666’s fascism is found in the upwelling of deep-bred hatred that makes these meek men beat a taxi driver to within an inch of his life. A sort of fascism that has become profoundly embedded in the culture of educated, economically powerful, liberal democratic nations.

I have thought more and more about this scene these past months, as we have seen Nazi-saluting creeps celebrating Donald Trump in Washington, purveyors of hate engineering incidents designed to provoke violence and chaos, and the spiking of hate crimes and other forms of racialized violence. I have been brought back to this scene as it has bit by bit been demonstrated that the racism at the heart of Trump’s campaign was decisive in his win, and as our President now defames Mexicans, insults Muslims, incites rage against outsiders, and even uses the name “Pocahontas” to mock a United States Senator. I have thought about this scene, and I have thought how Bolaño detected the rot spreading through Ciudad Juárez long before it was dubbed “the most violent city on Earth,” how he was among the first to zero in on the unique horror of Juárez’s femicide epidemic, and how he was brave enough to turn these nice academics into enraged barbarians.

Thinking of these things called to mind Bolaño’s reflection that “literature is basically a dangerous calling.” Let me quote Bolaño in full on this:

A writer’s country isn’t his language or isn’t only his language . . . There can be many countries, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and obviously that passport is the quality of the writing. Which doesn’t mean just to write well, because anybody can do that, but to write marvelously well, though not even that, because anybody can do that too. Then what is writing of quality? Well, what it’s always been: to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.

When Bolaño says that literature is dangerous to its practitioners, I think it goes back to the state of mind one would have to be in to create characters like 2666′s academics: decent, liberal, incredibly well-educated Westerners who are capable of spouting out feminist pieties while nearly murdering an immigrant with their bare hands. It would touch upon the levels one would have to exist on in order to be sensitive to the inchoate rage that was circulating through Western culture and would soon find itself concentrated in the hateful campaigns of the likes of Donald Trump, Theresa May, Marine Le Pen, and others. Let us not forget that 49 percent of white college graduates were angry enough with the status quo to choose Donald Trump for President.

A writer’s duty is to see as much of the truth as possible of the society he or she inhabits, and often this is dangerous. Not simply dangerous in the sense of journalists like Ben Jacobs, who in May 2017 was assaulted by a candidate for Congress he was covering, or the many other journalists who have been threatened by Trump and terrorized by his supporters at his rallies—I mean dangerous in the sense of having to get close enough to the darkest sides of a society that it begins to infect your mind. This is precisely what Bolaño did, and anyone who has read his literature knows that it left a profound impact.

Bolaño, of course, saw much more of the worst of humanity than should anyone in a single lifetime. He was born in Chile, and he fought for the regime of Salvador Allende just as a coup d’etat forced the suicide of this democratically elected president in favor of a dictator. (Bolaño narrowly escaped with his life.) All of this happening while neighboring Argentina—which had descended into fascism itself with its president Juan Perón—was mutating into one of Latin America’s most hideously grotesque and murderous regimes. He then went to Mexico, a nation that was being ruled by (as Mario Vargas Llosa once called it) the “perfect dictatorship.” And he ultimately settled in Spain, which had just recently relinquished the last vestige of fascism in Europe, a nearly 40-year reign. Given his experiences, it is unsurprising that Bolaño was preternaturally sensitive to a society’s incipient fascism and the darker aspects of humanity.

You can make a very strong case that fascism is the center of Bolaño’s massive literary project. Just to name a few larger examples, we can start with the aforementioned 2666. Then we have By Night in Chile, which deals profoundly with how fascism fled Europe and took root in the New World. Distant Star brings us face-to-face with what fascist evil looked like on the ground in Chile, bringing together avant-garde art and political torture. Amulet deals with a woman who is terrorized during one of Mexico’s darkest episodes, the massacres of hundreds of citizens following major political protests in Mexico City in 1968. And Nazi Literature in the Americas is a sort of endeavor to form a gallery of the petty little men and women who use fascist politics and/or techniques to chase literary fame.

Part of the reason we read Bolaño in America is that his life experiences, and his literary errands, gave him enormous insight into how fascism lurks in a society. This is a subject that has long fascinated Americans—think of the popularity of Upton Sinclair’s 1935 novel about a fascist president, It Can’t Happen Here, as well as Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winner All the King’s Men, George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Philip Roth’s massively bestselling The Plot Against America.

What does Bolaño add to this question that an American author can not? Perhaps Bolaño was the only writer who could give us such deep insight into the nature of political evil while filtering it through the minds of would-be artists who are dominated by a sort of nostalgic romanticism. What this amounts to is a mapping of the difficult, but extraordinarily rich terrain where the most noble aspirations of art overlap with the most perverse aspirations of politics. (And here, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a remarkable inquiry into the similarities between the rise of German avant-garde music and the rise of Nazism, is essential.)

This union of fascism and art has important lessons for us today. When our unbelievably surreal president—who effortlessly conjures enormous lies, changes his mind unpredictably, and breaks all norms of the office—is often compared to a performance artist; when purveyors of outrageous, dangerous lies like the right wing radio personality Alex Jones take cover behind the title of “performance artist”; and when the worst truths of our contemporary politics are frequently uttered by talented comedians who base their newscaster personae off parodies of clown-like Fox News hosts—at such a time, it seems that the overlap of art and politics is something important for us here in America.

So I would like to ask, which of our writers will do as Bolaño said we must and thrust their head into the darkness? I do not know that there is another way to find certain truths we must hear about our nation. These are not things you will read in the newspaper or see debated on CNN. They do not come from a politician’s mouth. They are not the sort of truths that science will unveil to us. They only come into existence when a writer is working at the edge of things, when their language is being used to articulate the highest degree of literary truth possible—writing that contains more truth than even the writer necessarily realizes. Bolaño gets it just right in his story “Dentist” when he says:

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realize that’s a lie.

We must have writers who are sensitive to the secret story. I do not know exactly who these writers are, but I can tell you that they will be, like Bolaño, citizens of the world who can live up to the words, “A writer’s patria or country . . . is his language.” They will be deeply knowledgeable of the history of political systems, and they will have an intimate familiarity with contemporary politics. They will also care deeply about people—about what motivates them, how their minds work, what drives them to passion, and what makes them terribly afraid. And I think they will be the sort who can grapple in the deepest possible way with these rightly famous lines of Bolano’s:

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it’s not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness and death.

__________________________________

Writers Who Have Shown Us the Secret Story

2666
Roberto Bolaño (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
*
The Neapolitan Quartet
Elena Ferrante (tr. Ann Goldstein)
*
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann (tr. John E. Woods)
*
Texas: The Great Theft
Carmen Boullosa (tr. Samantha Schnee)
*
Seiobo There Below
László Krasznahorkai (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)
*
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood

The story of a woman eating a cockroach—it may not sound like the most inspiring thing in the world, but this book saved my life.

I worked for a corporation, and every day at lunch I would take this strange little novel outside to a poured concrete picnic table and read for an hour in the chilly winter—by far the happiest hour of my workday. More than that: this hour was a means of survival at a job I had grown to despise.

Life had not always been this way. For the previous two years I had traveled, read, and freelanced my way through Latin America. It was a very loose, very free life. I was responsible to no one and had my days all to myself. It was a time of adventure, of exploring, and most of all of reading—for hours and hours every day.

But then my two years were up. I wanted to return home and resume the life I had put on hold. I knew that once I was back in the States I wouldn’t be able to survive on the modest earnings that had propped me up throughout Latin America. So I found a real job. It was not a very good job.

Going into that office in the morning made me unhappier than anything else, and leaving it in the evening filled me with relief. I don’t know exactly how I survived the nine hours in between. I do remember what a blessing it was to read on my lunch hour, the way I could feel my entire mind opening up—as though I’d escaped a suffocating, smoke-filled cell and finally gotten a breath of clean air—and how it felt to walk back into that office, that little bit of life being smothered.

In the year that I survived that job many lunchtime books were a lifeline, but none more profoundly than Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (translated by Idra Novey). Many regard this as the most bizarre and infamous book from a writer who didn’t exactly shrink from eccentricity and controversy. In so many words, it’s the story of a wealthy, sheltered woman who one day squishes a cockroach, experiences a spiritual awakening, spends dozens of pages soliloquizing to the dying creature, and then eats it. She discovers that her whole life is a lie and vows to change. There are Christ-like overtones throughout (hence the title).

Quite possibly Lispector is the only writer on Earth who could have made such a crazy premise work. This should not surprise us. She was an iconoclast who did as she pleased her whole life—for her opener, after dropping a heart-stopping debut novel at the tender age of 23, she promptly left her native Brazil for 15 years. She broke down gender barriers at a time when “woman writer” was virtually an oxymoron in Brazil. She won respect from the establishment while writing about subjects that few—male or female—would dare touch. Her biographer, Benjamin Moser, has written that when she died in 1977, just one day shy of her 57th birthday, she was “one of the mythical figures of Brazil, the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro, a woman who fascinated her countrymen virtually from adolescence.”

Moser has also written that a friend of his once warned, “Be careful with Clarice. It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft,” and indeed, that was exactly my experience with The Passion According to G.H. At a time when I felt myself being dominated by an environment that was intolerably sterile and heartless—lacking any sort of care, humanity, or curiosity—this book was a potent reminder of the world that I felt passionate about.

Within this compact, ferocious novel—that feels like the extended scream of a woman who has quietly wept her whole life—I found so many lines that filled me with inspiration. Above all, The Passion According to G.H. is about shaking off the deception of a world that tries to mold you into what it wants—that in fact uses the lure of material wealth and the fear of rejection to prevent you from ever confronting a reality outside of its own making. At my suffocating job I could very much identify with G.H.’s plight, and her courage helped me find my own.

I underlined so much, because so much of this book felt as though it were written just for me. Here are just a few of the many lines that gave me life:

“Until now, finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it.”

“I’m afraid I’ll start to ‘make’ a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system.”

“Creation isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality.”

“Where was my greater destiny? One that wasn’t just the story of my life.”

I brought these words into one of the most deadening environments I had ever known, and they rejuvenated me. This is what books can do. They do not only help you to find yourself: they help you remain that person, no matter what life throws at you. Through The Passion According to G.H., Lispector reminded me of the self I wanted to stay true to. It also gave me the means to do so. Books like these are little pieces of a better reality that we can take into places that make us feel like a failure—they are reminders that these oppressive environments are not our world and never will be.

I want to return to that word “witchcraft,” because there is something eerie about a book like The Passion According to G.H. Lispector’s mysticism has often been celebrated, and she is indeed a mystic writer, but there is something ironic in the fact that it takes a mystic to put us in touch with the “real world.” After all, we’re constantly surrounded by reality—shouldn’t it be easy to get in touch with?

But it’s not easy: such a basic matter as personal identity is a lifelong quest in which we all struggle to find our true selves. The truth of our world and of ourselves is covered by layers and layers of obfuscation: ideology, marketing, biases, misconceptions, historical narratives, personal psychology, just to name a few. These all must be peeled back if we want to find the truth. This is an idea that has deep roots in the Western tradition—we’ve all heard of Plato’s cave and the shadows its denizens take for real things. And it is still a resonant part of our popular culture—think of The Matrix, where in order for Neo to see the true nature of the world, Morpheus must seduce him with the red pill, then take him on a dangerous journey in which he converses with a riddle-speaking Oracle while watching a young boy demonstrate the artificiality of appearances by bending a spoon with the power of his mind.

The Passion According to G.H. is solidly in this tradition—it’s the story of a spiritual experience that shreds the deceptive layers of the everyday, giving its protagonist a rare opportunity to meditate on the true nature of her life. What Lispector brings to this tradition is prose so original and passionate that it broke right through my deadening office life. She also brings her unique verve: who but Lispector would have the boldness to turn the dying, oozing body of a severed cockroach into an existential crisis that opens up profound realization on the falsity of one’s material life? And she brings her boundless empathy: who else could have taken this symbol of universal disgust, which Kafka turned into the worst sort of alienation and tragedy, and make it into a site of compassion, understanding, and heroic transcendence?

In order to succeed, a writer like Lispector must fight against the decades and decades of conditioning that make us what we are. She must surprise us with premises and characters that are shockingly original. Her prose must be unbeatable. So it is absolutely correct that G.H. draws on absurdity and excess to give its ideas an incandescent, ecstatic energy. This is precisely why it rejuvenated me, and why it remains fixed in my mind as an incomparable reading experience.

Fortunately, that awful job is long behind me, and today I’m able to make my money though truly inspiring work with literature that I love and colleagues I respect. Nonetheless, I still rely on books—they break me out of my complacency and misconceptions. This is an ongoing, lifelong battle. To live in our world is to always run the risk of falling into routine ways of thinking, to stifle the imagination and the empathy that we all need to in order to be authentic, compassionate people. I cannot tell you how essential books are for keeping me where I need to be. With the stressful, busy lives that we lead, plus the hopes we chase and the setbacks we endure—to say nothing of the powerful economic and political forces that seek to define us—we are always in danger of being drawn away from the people we aspire to be. Great literature is that indispensable reality-check.

Fundamentally, a writer like Lispector is a writer of humility. You cannot see the world with such a fresh and penetrating gaze if you are not very aware of your own limitations and personal failings. Nor can you make the search for truth and authenticity such a defining fact of your literature—as it is for Lispector—if you do not approach your art with humility. I very much like the idea of Lispector’s work as a mixture of audacity and humility—to be bold enough to dream up premises that have lost none of their power in 50 years, and to be honest enough to make them live with truth and dignity. It is a rare combination to get right, and it is the mark of an essential writer.

Some Literary Reality-Checks That Might Save Your Life

The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector (tr. Idra Novey)
*
Água Viva
Clarice Lispector (tr. Stefan Tobler)
*
Europe Central
William T. Vollmann
*
Torpor
Chris Kraus
*
The Art of Cruelty
Maggie Nelson
*
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
*
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag

Earlier this summer I interviewed my friend and colleague Daniel Hahn, who had just given away £12,500—roughly $16,500. That’s a lot of money, and Danny is not a wealthy man. He’s a literary translator, a line of work with famously low rates, and even though he’s in high demand and tends to be prolific, there’s only so much even the decently paid translators can earn. And yet there it was: he’d just given away half the cost of a new car. Why would he do that?

Here’s another one for you: in 2003, when the translator Michael Henry Heim was 60 years old, he and his wife, Priscilla, gave away $734,000—their life’s savings. They did this anonymously, and their generosity only came out nine years later, after Heim’s death of cancer.

As with Danny, the Heims weren’t particularly rich. Michael Henry Heim was a prestigious and prodigious translator, and for 40 years he enjoyed a professorship at UCLA, but certainly a quarter-of-a-million dollars would have represented an enormous sum to him and his wife. They might have enjoyed lavish vacations with this money, or put it into a gigantic Southern California mansion—but instead they just gave it all away.

The interesting thing is that Danny and Heim gave their money to more or less the same place. Danny’s $16,500 went to establish a new translation award called the TA First Translation Prize, which awards £2,000 to a first-time translator and their editor. The Heims gave their money to establish a line of translation grants now called PEN/Heim grants, each worth a few thousand dollars, and which have so far funded hundreds of literary translation projects.

The reason I’m writing about them today is twofold: first of all, such generosity is noteworthy and should always be recognized; and secondly, it’s emblematic of the sort of values I see all around me in the field of literary translation, where I’ve worked for about a decade. Not everyone in my field gives away quite that much money, but all the time I see my colleagues demonstrate their love for their vocation through various acts of kindness. It’s their generosity that makes my field a rewarding place to be.

Altruism is a complex emotion with many different causes, so I don’t presume to know exactly why my colleagues give so much when they don’t have to. But I am certain that high among the reasons for acts of giving like those of Danny, the Heims, and many, many other colleagues is gratitude for everything the translation community has given them, and an intense desire to see our community remain strong so that it may so benefit the lives of others in the future.

It’s often said that to enjoy your work you have to find people who share your values, and certainly this is why I’ve stuck around so long in the world of translation. Here, money is not a primary motivation. There are high levels of curiosity, a desire to make a unique contribution to the life of our culture, an ethic of being responsible for the community, and a belief that the books we work with are truly important. I don’t mean to romanticize the translation world—I’ve seen pettiness, egos, and self-servingness. These things exist here, as they do everywhere, but they are not common, and they are easy to forget when the charitable values this field embraces loom so much larger. There is a real idealism in the work of translation, and this is a place where one can nourish their idealism, even when other parts of life try to turn us into cynics. Truly, if this wasn’t the case I don’t think I would have been able to sustain myself very long here. Let me quote a little of Danny on how he feels about this field:

The world of people who translate books and publish translations and champion international writing is the most extraordinarily collegial, optimistic, generous tribe I’ve been a part of; every person I know does much more than they’re paid for, everyone is driven by a sense of mission, or a feeling of community, or a drive towards a common good. Every experienced translator I’ve ever met puts a lot of work into helping out those following after them.

I feel the same, and thoughts such as these have been important to remember when the news out of our national government is so grim. We hear stories of immense brutality every day, like ICE agents destroying families, endangering lives, and making sport of killing people’s dreams. Or we watch a Republican legislature attempt to throw millions of impoverished Americans off health care in order to give the rich a tax cut. Or we see that a businessman who is scared to open his taxes to public scrutiny, who has lied in the most grotesque and shameless manner, and who is a serial abuser of women has won the Presidency of the United States, and (if the polls are to be believed) still receives the ongoing support of perhaps as many as 100 million Americans.

These are dire truths that we must grapple with as citizens of this nation. On election night, when I saw that this country really was capable of electing an individual like Donald Trump, I felt as though I had been transported to an entirely new place. I felt like something had been stolen from me. I really could not believe this was possible, and it shook me to my core. And then, in the weeks following the election, I watched the neo-fascist alt-right emerged; I saw a spike in hate crimes; and I witnessed a proud, angry, and hateful white nationalism that had always been a suppressed part of America come into the mainstream.

Undoubtedly many of us were disgusted and betrayed to see what had been hiding under our radar in a country we thought we knew. We should be disturbed at this realization—this is really odious stuff—but we shouldn’t let it define us. It would be factually false and intellectually dishonest to ignore the great good there is here in America. And that is why today I have told you about what I see in the translation world. This community, and so many other artistic communities all throughout America, are also the fabric of this country, even if their good deeds are largely invisible in the cable news cycles, opinion polls, and social media feeds that are now central in shaping our idea of the US.

If Trump can activate much of the bad that America has to offer—make it more visible and give it empowerment and courage—then I think the artistic community has a role in activating the good. If we are ever to defeat Trump—and more importantly, what he stands for—we must make this country see everything about itself that is not Trump. This is one of our duties now, and we are equal to it: we are creative, talented, ambitious people, and we have powerful tools for highlighting this other America, our America. We should take some time out from our indignation and irony to make visible the parts of our world that inspire us.

I am not surprised to see many in my own translation community already doing just this, for this is what translators do by nature: our work is nothing if not the art of making visible something that was formerly unavailable to us. A book that never was a part of America—that virtually nobody here even knew existed—through translation it can be read and known, and just like that our picture of the world is that much larger.

One of the reasons I enjoy translation so much is that in order to show us these things, a translator must be selflessness. He or she must care for a text that belongs to another person, another culture—they must show immense resourcefulness and dedication to this book that is not even theirs. Accordingly, translation is a field in which respect for the other is extraordinarily high, and where you often encounter self-abnegation out of respect for a higher purpose. To me, these are the foundations of an ideal community. Michael Henry Heim embodied much of this ethos when he explained why he himself did not write books, despite translating so many of them:

I’m often asked that question. My answer is simple: There are so many wonderful books that need to be translated, and this is what I know how to do best—I’m not being modest, just honest. As long as there are untranslated books in the world, I know that this is where my duty lies. I have some ideas I could write about if I ever started to, but I prefer to work on those books that I already know can change people’s lives.

I’ve just said very much about the world of translation, so let me conclude by talking about something very different from translation—for there are many ways that those in the arts can change lives. In 1973, a young economist named Sebastião Salgado gave up a prestigious and well-paid job at the World Bank to begin a tenuous life as a photographer. At first the work was lowly and poorly paid, but in the 40 years since he decided to change his life, Salgado has photographed more of the world than any other person on Earth. In the process he has won virtually every honor available to photographers.

His work is extraordinary, and if you have never seen it, I encourage you to google the name “Sebastião Salgado” immediately. Every photograph Salgado takes looks as though it comes from an epic, three-hour, blockbuster film, and also from the Bible. The level of detail in each photo is astonishing, and he photographs people as I have never seen them anywhere else. Even in the small reproductions that I have spent hours looking at in books of Salgado’s photos, the sense of enormity is unmistakable—enormity of landscape, enormity of emotion, enormity of the significance of every person he photographs. Salgado’s career has been defined by photographs of the forgotten: communities devastated by drought in Saharan Africa, thousands of Brazilians carrying 100-pound sacks of mud up rickety, ten-story ladders; a sea of people rushing through a train station in India; nomads traveling through the highlands of the Andes.

Salgado’s photographs have brought attention to countless international causes, and they have spotlighted much of the unremarked grace and heroism that exists every day on Earth, but they can sometimes be excruciating to look at. In particular his Saharan series is brutal. I always think of one of a young boy suffering from a famine: he is being weighed, his whole body suspended in a sling, and you can see his bones clearly through his skin. His posture shows such complete abjection—it is an awful sight.

Salgado himself has been deeply affected by the conditions he has seen. In the 2014 film that Wim Wenders made about him, The Salt of the Earth, he reveals the story of his loss of faith in humanity: the breaking point came after witnessing mass murder during the Rwandan genocide, including that of a dear friend, his wife, and his children. “My soul was sick,” Salgado said, “I no longer believed in anything, in any salvation for the human species.” These horrors made him lose his faith in photography and stop his life’s work.

Salgado’s response to this crisis of faith was to plant trees. After years of hard work, he and his wife, Lélia, had reforested some 17,000 acres of devastated Brazilian rain forest with more than 4 million trees. These years of restoring life to a devastated part of Brazil helped Salgado to see enough good in the world to resume photography, and in 2002 he embarked on a momentous project titled Genesis. For eight years he traveled to some of the most remote places on the Earth, capturing natural beauty all throughout the world.

The artistic world thrives on utopian visions like these. To find a life in the arts requires indisputable hope and optimism, for it is a vocation that sits uneasily within the prevailing capitalist culture. I think we are all hopeful people, and I think right now we need to call on that part of ourselves to believe in our country and make it what we want it to be. I would like to ask that everybody reading this take some step, big or small, to reveal and encourage the America that we live in—the true face of this country, and the America that will still be here long after the tides of hate, resentment, and buffoonery have subsided.

Utopian Visions to Help See the World Anew

Workers · Genesis
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Sebastião Salgado

Understanding a Photograph
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John Berger

The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim and a Life in Translation
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Eds. Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, Russell Scott Valentino

Hope in the Dark
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Rebecca Solnit

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
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Lauret Savoy

Education for Critical Consciousness
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Paulo Freire

Belonging
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bell hooks

I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my whole life. I don’t like to do my reading on devices, and in fact I’ll do almost anything to avoid reading a book electronically. I love the feel of having a paperback to take with me and mark up—in my mind, nothing matches their ease and pleasure.

Of the two ebooks I’ve ever bought, one was trivial, and the other is a book that I’ve never, ever told anybody about. When I first bought this book I would have died of shame if anybody saw me reading it or happened to find it in my apartment. I purchased it as an ebook because that was the only way I could be sure that it would remain my secret.

I bought it in November 2010, and even though I’ve never told anybody about it, I don’t mind sharing it with you all now. Its title, in full, is Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, and it is an academic work of gender theory by a Princeton professor named Gayle Salamon, published in 2010 by Columbia University Press.

I know precisely why I wanted to read this book, and why it felt so shameful to me. For my whole life I had been experiencing doubts as to my presumed male gender, and I felt an intense desire to experience life as a woman. But I had never, ever been able to do anything about it. For about 20 years I had lived with this quandary, always profoundly ashamed of these desires, yet also deeply yearning to explore them. For those two decades I had gotten more or less nowhere.

Well, not exactly nowhere—I had at least figured out that this question wasn’t ever going to go away, and I would have to do something about it, otherwise suffer this angst more or less every single day for the rest of my life. So, more as an act of desperation than anything else, I downloaded Assuming a Body to my iPad with a vague idea that I could read it in secret and maybe it would do something to help me.

This book opened up some door in my mind that I had never been able to open in all my life. It helped me see that other people had wrestled with exactly the same questions I had wrestled with; not only that, they thought these were entirely valid questions, proper matters for the most serious kind of inquiry. Not to put too fine a point on it, but seeing how deeply Salamon took these matters, as did so many other thinkers that she cited and discussed in her book, made me feel as though I had a right to exist. This validation as a gender-questioning person was extremely powerful for me, and Salamon’s book also gave me theories and terms that I could use to begin thinking these questions through for myself.

I don’t want to overstate the impact of this particular book. I think that a number of books might have done what this one did for me—there was clearly something of it happening to be in the right place at the right time. All the same, I have no doubt that many other books would have failed to so move me. I should also add that it was still a very long time before I could even say the word “crossdress” to another human being, let alone feel comfortable being feminine in front of others. One single book didn’t suddenly change my life, but it was a crucial spark: it started something within me that I had never been able to start, no matter that I had tried very hard for years to do it, initiating an inquiry that led me to other books, which themselves led to even more books, this array of written material eventually becoming conversations with other people that slowly led to the courage and self-belief that I needed to find myself.

For those of us who value books as readers, writers, publishers, publicists, editors, critics, booksellers, or what have you, it’s essential to keep in mind that the books we cherish always have the possibility of making this kind of an impact on somebody. That, to put it bluntly, words matter, they matter very, very much.

Often the world fights to make books seem tiny and banal. If you work in the literary field, the daily grind of one’s job can make books feel like just another commodity. If you’re someone who loves to read, the mind-numbing cascade of new books, book reviews, author interviews, bookstore events, profiles, lists, gossip, feuds, and so on make it easy to diminish the importance of any individual reading experience. But I think we must always fight this tendency. If nothing else, my story proves that just one single book can be immensely powerful. When I feel that my work with literature has become just a little too routine, a little too uninspired, I bring out personal memories like this one to remind me just what kind of an impact words can have. All of us who love books must recognize this potential on some level—it’s clearly one of the big attractions that has drawn us to this world, the power that these words have had over us, or perhaps over very important people in our lives.

*

Because I am so aware how powerful words can be, it pains me very much to see that the President of the United States is someone with seemingly little regard for the grievous harm he inflicts when he lashes out at vulnerable individuals and groups. When Donald Trump suddenly banned transgender troops from the US military with one ill-considered, base-baiting tweet, he did a lot more than ruin the careers of 15,000 dedicated service personnel: he told every transgender person who was struggling as I once did that their hardships were unimportant and their searching was invalid. He told every queer person that their place in society is marginal and their rights are precarious, capable of being demolished with a tweet. I have no doubt that as news of this tweet spread around the United States, many gender-questioning people were thrown that much further into self-hate and hiding. Callously unemploying 15,000 Americans while also forcing our military to suddenly fill 15,000 positions for no reason other than bigotry is surely no way to make America great again, particularly at a time when our saber-rattling President needs his military to be at its very best. This is a terrible, shameful, self-defeating thing from a person whose very purpose should be finding ways to enable the success of every decent American, not to denigrate some in order to curry favor with those who espouse hate and division.

We could apply this logic to the many other groups that Trump has made a practice of persecuting as a candidate and now as President. It is not merely that our fellow citizens now see an extraordinarily powerful and norm-setting individual telling them their religion, race, gender, or sexuality is wrong; it is also that the President’s messages enable a constellation of other individuals to spread the same messages, from high powered television personalities like Sean Hannity all the way down to the local two-bit bully. Who knows the damage this has already done throughout this country. We can tally the number of families that Trump’s Executive Orders have destroyed, we can count the hate crimes that his repulsive rhetoric has inspired, but it’s much harder to know how many people have been pushed into a deeper level of shame, fear, and distress by Trump’s words.

If we cannot know how many minds such rhetoric has savaged, we also cannot know how many lives have been bettered by the messages spread in great books. That this is hard to measure and often invisible to us does nothing to change the fact of the great importance of these words for those around us. This is a crucial thing to keep focus on at any time, but particularly now, when those moved by resentment and rage are filling our society with hateful messages. We must never forget that this is a central fact of literary culture.

I know that against the awesome power of the President of the United States a single book doesn’t seem like much, against a hateful Klan rally a mere LGBTQ bookstore display seems puny. But I’m here to tell you that these things do make a difference for a lot of people. We must not doubt the importance of books. When we publish, or handsell, or review, or simply recommend to a friend, we must think very deeply about the kinds of messages we are putting into the world, as well as the sort of country we want our literary culture to represent. They are heard and seen by people all around us, and they are affecting lives.

This is something I know very well, not only for the impact books like Assuming a Body have had for my own life but also because I have had the great fortune to see the effect of the literary messages I have put into the world. After years and years of searching and struggling through my questions about gender, in 2014 I published an essay that revealed some of this personal history—it was the first time I had ever publicly talked about gender and revealed who I was, and the essay was a huge success. Two years later I published a short book that included this essay in the wider story of my life as a genderfluid person.

Many people who have been touched by these works and have gleaned some bit of courage or self-understanding from them have contacted me in one way or another to share how it has affected them, so I know for a fact that when you put good things into the world, it helps other people. It not only does that—it makes these people grateful, and it instills in them a desire to help others as they have been so helped. It very much pleases me to think that I have been able to push forward this literary conversation that has given me so much, enabling others to make their own contributions. This I think is key. We needn’t publish a bestseller or become President of the United States to meaningfully participate in the continuance of these ideas that bring us together and allow people to live their best lives. This is what we have to give, and with it great things are possible.

Books That Have Helped Me Find a Little More of Myself

Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality 
Gayle Salamon
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Trans
Juliet Jacques
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Kissing the Mask
William T. Vollmann
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Kiss of the Spider Woman
Manuel Puig (tr. Thomas Colchie)
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“The Cyborg Manifesto”
Donna Haraway
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Conundrum
Jan Morris
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Orlando
Virginia Woolf
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A Thousand Plateaus
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (tr. Brian Massumi)

Shortly before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus took a moment to reflect on a practice that was still not very widespread in the Western world, yet one that he had concluded was indispensable to human prosperity:

Who could compose a worthy encomium of literacy? For it is by means of writing alone that the dead are brought to the minds of the living . . . While it is true that nature is the cause of life, the cause of the good life is education based on the written word.

Siculus was a historian—a great one in fact, who authored a 40-volume work comprising the entire history of the known world. I have been thinking lately about his idea that words speak to the dead, and what this means for a people. Words create a historical record—thus allowing us to form a sense of national progress and identity—and they provide vital opportunities to address a nation’s history.

I realized as much as I recently read Letters to Memory, in which the Japanese-American author Karen Tei Yamashita converses with the many documents that have preserved her family’s experience as internees during the Second World War. Yamashita was not yet born when her family members were taken from their homes and forced to live for well over a year in a barren wasteland deep in the Utah desert—the man who would become her father was still young and unmarried at the time—but by poring over the letters, diaries, and other documents that retain her family’s experiences she had the opportunity to construct a dialogue. It is from this encounter that her beautiful, necessary book has emerged.

I have asked myself why the family saved these letters. You might say they were historians, that they knew the value of their stories, this proof of their thoughts and actions in unjust and difficult times. History is proffered to the future. This is what we did. Do not forget us. Please forgive us.

In 1942, Yamashita’s father, grandparents, aunts, and uncles were told to assemble for pickup at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, bringing only what they could carry. (Against regulations, her aunt was reputed to have taken a vacuum cleaner and waffle iron.) After being placed into custody at the Topaz internment center, they lived in spare conditions in the desert for over a year, in the process losing their homes, their jobs, their community, and virtually all of their possessions. Upon their release in 1943 the family was scattered throughout the United States, where they faced discrimination and the enormous challenge of starting their lives over. They were among 120,000 Japanese-Americans so treated, the majority of which were US citizens.

It is obvious that this constitutes a grave historical injustice—what does a nation do with such wrongs? In 1988 President Reagan signed a bill that provided for reparations—each detainee was allotted some $20,000, although many of them had died by then and the $1.2 billion that was distributed represented only a fraction of the wealth that was lost by these individuals. Even though this was a victory that the Japanese-American community had fought hard to win, and the apology was a major (if long overdue) accomplishment, monetary compensation and official admittance of guilt can only be one part of the work of memorializing, forgiveness, education, and dialogue through which such deeds are truly brought to rest.

Where do personal mechanisms of grievance and understanding insert themselves into this machinery of bureaucratic justice? Yamashita first began looking into her family’s past when in 1995 she discovered some papers long held by her Aunt Kay. Soon she became known throughout her clan as the repository of all family documents, and in combing over these archives she began to encounter the internment of her family in a way she had not previously been able to. This was when her dialogue began to emerge.

Yamashita calls her project “memory”—it is memory that blends the author’s own recollections with historical narratives, personal papers, bureaucratic records, and great historical tomes. It is perhaps a species of group memory formed over thousands of years as humans have engaged the questions of war, necessity, failure, grievance, law, justice, forgiveness, and transcendence, all taking place through the medium of the written word. As we all must do, she is finding her own place in this legacy, hewing out her own sense of what she is and what has transpired in the lives of those closest to her.

Yamashita knows that to a large degree her parents’ lives were shaped by their internment and the discrimination prevalent throughout postwar America, and she knows that these lives in turn made her who she is. This history is in her, it is personal as can be, and yet it is also a significant part of her nation’s story. Her book goes beyond her personal story to situate this episode of US history into the larger fabric of human history. So it is more than memory, it is a means of creating her own contribution to this discourse that has occurred over generations. Yamashita poses this book as many things—revenge, resistance, recovery, documentary, inquiry—but I read it most fundamentally as an act of forgiveness, a thing that she says “requires the confrontation of two parties, a meeting face to face between people who have the capacity to hurt one another, and thus, perhaps, to discover grace.” Needless to say, when things are buried so far in the past such a meeting largely occurs through written words.

If we are fortunate, we forgive, but we do not forget. Letters to Memory is an important book in part because it points to how a nation’s past errors are never really over, and how it nonetheless inches its way toward a future. There are plenty of reminders that the internment still lives on, not only in records but in the Japanese-American identity and in the lives of the descendants of internees. Yamashita goes beyond her family’s story as internees to unpack what that experience became as they dealt with the ordeal of building new identities and re-establishing their communities in the face of great loss and ongoing racism. It also very personally deals with the author’s emotions regarding this legacy. This is the work of establishing these deeds as an ongoing, living part of America’s being.

The last surviving member of Yamashita’s family to be interned during World War II died in 2015: we are at a moment when the living memory of this shameful act is disappearing from the world, which surely must have been a motivation for the creation of this book. Once the last survivors have passed on, all that will exist of this episode are the written testaments, along with the documents of American bureaucracy, news stories, records of the resistance, and the little that remains of the camps themselves. If these acts are to be learned from, and atoned for, it will require the work of authors and historians to keep that memory alive and that conversation moving forward.

I have visited two of the sites of Japanese internment: at Manzanar, east of the California Sierra Nevadas, there is a visitor center and some preserved buildings, but the great majority of the camp has long since been dismantled and appropriated by people in the Owens Valley. If not for the concerted efforts of Japanese-American activists to construct a site of memory on the Manzanar space, it would likely resemble the other camp I have visited, Tulelake camp, where all one can now access is a small placard in remote Northern California. I remember what it was like to stand there on a chilly summer day, a violent wind rocketing past my face, trying to imagine how it would feel to be taken from my home and forced to live in this dismal wasteland.

Tulelake is a piece of our past that, like so much of our history, has been lost to the forces of decay and barely exists any longer in any meaningful way. I am grateful to the people who have fought to maintain the memory of what happened in Manzanar, for it is only through their work that I was able to see the conditions of those who were forced to live there and learn some of their stories by reading some of the documents they left behind.

I am, of course, also grateful to authors like Yamashita, who have fought so hard to make this story vivid and to think through its implications with a true wisdom. As I read Letters to Memory and thought of the ways in which Japanese-Americans have sought to reconcile with and preserve this legacy, I couldn’t help but think of the ethnic and gender groups that are currently being demonized by the United States government. Although there has been talk of a “Muslim registry,” thus far nothing has occurred that can compare to the wrong inflicted during World War II, but still families have been scattered and decent people have been terrorized, and there have been beatings, murders, and bombings. Certainly those who have had to find some way to endure these wrongs are now creating their own paper trail as they reach out to their loved ones for support and seek redress from the authorities. These deeds are becoming part of the American identity, and they too will have to be dealt with. We must do the hard work of keeping this national memory alive and conversing with it.

Yamashita writes that she does not intend her book to merely be a sermon, an application of past wrongs to present-day evils; rather it has “no formed definition . . . except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand.” And, in fact, the scope of her book goes far beyond the experiences of her family, as she puts in conversation, among others, Homer, Gandhi, the Buddha, the Vedas, and numerous other writers, thinkers, and texts. She writes that “every history is a story told, weighted by the knowledge of the teller,” and I think it is here—in the knowledge of the teller—one locates that elusive quality that Yamashita hopes will elevate her act of memory beyond a sermon. There is a responsibility here: to herself, to her family, to history, to the future—and also her nation. Yamashita’s story has become a part of America’s account of itself, this process of wrongs, redress, and reconciliation. To my mind, this is the building of a nation’s history.

This is an American story: how America’s government and its people reacted when asked to confront fear, our unsteady process of assimilation and rejection, wounds and forgiveness. It is us. It is a story that has occurred numerous times in our history, but one, as Yamashita’s book testifies, that we are still learning to tell. In fact, right now we are caught up in a major chapter of it, and it is incumbent on us to participate. As Yamashita writes, “art and music and poetry performed in . . . circumstances of incarceration, in death and labor camps . . . is an impulse to sustain one’s humanity and is an act of resistance.” She adds that it is also “an act of witness. . . . [W]hile art may be spiritual practice, it is also political.”

Let me conclude with the words of former President George H. W. Bush, regarding the treatment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War:

In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated.

I include this in part to illustrate how far the Republican Party has fallen—from a President who said “it will never be repeated” to one who talks of Muslim registries and supports white supremacists. And I also include it because Bush is correct: no nation will be great if is does not understand its past. For exactly this reason, we are blessed to have writers like Yamashita.

Books to Help Confront History

Karen Tei Yamashita, Letters to Memory
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Octavia Butler, Kindred
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Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
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Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do
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Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
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John Keene, Counternarratives
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Lauret Savoy, Trace
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Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation
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Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, “At the Tulelake Relocation Center.”

An oddly postmodern thing happens right near the beginning of Virgil’s ancient classic the Aeneid. Having fled Troy in defeat from the Greeks, and destined to found the great Roman civilization, a defeated, beleaguered Aeneas and his men wash up on the northern coast of Africa near Carthage. Before long Aeneas locates the bustling port city, eventually stealing into the magnificent temple of Dido the queen. As he is acquainting himself with the surroundings he discovers an elaborate depiction of the very war that he is a refugee from:

Wondering at the good fortune of the city,
And admiring all the things the makers had done,
The workmanship of what was told on the walls,
Suddenly he saw depicted there,
One after another, the scenes of the Trojan War,
Famous through all the world . . .
Aeneas stopped, and weeping at what he saw,
Said, “Is there, Achates, anywhere on earth
That does not know the story of our trouble?”

Imagine it: the catastrophic war that has wiped your home off the face of the Earth is now the stuff of legend, famous clear across the entire known world. The beloved comrades you watched die as you struggled to defend your homeland are now wrought exquisitely into the walls of a queen’s temple. You even see your own self, fighting the war you have just fled from. It is a curiously modern moment: Aeneas sees the horrific reality he has just escaped as a story told by foreigners a thousand miles away, not so different from, say, a refugee from Venezuela, or Yemen, or Syria, or Myanmar escapes to a more stable nation, only to see the story of her nation’s escalating tragedy—and maybe even herself—broadcast on CNN.

It was years ago that I first read the Aeneid, in classicist Robert Fitzgerald’s standard-bearing English translation, but I had forgotten this scene, and I only mention it now because I have discovered it anew in poet David Ferry’s extraordinary new translation of Virgil’s classic. I do not recall what I thought of this scene when I first encountered it, but, reading it today, it seems prescient of the world in which I live. For the story of the Aeneid is nothing if not a story of how war begets war and destabilizes the world—fleeing destroyed Troy, Aeneas will obliterate the Latin civilization in order to found Rome, and his descendants will come to conquer the very Carthage that honors his loss.

When he discoverers his story in Dido’s temple, Aeneas is at once bewildered, saddened, comforted, and inspired—he also feels some pride to know that the deeds of he and his fellow warriors have become famous. This newfound fame encourages Aeneas, making him bold enough to reveal himself to Dido, who is amazed to learn that this miraculous hero is in her very court. Soon the two have fallen deep into a romance that has been celebrated for thousands of years in myths, ballets, paintings, and novels.

Reading this passage of the Aeneid today has made me wonder what extraordinary events of our modern world would deserve this treatment. What recent parts of history have become so famous as to travel to the ends of our globalized world? What individuals have become so famous, inspiring, and mythic that even far-flung cultures are re-telling their deeds? What events are so amazing that we would feel immensely honored if their heroes happened to visit our land?

These would have to be immensely extraordinary doings to match up to the tale of the Trojan War, which is one of the greatest stories ever told. By the time Virgil wrote the Aeneid—roughly 1,000 years after the Trojan War was first told—this tale was still so universally known that he could assume anyone who might read his epic poem would know the ins and outs of it. In the centuries after Virgil’s death in 19 BC the story continued to live on through the ages (in no small part because of Virgil’s contribution to it), and it is still so famous, a good 2,000 years after Virgil, I can safely assume that most people reading this column will know the broad outlines of it. In fact, just a couple of months ago it again popped up in my life (as it does, seemingly every few months) as I watched the California Shakespeare Theater perform Marcus Gardley’s Black Odyssey—a fusion of the African-American experience and the story of Odysseus’s return home from the Trojan War. It is one of the most canonical stories humans have ever told, one of the most re-told, and one of the oldest, likely even pre-dating the Book of Genesis.

It has also accumulated a distinguished literary pedigree. Perhaps ten centuries after Homer, Virgil wrote the Aeneid, and then fourteen centuries after the Aeneid, Dante Alighieri made it the foundation of his Divine Comedy, widely considered the greatest work ever written by an Italian and acknowledged as establishing the modern Italian language. Famously, Dante is accompanied through Hell by Virgil, but the great Florentine doesn’t just use him as a guide to the underworld—he also draws heavily from the Romanized variants of Greek mythology that Virgil deeply wove into his Aeneid, creating his unique vision of the afterlife. These ideas that Dante created from this fusion of Christian and Greek theology proved to be so vivid and compelling that for over a thousand years they have transformed our conception of what awaits us after death.

Through the Divine Comedy, the Aeneid’s influence continued to live on and on. For instance, Milton’s pivotal portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost—which gave him a depth that no prior author had ever given him and made its own contributions to our image of evil—grows out of Dante’s Inferno. Jorge Luis Borges also held Dante as one of his key authors, once declaring the Divine Comedy, “the best book literature has achieved”—under the influence of this master Borges would go on to revolutionize our concepts of time, history, originality, and infinity. (Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which of course was a huge influence on Borges, among others, was also inspired by Virgil (there is even a scene in Cervantes’s masterpiece that references Aeneas’s discovery of himself in Dido’s temple, but I digress . . .) Undoubtedly there are authors working right now who are heavily influenced by Borges, and maybe even Milton and Cervantes—and thus also Dante, Virgil, and the Trojan War.

This column began with a war in the Middle East that storytellers began recounting 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, and we have followed it to North Africa, Rome, Italy, Spain, and Britain—and all the way to Borges clutching his bilingual copy of the Divine Comedy in Argentina in the early 1940s. I find this one of the greatest things about the literary tradition: it works on the longest timescales of human history, and it easily perforates borders. Literature conducts ideas across continents and through time with a startling efficacy: in the case of the Trojan War, it has traveled all throughout the world and back to the dawn of recorded history. Literature is the medium that is most conversant with humanity’s master narratives, the one that has done the most to form them and make them so indispensible and famed.

Perhaps now, when we are all quite taken by new media, it is important to keep this much slower, low-technology medium in mind. It is quite easy to be impressed at how social media has taken already-compressed cycles of 24-hour cable news into nuclear territory—our national political debates have reached a sort of ecstatic frenzy in which, just minutes after the latest talking points, scandals, and memes hit the Internet they become the subject of tens—sometimes hundreds—of thousands of Tweets and Facebook posts, giving them an oppressive ubiquity. Each twist in this neverending onslaught of raw political incident seems to hit with a maddening regularity, saturating us every which way we look.

There is only so much of this anyone can take, and perhaps we don’t need as much of it as we consume. I myself have become more and more of a social media junkie, but increasingly I ask myself why. Who can even recall the hashtags that were being used to mock poor Anthony Scaramucci just two months ago, much less what the memes du jour were at the beginning of Donald Trump’s Presidency? When I step away from the online frenzy and immerse myself in the longer rhythms of something like Virgil, I feel a profound, visceral relief, and I also feel a whole new perspective taking over. If the Trojan War is one of the grandest narratives ever constructed, the latest political Twitter memes are like microscopic pieces of narrative thread—from the perspective of the everlasting present they may seem hugely important to us, but from the perspective of Virgil they are puny.

I don’t mean to say we should all just check out, but I do think such perspective is something many of us can benefit from right now. We have grown accustomed to calling our national politics “not normal” and “unprecedented,” and I will readily agree that in many ways things are quite bad, but they are still very, very far from the worst this country has seen. To see just how bad things have gotten, read the latest piece by the indispensible historian Adam Hochschild in The New York Review of Books, where he recounts what occurred in the United States during and immediately after World War I. You will see that just 100 years ago there was mass incarceration of immigrants, the shutting down of newspapers and magazines, speeches about executing editors for “treason”—Congress even refused to seat a fairly elected Representative simply because he was a member of the Socialist party. As Hochschild writes,

As our newspapers and TV screens overflow with choleric attacks by President Trump on the media, immigrants, and anyone who criticizes him, it makes us wonder: What would it be like if nothing restrained him from his obvious wish to silence, deport, or jail such enemies? For a chilling answer, we need only roll back the clock one hundred years, to the moment when the United States entered not just a world war, but a three-year period of unparalleled censorship, mass imprisonment, and anti-immigrant terror.

As Hochschild writes at the end of his piece, we all must stay engaged and informed to ensure that this Presidency does not become nearly as oppressive as that of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s, who spearheaded these odious deeds. But I think we might also use a little better filtering when we decide just how important any given outrage is. We might subject the latest transgression to the Virgil test: if an artisan were carving this story into a palace wall half a world away, which incidents would make the cut? Which developments in this critical American saga would make it into the grand narrative of these years that may one day be passed down through the ages? Which things would we want to see if, like Aeneas, we happened to suddenly discover this story being told far away? And which developments are just noise, things that sap our energy and attention but that ultimately are not worth so much fuss?

*

Literature from the Longue Durée

The Aeneid by Virgil (tr. David Ferry)

The Divine Comedy by Dante (tr. John Ciardi)

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (tr. various)

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (tr. Royall Tyler)

The Epic of Gilgamesh by unknown (tr. Stephen Mitchell)

For several days after Stephen Paddock perpetuated the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States, I would start my morning off by crying. The tears would just well up from no particular place, manifesting as a slight constriction in my chest and a warmth behind my eyes as I drank my morning coffee. I made no effort to stifle them as they trailed down my cheeks and wet the front of my shirt. To the contrary, they felt quite good.

I am generally an optimistic, put-together person who can maintain his composure during tough times. Even after other horrific massacres, like those at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I never experienced anything quite like this. The Las Vegas shooting put me into a depression unlike anything I can recall. As soon as I felt those tears, I knew why this time was different.

Everyone has their limit, and in those days after the massacre in Las Vegas I reached mine. I understood that this was not simply a matter of one evil person mechanically slaughtering innocents. That brutal act had pushed me over the edge, but it only had that power because of all the other heartless, abusive, destructive things I have had to witness ever since that day in late January when Donald Trump was sworn in as our 45th President.

I have come to see that we are a country in the midst of experiencing a mass trauma. Those of us who are dismayed at the almost daily cruelties and absurdities meted out by our nation’s President can be likened to a family member who must live in the household of an abusive man. We ourselves may not be the beaten wife or struck child—and certainly those directly on the receiving end of Trump’s policies have suffered far worse than I, who merely must watch this buffoonish man spit upon what is noble about this nation—but simply to live inside of what another has termed “the abuser’s house” for months on end is taking its toll.

I first encountered this framing during the Presidential debates last October, when Trump made unhinged statements and childish outbursts on live television. This behavior was clearly outside the norm for any Presidential debate I had witnessed in my lifetime, as was Trump’s practice of stalking Hillary Clinton around the debate stage and looming over her in a blatant attempt at bodily intimidation. Of course, the debates were only the tip of the iceberg, as they were preceded by such low points as: bodily mocking a disabled reporter, suggesting that Muslim terrorists should be executed with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, calling Mexican immigrants rapists. We all well know the norm-shattering things Trump did and said in attracting the people who would later elect him President.

The debates were a climax in terms of this behavior, a point when the pure malice of this man crystallized in the minds of many—recall Trump threatening to put Hillary Clinton on trial for treason—and following them the journalist and historian Josh Marshall declared that we were all living in the house of an abusive man: we all had to watch as Trump cholerically and spitefully transgressed the norms and institutions that have kept America’s democracy stable. We had no choice but to sit there and endure his outbursts. We watched him issue outlandish, febrile threats to various groups and individuals. We watched his misogynistic declarations that Hillary Clinton was a criminal, his pleasure at churning his crowds into a frothing rage until they were crying out for her blood.

None of us may have personally met Trump, we may not have been singled out by him for abuse, but violent acts such as these leave marks, particularly when they are made week in and week out by the most powerful person on Earth. And we are quite clearly impacted by the bans on Muslims he has signed into law, his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, his brinksmanship with North Korea, his efforts to destroy the gains made by the Affordable Care Act, his assistance in shredding the social safety net in order to give tax breaks to those as rich as he claims to be. Having to watch this endless, often spiteful assault on our most basic values adds up, and it deprives us of our hope for a better future. It is, quite simply, an ideology of abuse.

Let us take a very characteristic example. Here is Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and a hugely powerful Republican, talking with Sean Hannity, a powerful and widely watched TV personality, about what would happen if President of the United States punched Maxine Waters, a female, African-American member of Congress who has very prominently disagreed with his Administration.

NEWT GINGRICH: First of all, let me just say—you’d never get it to happen, but the idea of a round between her and Donald Trump is pretty interesting. I think he would probably win in the opening half minute. But look, what you have on the left, and you see it over and over–

HANNITY: He’s not going to hit a girl, a woman. He’s not going to do that. It’s not–

GINGRICH: Oh, sure.

HANNITY: But– but– but–

GINGRICH: Yeah, but if he was confronted with her, he would be very pleasant until she hit him, and the second she hit him, he would knock her down. I mean, let’s be honest here, this is crazy. I mean, we’re going to have on the left–

HANNITY: Oh jeez, I can see the headline: “Newt Gingrich encourages Trump to hit congresswoman.” I can see the headlines now—that’s not what you’re saying.

GINGRICH: No—look, my point is this, the left—I mean, I did this interview with a reporter the other day, and I cut him off and I said, “You know, you have a pathology. I can’t answer your questions, because you are pathological.” And he was totally stunned and said “What do you mean?” I said, “You are so anti-Trump, you are not in touch with the real world.”

HANNITY: There’s no talking to you.

GINGRICH: “So, how can I have an interview?” I think Maxine Waters is in the same group. There’s this whole group of people who are so, frankly, crazy, that they are certifiably out of touch with reality.

This bears all the hallmarks of an abuser. (For those who would like to read in greater depth on the clinical patterns of abusive spouses and fathers, I recommend Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, from while I am cribbing liberally.) We begin with Gingrich indulging the fantasy of violently silencing someone he disagrees with—in fact, a woman he disagrees with. When Hannity very rightly recognizes that such thoughts are unacceptable, instead of apologizing for the outburst and shaming Gingrich, he instead chooses to make light of the situation and shift the blame to the victim of Gingrich’s abuse. This is all standard operating procedure: issuing violent threats, then undermining the victim through mockery, while also allowing no outlet for properly addressing such violence. Hannity even goes so far as to preemptively demonize the media, just in case they decide to accurately report on what Gingrich has just stated. Already up is down.

It gets worse: after fantasizing about physically assaulting an opponent, Gingrich recounts how he declared to a reporter that anyone who disagrees with him is “pathological.” When the reporter responds with a stunned reaction at this broadside against his rights and responsibilities as a journalist, Gingrich decides that the man is “not in touch with the real world,” finally concluding that he is “frankly, crazy . . . certifiably out of touch with reality.”

These are textbook tactics of abusers. Instead of attempting empathy and admitting that other human beings may have legitimate needs and beliefs, they instead ceaselessly mock and trivialize their victims. They tell their victims that they are crazy, that their beliefs are simply not worth even a moment of thought. In so doing they seek to create a closed environment so that their victims are unable to get an outside perspective on reality. This is how abusers warp the minds of their victims: they demonize the very validity of their victims’ own thoughts until the victims doubt everything they have ever believed and become willing to accept the abusers’ truths as their own. When this technique is not enough to get the desires results, abusers supplement this assault with violence—be it emotional or physical.

This has happened quite often with the Trump Administration. Recently, we can note, for instance, Donald Trump’s harassment of the widow Myeshia Johnson after she found inadequate his sympathy over the death of her husband, a U.S. Army Sergeant who fell in the line of duty. Trump’s repeated insistence that Johnson lied about things that she and others in the room heard him say is one of the most basic techniques of the abuser, as is Trump’s attempt to create a false reality by having his surrogates support these false statements; for instance, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who opined of the widow, “I think there were people who were just looking for something to complain about.” Gaslighting has proven to be one of the core methods pathological narcissists use to maintain control over their victims; needless to say, only those with serious mental deformities would even think of gaslighting a mother who had just lost her husband in the line of duty as an American armed serviceman. Or we might take the statement of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a noted Trump sycophant and a confirmed repeat victim of Trump’s abuse: Christie says that Trump “yells at me at times, but he respects me.” This is such a boilerplate statement of a victim of abuse as to almost be comical in its lack of self-awareness.

Such incidents are not hard to find; to the contrary, they form the modus operandi of Trump and his team, this Administration having left a string of such victims in its wake, going all the way back to then–Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s very first news conference, where he baselessly declared that “members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting” before accusing journalists who simply reported the facts regarding Trump’s lackluster inauguration of “sowing division.” At this point there is, quite simply, an enormous amount of evidence that this Presidency operates through massive, continual psychological abuse.

We all must watch it occur and be victimized by it in one way or another. This is the trauma we are all currently bearing. We know that societies that have existed under brutal dictatorships, ruinous civil wars, catastrophes, or pervasive states of uncertainty, moral devolution, and enlarged pessimism are traumatized by that experience. Clearly we are not at the stage of dictatorship, civil war, or even catastrophe, but we are experiencing uncertainty, moral devolution, and pessimism. We are living in the house of an abusive man. This is reason enough for grave concern.

Let me return to my own personal example. The fact is, it is not regular for me to start multiple morning in tears, and nor is it regular for me to feel on edge, easy to provoke, pessimistic about the future of my world, or unsure that millions of my fellow Americans have any moral compass. These are facts that have settled into my life as I have daily witnessed the callousness and blatant disregard for the wellbeing of others that has characterized Trump and his accessories in the GOP and elsewhere.

These are conclusions that I have fought hard to resist—even today I look for reasons to doubt them—and I will continue to resist pessimism for my nation’s future every single day, but fundamentally there is no escape. I fear that these thoughts and feelings will only continue to get worse until there is a sea change in American politics.

And this is the thing. It is possible to live one’s life in an abusive relationship. People in such households can have good days mixed in with the bad; sometimes for a period the abuser will seem less malign and life can take on a surprising normalcy. But what one can never do in such a relationship is to recover. Those who have made such abuse their field of study are clear: recovery only begins once the victim has escaped the abuser’s grasp. The processing of this trauma can only happen once the victim begins to feel a measure of safety and begins to truly believe in a better future.

We cannot escape. We are stuck with Trump until he decides to move on, until he is voted out of office, until Congress finally accepts its duty to protect the nation from dangerous and blatantly illegal leadership. Fundamentally we cannot begin to recover from the trauma of living under this government until it ends.

I have mixed feelings about applying the term “not normal” to this Presidency for in many ways it whitewashes the enormous wrongs that have been committed by prior American Presidents, Democratic and Republican alike. But regardless of exactly how unprecedented, how non-normal are the policies aims of this Administration, it is clear that its abusive and authoritarian methods diverge significantly from recent Presidencies. We must never normalize the abuse being perpetuated on the people of this nation, the mean-spirited, childish callousness that has now become part of how our Federal government operates. The true danger of authoritarian regimes comes when the emotionally exhausted, desperate populace eventually succumbs to a kind of sleepwalking, still aware that things are gravely wrong but now accepting that this is their reality. This is the beginning of conditions such as Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim loses touch with reality outside of the abusive relationship, and this is where even the toughest and most resilient minds are broken down.

I welcomed those tears in my kitchen for many reasons—they were a necessary release, moments of catharsis, little breaks from the work of pushing against this vileness and absurdity—but most of all I wanted them as proof of my humanity. At their most basic, they were a recognition that I had experienced one tragedy too many under this President, proof positive that I would never be able to say—as I had just heard a Kansan tell a journalist for National Public Radio—that we must simply accept 58 murders and hundreds of casualties as the necessary cost for the freedom of arming ourselves to the teeth with weapons made for war zones. These tears were my proof that on this morning I was not succumbing to the brutal reality this President hopes to force upon us all—in fact I found such a normalization horrifying to the point that it induced tears. Going forward I will continue to remember these tear-filled mornings as a point at which my body very viscerally told me that I had witnessed too much violence in these 8 months.

I have generally written these columns in an optimistic key, because I am fundamentally an optimistic person, and because there is already more than enough cynicism about this nation’s future to be found on the Internet. The elevator-pitch description of this column is “how the arts make the Trump Presidency more bearable,” and here I have sought to inspire, to show how these books we love, this literary community that sustains us, can give us perspective and support during this historically awful moment. I still do endorse that philosophy, and I know for a fact that literature and the communities I find around it have done enormous amounts to sustain me in this period, clearly one of the worst of my life. But perhaps also part of the task of making this Presidency bearable is to at times make it unbearable. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produced.” We should recognize that suffering, if only to let it out and be more honest with one another. There is relief and knowledge in occasionally witnessing ourselves in extremis, in simply admitting that terrible things are afoot and crying the necessary tears.

Recently a friend of mine visited New York City for the first time. He is one of the many who have immigrated to the United States—who continue to immigrate here despite this Administration’s efforts to define the U.S. as a “white nation.” He has only been here for a short time. Most of his energy has been encumbered with the work of navigating bureaucracy, setting up his home, and establishing himself at his new life. But he at last took a break to see what his new home had to offer. So he saw New York City, one of the most indelible achievements America has given to the world.

Throughout the weekend of his visit to New York I was pleased to see him post one photo after another on social media, each one featuring a caption that communicated his sincere astonishment and joy at the cultural treasures he felt so honored to experience. During his trip we happened to chat via text message, and he became solemn about what he was seeing in New York. My friend told me that he felt it was a privilege to be able to live in this country, a place of such cultural opulence and grandeur.

I cannot tell you how much I needed to hear those words right then. I thanked my friend for giving this nation of mine a very gracious and honest compliment, and I informed him that it was precisely what I needed to grab on to at this moment of intense doubt in the goodness of my homeland. It has been proven that even in the wake of life-wrecking disasters, hope for the future can be preserved if we are given reason to believe that we live in a caring community of those who will give material support to one another. Essentially, that there are still decent people and institutions with whom we can build a better tomorrow. I will keep on grabbing on to such sentiments wherever I can find them. They are things that I need right now more now that I have ever before.

Reading for Troubled Times

• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno (tr. E F N Jephcott)
• Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
• Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boll (tr. Charles A. McBride)
• Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman
• No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein
• Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

When I started this column a few weeks after Donald Trump had been elected our 45th President, I knew that something had gone drastically wrong with our politics, but I couldn’t then grasp how this disquieting year would transform us. It’s been a scarring 12 months, and here we are now at the end of this administration’s first year, having endured something together—just what, I can’t really say, and nor can I guess exactly where this dangerous episode in American history is headed.

But I will say that our artistic communities have been responding in ways that have helped keep me afloat. And today, as historic marches across the country mark the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I would like to tell you about an old story that I have recently witnessed re-imagined for this shocking era. It’s a national myth about the most blessed land on Earth, a place of such vast riches that you can just pull wealth right out of the ground, a beautiful terrain of natural magnificence, remarkable people, wide open spaces for everyone to enjoy, and the advancement of freedom—how does this land turn into a place of cavernous inequality, xenophobic resentment, economic desperation, hate, illiberality, and murder? I know you’ve heard this story before, but I’m not talking Trump-Era United States. I’m talking about the California Gold Rush.

This is the place that John Adams—quite likely America’s preeminent living composer—has chosen to set his fifth and latest opera, Girls of the Golden West, which I recently saw in its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera. Discussing contemporary politics by assaulting a major American myth is by now par for the course for Adams: he made a name for himself by scandalizing critics when he wrote an opera about Nixon’s visit to China (now regarded as a classic), and he was later celebrated for making one around Robert Oppenheimer and his unleashing of the nuclear demon.

He has also considered making an opera from the life of LBJ, as well as the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, TX, but he ultimately decided to explore the California Gold Rush, a quintessentially American event. This episode embodied our distinctly New World sense of optimism, fresh starts, and deeply entrenched belief in equality and social mobility, and it combined these good things with white supremacy, Manifest Destiny, pillage, extermination, and greed. The Gold Rush communities that formed in California exhibit the melting pot that is America, drawing hopefuls from all over the world alongside ranks of resentful white men who believed the fat of the land was their birthright—despite the fact that California had only been part of the Union for one year when the Gold Rush started. This episode engages some of the deepest questions of this nation, questions that are far from resolved and are very much at the heart of the present crisis.

Yet though there was very much white supremacy in the Gold Rush, and even as Adams’ nativist ’49ers plotted race riots, I was moved by their earnest pride for America, which the composer relates in their drinking songs. While it’s true their boasts are at times so absurdly grandiose as to come right from a Trump rally—”We’ve got the highest mountains here / Taller trees, and faster deer”—there is much sincerity and earnest truth when they sing, “There is no land upon the earth / Contains the same amount of worth.” America has long prided itself on being just such a cornucopia to the globe, and California, with its bountiful natural resources, extraordinarily fertile farmlands, and intense, savage beauty, often seems most blessed of all. I cannot doubt the miners’ sincerity because I have felt exactly this pride for my home state, even as I have seen many Californians exhibit the exact xenophobia that led these miners to disparage the diverse peoples who have boundlessly enriched our culture (many of them arriving here long before Americans did), while also providing a source of cheap and often exploited labor to make the state run.

This, it seems to me, is the riddle that Adams examines, a riddle foundational to America, that has returned with a vengeance, starting in 2016: Why in a land with so much wealth and opportunity is there so much resentment and animosity? Why in a place that is so beautiful and so desired the globe over are we tearing ourselves apart with hatred?

Opera is the most literary of classical music forms, and Girls of the Golden West is a particularly literary opera. Using a collage method familiar to 20th-century American literature, librettist Peter Sellars composed Girls’ libretto from the remarkable letters of frontierswoman Louise Clappe, as well as newspapers and songs of the time, immigrant diaries, and the writings of Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain. As I experienced it live, these words came across as a distinctly popular American idiom that is full of poetry—so much so that when Act II begins with a staging of Macbeth, it took me a moment to register that we had transitioned from the words of America to those of the Bard.

Adams has observed that these American lyrics demanded that he write a certain kind of music. “What makes this opera unique for me is the influence of the Gold Rush lyrics,” he told the San Francisco Opera, “because structurally they’re as simple as can be. You can’t take language this simple and this frank and set it to overly complex music. It needs to have music that respects its own simplicity.” This is a style that Adams has honed over a lifetime of dealing with America’s most crucial events—including a truly remarkably response to 9/11—and so it is no stretch to say that the sounds of his operas have very much become a part of what America sounds like.

Sellars’ collaged lyrics give this music a basis in our collective voice and shared national history. The people who built the California Gold Rush must have known that they were part of some grand historical moment that would live on in our national memory, and the documentation they have left of this episode testifies to the remarkable thoughts and feelings stirred up by this unique event. Watching Girls of the Golden West, I was able to feel the emotion behind this well-known American myth in new and surprising ways. I realized there is still so much here to learn from and think through: the form penetrates through the popular viewpoints of the era in a way books, film, and TV cannot. To hear the mixed-race character Ned intone Frederick Douglass’s words “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?,” backed by an orchestra while white ’49ers celebrate America’s founding, is to feel the emotion of this sentiment in a more powerful and overwhelming way than I have ever felt it. Similarly, Adams’ ability to open up the songs of the era for a 21st-century audience gives an important viewpoint on the white men who came to California in search of a better life, and whose ambition mixed with desperation, their compassion combined with exploitation.

What ultimately most resonated for me in this work was its polyphony of viewpoint, and this opens onto one of the most unremarked aspects of this opera—its feminist bent. Despite being set in a thoroughly macho environment, Girls of the Golden West revolves around three powerful female personalities, and its climatic scene is the lynching of a Mexican woman for defending herself from a man trying to rape her. The frank, elucidating frontier letters of the fish-out-of-water Louise Clappe—under the pen name Dame Shirley—form the backbone of the libretto and are drawn from her published works, widely recognized as among the great American frontier chronicles of the 19th century. The Chinese prostitute Ah Sing performs the opera’s most remarkable act by purchasing her freedom, and her forceful entrepreneurial designs best any man in the story. And lastly there is the lynched Josefa, a woman whose quiet poise and grace are far too great for the indignities she is made to tolerate daily—her stabbing of a man out to rape her is as much a response to a lifetime of abuse as it is an act of self-defense. It is in these three women, who are each deeply affected by the far West, and who see much better than their male counterparts how their common struggles are obscured by false divides, that the opera shows us the kind of intersectionality that has been too often missing from politics in these divisive times.

Amid all this talk of racial justice, equality, and shared struggle, I would be remiss if I did not recognize what a white, elitist institution the opera is. The truth is, opera is something I can only occasionally enjoy because the price of the tickets are high, and even these prices are greatly reduced by enormous private donations. The extraordinarily wealthy patrons of the arts whose generosity subsidized the price of my ticket are, to judge by the sponsors profiled in the opera’s program, overwhelmingly white: this is an institution that is sustained, enjoyed, and perpetuated largely by upper–middle class and superrich whites. This racial and class divide continues on to the composers and performers: as the San Francisco Chronicle has reported, “The lack of ethnic and gender diversity among performers and even more critically among the composers whose work is represented on the programs of America’s symphony orchestras and opera companies has long been a stigma for classical music—one that neither the San Francisco Symphony nor the San Francisco Opera has remotely dodged.” This is obviously worthy of condemnation, and it must change, but I am cheered by the diversity of people I have seen at the San Francisco Opera audiences this year, as well as the great ethnic and gender diversity of the cast of Girls of the Golden West—dubbed by more than one critic as “the future of opera”—and I hope to see more and more of this diversity in the future of the opera in the Bay Area and nationwide.

As Josefa is being lynched at the end of Adam’s vast monument to the history of America, the action pauses for a moment as this gracious woman spreads her arms magnificently and asks God to forgive those who are murdering her. It is a radical act of empathy that cuts to the core of the community that we must have to endure as a nation, and which is being torn apart right now by animosity. In all frankness, I wish I could muster today the grace that Josefa shows in forgiving the racism and resentment that will soon destroy her; it is not yet a thing I have the capacity for in these dark times, but it is a thing we need and that we must be ready for if we are to climb out of these national depths and become again a nation worthy of the greatness so many claim.

And perhaps this gesture is why I ultimately find the California Gold Rush an inspiration, however unsteady and problematic. Out of this lawlessness, villainy, limitless potential, beauty, murder, courage, cowardice, pillaging, understanding, hatred, hope, ignorance, and genius came one of the most storied and inspiring places on Earth: California, a state that currently stands as a beacon in these days when we have so much reason to doubt the future of our country. It is my home and I have immense pride in it, even though I know intimately many of its damning failures. It is a place that, when I was young, instituted the racist “3 Strikes” law and cut off medical support to undocumented immigrants, but that over my lifetime has attempted to correct many of these terrible mistakes and that has edged more and more toward equality and tolerance.

In a word, it gives me hope, and as this disturbing and terribly painful year draws to a close, I would like to direct your attention to Josefa: well aware that an angry and race-baited mob of white men will soon come to murder her, she calmly attires herself in a rich gown, resplendently braids her hair, adorns herself with magnificent jewels and precious metals. She is noble and magnificent. It is in this form that she meets a mob of ragtag ignorance, calmly beseeching God to grant them grace. In a world that was not yet good enough for someone of her character, she exercised the only choice remaining to her: to die with dignity, making it clear to those who came to murder her that they were killing somebody morally superior to themselves.

I thank Adams for sharing her story at a time when we are perhaps ready for her moral rectitude to at last triumph over those who unjustly ended her life. I reflect on Josefa, and I see that though we are disempowered—though we cannot stop the Republicans from ramming through a disastrous and repugnant giveaway to the superrich, though we cannot make the GOP fund essential health care for impoverished children, and though we cannot prevent Kellyanne Conway on Fox News from slurring Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump as an “attempted coup”—we do have the power to present a vision of moral superiority for history to remember. And as we fight to resist this awful misrule and reclaim our country, to everybody who is today struggling for the soul of this nation, I think of you with opulence.

You are the greatness of America—you are pristine and gorgeous as you engage in the most important work that anybody can undertake. Be aware, this is not work that will end once this ruinous Presidency is over, nor will it conclude once this feckless Congress has been voted out of office and its inhumane and degrading laws overturned. This is the work of a lifetime. I am here for that struggle, and I hope you are too.

Reading to Fuel the Struggles Ahead

The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852 by Louise Clappe
*
History Is Our Mother: Three Libretti: Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, The Magic Flute by Alice Goodman
*
Letters to Memory by Karen Tei Yamashita
*
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
*
About Looking by John Berger
*
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño (tr. Chris Andrews)

Earlier this year I made my first visit to Colombia. During my stay, I became familiar with many of the emblems around which this wonderful nation’s image revolves. There is of course the coffee, some of the best in the world and perhaps primarily known to Americans by the mustachioed Juan Valdez. There are also the ancient indigenous civilizations, whose exquisite artifacts you will see in museums everywhere. Then there is the world-famous painter Fernando Botero, who has adapted his unique style to depict countless national icons, as well as the torture practiced by US soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. And most of all, towering over the rest, is Colombia’s most beloved author, Gabriel García Márquez.

There is an oft-told anecdote that cuts to the heart of this writer’s greatness. As he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, he would regularly meet with his fellow great Colombian author Álvaro Mutis, updating Mutis on his progress by narrating the latest events from his novel. There was just one problem: none of what García Márquez told Mutis actually occurs in the book. He had effectively made up an entire shadow-novel while in the middle of writing one of the most imaginative and jam-packed books in the history of modern literature. This is a measure of how many competing realities existed in García Márquez’s voracious mind.

I am writing about this author today because his greatest work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 50 years old this year, and I would like to understand why it has had such flabbergasting success. This immense novel is claimed to be an effort to express everything that had influenced García Márquez throughout his childhood. It has been called a latter-day Genesis, the greatest thing in Spanish since Don Quixote (by Pablo Neruda, no less), and unique even by the standards of the colossi of the Boom era. García Márquez wrote it in one rapturous year in Mexico City, supposedly chain-smoking 60 cigarettes a day, secluded and reliant on his wife for the necessities of living. To paraphrase critic Harold Bloom, there is not a single line that does not flood with detail: “It is all story, where everything conceivable and inconceivable is happening at once.”

There are hits, and then there are smash hits, and then there are rocket ships to Mars—One Hundred Years of Solitude would qualify as the last. Estimates of its sales are around 50 million worldwide, which would put it in the range of books like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. College syllabi can certainly account for some of this figure, but when one considers by just how much García Márquez’s sales dwarf his fellow Boom greats—Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar—something more than higher education must be called to account. Nor is it easy to explain One Hundred Years of Solitude’s global diffusion: published in at least 44 languages, it is the most translated Spanish-language literary work after Don Quixote.

I think what can be said of this book is that it captured something vital about the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people, not only in Latin America but in other colonized lands as well. Nii Ayikwei Parkes, the award-winning British novelist born to Ghanaian immigrants, has said of the book: “[It] taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-Western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia.” He added that, “Apart from the fact that it’s an amazing book, it taught Western readers tolerance for other perspectives.”

It is indeed true that this book transported something essential about Latin America to far-away places, but I would go farther than that—I would call One Hundred Years of Solitude the most widely read book of Latin American history. I see it as a work in the tradition of ancient foundation stories, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad—or even, while we’re at it, the Bible—a modern version of these works that filtered history through mythic and heroic registers. Reviewing it in 1970 in The New York Times—the year in which North Americans at last received Gregory Rabassa’s “better than the original” translation (to paraphrase García Márquez)—the scholar Robert Kiely said, “the book is a history, not of governments or of formal institutions of the sort which keeps public records, but of a people who, like the earliest descendants of Abraham, are best understood in terms of their relationship to a single family. . . It is a South American Genesis.” Forty-four years later, when García Márquez died, the Times re-upped that opinion in their obituary of the great author, calling One Hundred Years “the defining saga of Latin America’s social and political history.”

The foundation story García Márquez tells is not nearly so heroic as those of Virgil and Homer: rather, his is one of disenchantment and circularity, the slow process of a continent finding its own voice, overcoming efforts to impose a history and trajectory upon it. But though García Márquez would tell history, even incorporate actual historical events into the book, he would not write something that slavishly followed facts. Inspired by Kafka and Joyce, García Márquez believed that in order to speak his truth “it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice.”

Which is to say, even though One Hundred Years of Solitude springs from very real Colombian politics, it far transcends its political context. The author himself has said that the ideal novel should “perturb not only because of its political and social content, but also because of its power of penetrating reality; and better yet, because of its capacity to turn reality upside down so we can see the other side of it.” And this gets right to the heart of his gift: as the leading exponent of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with beguiling treasures that captivate a reader’s imagination. As tall as these tales are—a plague of forgetting, or a woman so graceful and beautiful that she ascends right to heaven—they also have an indisputable connection to our prosaic daily lives. This is what literary myth can do that factual history cannot—as García Márquez puts it, this literature turns reality upside down and shows us what hides beneath.

What could be a better foundation myth for a continent deeply fractured along political, historical, and ethnic lines, yet also desirous of articulating a commonly understood experience? Not only that, this story also allowed those on the opposite end—that is, those who had created the conditions for oppression and exploitation—to comprehend and appreciate this shared experience as well. It was through this feat of imagination that García Márquez forged bonds of community. As he said in 1982 while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, “poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels . . . we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

In giving the world new narratives García Márquez helped alleviate that solitude. This is how books like One Hundred Years of Solitude inspire us: they offer new images, new myths, new ideas, and new forms of understanding that cut against those keeping us in division and incomprehension.

Although an author need not be politically motivated to create such art, this is inherently a political act, for politics is made up of narratives—more than that, it depends on them like nothing else—and whenever art creates new, invasive narratives, it contests our politicians’ authority. Let me explain what I mean. When one hears talk of politicians, political campaigns, legislative politicking, and such, never far away is the idea of “controlling the narrative.” Elections are all about defining the narrative you want and hoping it resonates with the voters; then, once in office, you must hang on to your command of the narrative in order to successfully advocate for the policies you want to drum up support for. Imposing your preferred narrative onto the nation is very much essential for transforming your will into law.

According to this notion of politics, narratives are extremely potent things. This is why wealthy and powerful men (it is almost always men) have invested billions of dollars into building media empires meant to put a stranglehold on certain national narratives. Thus the likes of Fox News and Breitbart have convinced millions of people that certain minorities abuse social aid programs, or that the deficit always requires cutting government spending (except when it comes to the military), and that radical Islamists are perpetually on the verge of overrunning our nation. Against these narratives the left plays its own, and if I count myself as a progressive it is primarily because I find the left’s account of the world far more compelling, compassionate, authentic, honest, and productive than the right’s.

It is in the realm of narratives that art can make its most potent interventions into our politics. I do not mean to reduce a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude to a “liberal vs. conservative” framework—even though this book deals to a very large extent with Colombia’s “Thousand Days’ War,” which was precisely a war between Liberals and Conservatives, like any true work of art it defeats such ready-made binaries to show us that the world is immensely more mysterious and complex. And indeed, this must be another measure of García Márquez’s success: that he has given us books that touch us deeply, even if we know virtually nothing of this source material. His novels have altered our narratives even while they resist simple interpretation, growing with society as it ages and remaining contemporary and relevant. To once again quote Bloom, “García Márquez has given contemporary culture, in North America and Europe, as much as in Latin America, one of its double handful of necessary narratives, without which we will understand neither one another nor our own selves.”

In modern history, great art has always shown other ways of seeing the world. It should always remind us that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, and that even the political narratives that we hold to most steadfastly still only capture at best a portion of this world that is always far more complex than our thought and language can say. To experience a towering work like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to be reminded of the humility we should all feel when trying to assert what is true and what is false.

Of course, this is not to say that progressives should not advocate for the world we want with passion and conviction—politics requires just that—it is to say that our compassion and our empathy should always also be close at hand, no matter who we are dealing with. And we should always look to enlarge our world view through books. Even in this age of media over-saturation—when we have film, TV, Facebook, binge-watching, streaming, Twitter, and so many others—I do not believe there is a better medium for conveying challenging, nuanced, original, and important new narratives to our minds. It is precisely these stories that have kept One Hundred Years of Solitude fresh, and that keeps the world reading it.

More Great Latin American Narratives to Discover

Love in a Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez (tr. Edith Grossman)
*
The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector (tr. Idra Novey)
*
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo
Bioy Casares (tr. Ruth L. C. Simms)
*
Thus Were Their Faces
Silvina Ocampo (tr. Daniel Balderston)
*
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Manuel Puig (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine)
*
Seeing Red
Lina Meruane (tr. Megan McDowell)
*
Fever Dream
Samanta Schweblin (tr. Megan McDowell)
*
Bonsai
Alejandro Zambra (tr. Carolina De Robertis)

Just days after I completed and submitted this column, an enormous controversy broke out over The Public Theater’s staging of William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, which dramatizes the assassination of Caesar and the ensuing chaos and civil war. The controversy was in the choice to make the murdered Caesar a very obvious stand-in for President Donald Trump. (It should be noted that this is far the first such updating of Shakespeare’s play: in 2012, Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater staged a Caesar with an stand-in for then-President Obama in the title role, although there was no notable outcry.)

One could hardly ask for a more apt demonstration of the idea of this essay: namely, theater’s unique ability to retell age-old stories, in the process rendering them relevant to contemporary life. And as it so happened, just as this controversy was reaching fever pitch, I myself was watching a production of Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—an extraordinary performance, and one lacking any overt references to Presidential politics. What most came through in OSF’s beautifully choreographed and emotionally devastating production is the complete futility of the assassination of Caesar, and the utter hell it unleashes on all involved. Having read Caesar numerous times and now seen it live, I feel confident stating that no matter how one interprets Shakespeare, any faithful production would never be one the endorses political assassination. In a nation with a startlingly high number of Presidential assassinations and assassination attempts, no invocation of Presidential murder should be taken lightly.

That said, The Public Theater’s production of Caesar would have to have been an utter travesty to make such an endorsement. One of the reasons Shakespeare’s work has remained so relevant for over 400 years is that it retains its ability to provoke us and make us think, offering no easy answers, a multitude of points of view, and much leeway for interpretation. To the extent that The Public Theater’s production of Caesar has succeeded in doing these things—while not suggesting that violence is the solution to any American political problem—it should be applauded, not condemned.

__________________________________

Joan Didion famously begins her book The White Album with the following words: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” About a year and a half ago I saw a play that made that sentiment literal. I mean literal: for these people, their lives depended on telling stories. It is one of the most incredible plays I can remember seeing in years.

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where they parodied Cape Fear? Before it was a Simpsons episode it was a 1962 thriller starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, and then it was a 1991 remake starring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte. And then—De Niro’s creepy tattooed knuckles still fresh in the American mind—The Simpsons made “Cape Feare.” The idea is simple: a murderer is released from prison, and he immediately sets out to stalk and murder the man whose testimony put him away. In The Simpsons, the murderer is Sideshow Bob, and it’s Bart he’s stalking. There are plenty of visual and vocal allusions to the film, and since it’s an episode of The Simpsons there are also about two dozen other allusions to all sorts of other things from high art to pop culture.

So “Cape Feare” was already about re-telling a popular story, and embellishing it with all sorts of cultural effluvia. And then Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play came along to take this to an extraordinary place.

The apocalypse has come, civilization has fallen, and bands of survivors are roaming the country, trying to locate loved ones and find enough friendly faces to survive. To stay alert through a long night’s watch against deadly marauders, one such group is trying to retell the “Cape Feare” episode. They want to get it exactly right—exactly—so they’re trying to remember every last line, every gesture, every inflection. This is how they entertain themselves in the long, perilous nights. They’re doing something humanity has done for millennia: coming together to enact a cherished, shared story. It’s not just entertainment—it’s a way of bonding, of reassuring one another, of digressing into personal memories, of establishing common fears and hopes.

Fast forward about a decade. Act II. The rudiments of civilization have been put back in place, but the world is still very much anarchic, very much kill-or-be-killed. There is still no mass media, no TV, no electronic communications. One way people make money in this new epoch is to travel around performing famous episodes from celebrated sit-coms. “Cape Feare” is a crowd favorite. The more authentic these re-creations are, the more successful, so they want to get the show perfectly right—so much so that they’ll pay good money to anyone who can give them a line or two that they haven’t managed to remember. Essentially, they’re trying to reassemble the pop culture that fell away with civilization and perform it live. But—crucially—this is all based on living memory, so these stories are mutating as they are being put back together. And of course they are mutating in accordance with the new realities that everyone has to live with.

We have one extraordinary act left to see, but before we get to that, there was something that struck me about Washburn’s story. As I watched, I knew she had keyed in on something fundamental: she was absolutely right, The Simpsons must be among the most widely disseminated and best-understood myths that American culture has ever produced. If civilization ever were to fall, it would be the exact thing we could come together around. After all, who wouldn’t recognize Bart Simpson’s face? Who doesn’t know that Mr. Burns is nefarious? Who has never heard the dejection in Homer’s famous “D’oh!”? As I watched Mr. Burns, I felt chills down my spine: Of course! It made so much sense!

Act III: We’re now roughly 75 years since the end of civilization. Things have advanced from anarchy to a kind of new feudal era, and what we’re watching is a neo–Passion play rooted in “Cape Feare.” However, the “Cape Feare” episode has evolved so much that it’s almost unrecognizable. The Bart character has somehow fused with elements of Eminem. Sideshow Bob has become similarly integrated with Mr. Burns, and other Simpsons characters have evolved. This episode of The Simpsons has developed into a moralistic fable about how civilization went wrong, and how we can redeem ourselves. Mr. Burns has become conflated with fate, with absolute evil, with that dark, anarchic energy that threatens the stability of civilization. And somehow Bart has become the embodiment of youth and energy, the human spirit that will strive to survive in this sad, stricken world.

Obviously there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek to Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play—it’s clearly a work that thrives on a certain level of the ridiculous—but Washburn’s point about the importance of shared stories and how they evolve is serious as can be. What this play captures is the centrality of narratives to our civilizations, how they develop with us and become answers to our deepest questions. The way that we re-tell them again and again. Enacting these master narratives before our eyes is essential to our survival as a species. When we lose everything else, these stories will be the things that we cling to for community, hope, and understanding.

What better place to explore this theme than the theater, which for thousands of years has been the way we come together as a community to share stories? Theater is still a vital force today—a study by the research firm Nielsen Scarborough determined that in spring 2016, over 47 million Americans had attended a live theatre event within the past month. This is many more people than will leave their homes to watch a film every month.

When we come together to hear stories in a community setting, it is the theater that we are going to, and I think there are very powerful reasons for that. As I write this, I am about to drive some 350 miles to Ashland, OR, in order to attend performances of Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights. It is something I have done for years now—the excitement of arriving in Ashland and finding my seat in its theaters is like nothing else I do all year. I cannot imagine myself (or anyone else) ever driving six hours to watch a movie. I am not alone in making this trip: every spring and summer tens of thousands make their own pilgrimage to Ashland, just as millions head to New York City—and elsewhere—to see a show.

The storytelling one encounters in the theater is found nowhere else in life. Because its means of suspending disbelief are so limited, it must be much more creative and seductive in how it captures our senses and draws us into its world. The results can be very potent. When Shakespeare writes, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” as he famously does in A Winter’s Tale, it is up to theater companies to figure out how to put a bear on stage. Will it be menacing? (An enormous, roaring creature built like a Chinese dragon.) Will it be ironic? (A man obviously dressed in a bear suit.) Will it be surreally deadpan? (An actual bear, as was sometimes done in Shakespeare’s day.) It is up to a theater to engineer its own unique solution each and every time it chooses to re-inhabit this age-old tale.

There is no replacement for actually seeing such things with your own two eyes. I recall a summer evening I sat outdoors at dusk in the Orinda hills to watch Beckett’s very ironically titled, Happy Days, in which poor Winnie gives an hour-long monologue buried waist-deep in sand, eventually getting buried up to her eyeballs. Or a truly astonishing performance of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice at the Shotgun Players’ theater in Berkeley, which included a 15-foot leap from a balcony across a precariously stacked wall of gallon-buckets, which of course all came tumbling down as Eurydice desperately attempted to flee the Lord of the Underworld. No other kind of storytelling has ever electrified me as that moment did.

There is a thrilling sense of danger and potential in live theater, and it is elating to see actors sweating with exertion and shaking with emotion. Once you have experienced this, it is impossible to doubt the necessity of our culture’s well-worn words being given new life with each cadre of aspiring performers. There is a renewal, a kind of passing of the torch as each generation accepts its responsibility to propagate our culture’s stories.

And this is why I began this column by saying that the players in Mr. Burns tell stories in order to live. Their performances are indeed their source of sustenance in their harsh, post-apocalyptic world, but even more, without these stories their souls would soon wither. This is the haunting thing about Washburn’s play. It really gives you the feeling of how our stories become us, and of the strange, necessary alchemy that occurs when we experience them.

I want to return to the words of Joan Didion with which I began this piece, but now I will quote her in full:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

These stories are how we come to an agreement about just what is this world is. To experience them together is to renew our shared understanding, and to give ourselves a common point around which to debate life’s big questions. Collectively articulating these stories is indeed a thing we do in order to live. I cannot imagine what life would be life without them.

Great Contemporary Theater

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
Anne Washburn
*
In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)
Sarah Ruhl
*
The Coast of Utopia
Tom Stoppard
*
Copenhagen
Michael Frayn
*
Red
John Logan
*
The Arabian Nights
Mary Zimmerman
*
Antigonick
Anne Carson
*
Death and the King’s Horseman
Wole Soyinka
*
36 Views
Naomi Iizuka

Picture it: three mild-mannered academics are having dinner together in London. They’re literary scholars who have deeply bonded over a shared love for an obscure author. The conversation turns to collegial romance, and the two men begin to press their female colleague on whether or not she has fancied a third man known to all. As they drunkenly continue the lewd discussion in the back of a cab, the driver, a Pakistani immigrant, overhears them. He is not pleased. Suddenly the Pakistani declares that the woman is a “slut” and the men are her “pimps.” After a shocked silence, something terrible happens.

This is a scene from Roberto Bolaño’s momentous last novel, 2666. I was reading it just days after the 2008 edition of Book Expo America, where I had reverently acquired a galley. The book would go on to become a huge best-seller, a critical grand slam, and a winner of a prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. It is truly a great novel, but as I read this scene, I could not believe what Bolaño had written. The things the academics were about to do to this cab driver were completely out of character—they were so unthinkable that it seemed like a bizarre error, a rare lapse on Bolaño’s part.

But more and more it has stuck in my mind as prophetic, all too accurate.

So here is what happens. Offended, the academics demand that the driver stop his car. He complies, coolly handing them the bill. This tense moment seems on the verge of fizzling when one of the men opens the driver’s door and drags him out. As if on cue, the beating commences:

as they delivered kick after kick, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mention seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton [the woman] was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head, except the eyes.

Bolaño wrote this in roughly 2003. When I encountered it in 2008, I honestly thought the worst of this was behind us. Civilized, educated Westerners wouldn’t do that sort of thing any longer. But increasingly I have seen that in fact Bolaño was foretelling our future. He had intuited some deep resentment that was beginning to assert itself in 2003, and was maybe a little more visible in 2008, and is now becoming monstrously unleashed in 2017, this year of astonishing animosity toward Muslims, Mexicans, and many others.

As a writer, Bolaño was obsessed with the way fascism had immigrated to South America after it was defeated in Europe. His shorter novels tend to deal with what fascism became in places like Chile, but in 2666 he seems to imply that perhaps fascism has become globalized. The book is stuffed with fascism, albeit not in the sense of goose-stepping thugs and authoritarian leaders, but rather in the texture of daily life. That is, 2666’s fascism is found in the upwelling of deep-bred hatred that makes these meek men beat a taxi driver to within an inch of his life. A sort of fascism that has become profoundly embedded in the culture of educated, economically powerful, liberal democratic nations.

I have thought more and more about this scene these past months, as we have seen Nazi-saluting creeps celebrating Donald Trump in Washington, purveyors of hate engineering incidents designed to provoke violence and chaos, and the spiking of hate crimes and other forms of racialized violence. I have been brought back to this scene as it has bit by bit been demonstrated that the racism at the heart of Trump’s campaign was decisive in his win, and as our President now defames Mexicans, insults Muslims, incites rage against outsiders, and even uses the name “Pocahontas” to mock a United States Senator. I have thought about this scene, and I have thought how Bolaño detected the rot spreading through Ciudad Juárez long before it was dubbed “the most violent city on Earth,” how he was among the first to zero in on the unique horror of Juárez’s femicide epidemic, and how he was brave enough to turn these nice academics into enraged barbarians.

Thinking of these things called to mind Bolaño’s reflection that “literature is basically a dangerous calling.” Let me quote Bolaño in full on this:

A writer’s country isn’t his language or isn’t only his language . . . There can be many countries, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and obviously that passport is the quality of the writing. Which doesn’t mean just to write well, because anybody can do that, but to write marvelously well, though not even that, because anybody can do that too. Then what is writing of quality? Well, what it’s always been: to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.

When Bolaño says that literature is dangerous to its practitioners, I think it goes back to the state of mind one would have to be in to create characters like 2666′s academics: decent, liberal, incredibly well-educated Westerners who are capable of spouting out feminist pieties while nearly murdering an immigrant with their bare hands. It would touch upon the levels one would have to exist on in order to be sensitive to the inchoate rage that was circulating through Western culture and would soon find itself concentrated in the hateful campaigns of the likes of Donald Trump, Theresa May, Marine Le Pen, and others. Let us not forget that 49 percent of white college graduates were angry enough with the status quo to choose Donald Trump for President.

A writer’s duty is to see as much of the truth as possible of the society he or she inhabits, and often this is dangerous. Not simply dangerous in the sense of journalists like Ben Jacobs, who in May 2017 was assaulted by a candidate for Congress he was covering, or the many other journalists who have been threatened by Trump and terrorized by his supporters at his rallies—I mean dangerous in the sense of having to get close enough to the darkest sides of a society that it begins to infect your mind. This is precisely what Bolaño did, and anyone who has read his literature knows that it left a profound impact.

Bolaño, of course, saw much more of the worst of humanity than should anyone in a single lifetime. He was born in Chile, and he fought for the regime of Salvador Allende just as a coup d’etat forced the suicide of this democratically elected president in favor of a dictator. (Bolaño narrowly escaped with his life.) All of this happening while neighboring Argentina—which had descended into fascism itself with its president Juan Perón—was mutating into one of Latin America’s most hideously grotesque and murderous regimes. He then went to Mexico, a nation that was being ruled by (as Mario Vargas Llosa once called it) the “perfect dictatorship.” And he ultimately settled in Spain, which had just recently relinquished the last vestige of fascism in Europe, a nearly 40-year reign. Given his experiences, it is unsurprising that Bolaño was preternaturally sensitive to a society’s incipient fascism and the darker aspects of humanity.

You can make a very strong case that fascism is the center of Bolaño’s massive literary project. Just to name a few larger examples, we can start with the aforementioned 2666. Then we have By Night in Chile, which deals profoundly with how fascism fled Europe and took root in the New World. Distant Star brings us face-to-face with what fascist evil looked like on the ground in Chile, bringing together avant-garde art and political torture. Amulet deals with a woman who is terrorized during one of Mexico’s darkest episodes, the massacres of hundreds of citizens following major political protests in Mexico City in 1968. And Nazi Literature in the Americas is a sort of endeavor to form a gallery of the petty little men and women who use fascist politics and/or techniques to chase literary fame.

Part of the reason we read Bolaño in America is that his life experiences, and his literary errands, gave him enormous insight into how fascism lurks in a society. This is a subject that has long fascinated Americans—think of the popularity of Upton Sinclair’s 1935 novel about a fascist president, It Can’t Happen Here, as well as Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winner All the King’s Men, George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Philip Roth’s massively bestselling The Plot Against America.

What does Bolaño add to this question that an American author can not? Perhaps Bolaño was the only writer who could give us such deep insight into the nature of political evil while filtering it through the minds of would-be artists who are dominated by a sort of nostalgic romanticism. What this amounts to is a mapping of the difficult, but extraordinarily rich terrain where the most noble aspirations of art overlap with the most perverse aspirations of politics. (And here, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a remarkable inquiry into the similarities between the rise of German avant-garde music and the rise of Nazism, is essential.)

This union of fascism and art has important lessons for us today. When our unbelievably surreal president—who effortlessly conjures enormous lies, changes his mind unpredictably, and breaks all norms of the office—is often compared to a performance artist; when purveyors of outrageous, dangerous lies like the right wing radio personality Alex Jones take cover behind the title of “performance artist”; and when the worst truths of our contemporary politics are frequently uttered by talented comedians who base their newscaster personae off parodies of clown-like Fox News hosts—at such a time, it seems that the overlap of art and politics is something important for us here in America.

So I would like to ask, which of our writers will do as Bolaño said we must and thrust their head into the darkness? I do not know that there is another way to find certain truths we must hear about our nation. These are not things you will read in the newspaper or see debated on CNN. They do not come from a politician’s mouth. They are not the sort of truths that science will unveil to us. They only come into existence when a writer is working at the edge of things, when their language is being used to articulate the highest degree of literary truth possible—writing that contains more truth than even the writer necessarily realizes. Bolaño gets it just right in his story “Dentist” when he says:

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realize that’s a lie.

We must have writers who are sensitive to the secret story. I do not know exactly who these writers are, but I can tell you that they will be, like Bolaño, citizens of the world who can live up to the words, “A writer’s patria or country . . . is his language.” They will be deeply knowledgeable of the history of political systems, and they will have an intimate familiarity with contemporary politics. They will also care deeply about people—about what motivates them, how their minds work, what drives them to passion, and what makes them terribly afraid. And I think they will be the sort who can grapple in the deepest possible way with these rightly famous lines of Bolano’s:

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it’s not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness and death.

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Writers Who Have Shown Us the Secret Story

2666
Roberto Bolaño (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
*
The Neapolitan Quartet
Elena Ferrante (tr. Ann Goldstein)
*
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann (tr. John E. Woods)
*
Texas: The Great Theft
Carmen Boullosa (tr. Samantha Schnee)
*
Seiobo There Below
László Krasznahorkai (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)
*
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood

The story of a woman eating a cockroach—it may not sound like the most inspiring thing in the world, but this book saved my life.

I worked for a corporation, and every day at lunch I would take this strange little novel outside to a poured concrete picnic table and read for an hour in the chilly winter—by far the happiest hour of my workday. More than that: this hour was a means of survival at a job I had grown to despise.

Life had not always been this way. For the previous two years I had traveled, read, and freelanced my way through Latin America. It was a very loose, very free life. I was responsible to no one and had my days all to myself. It was a time of adventure, of exploring, and most of all of reading—for hours and hours every day.

But then my two years were up. I wanted to return home and resume the life I had put on hold. I knew that once I was back in the States I wouldn’t be able to survive on the modest earnings that had propped me up throughout Latin America. So I found a real job. It was not a very good job.

Going into that office in the morning made me unhappier than anything else, and leaving it in the evening filled me with relief. I don’t know exactly how I survived the nine hours in between. I do remember what a blessing it was to read on my lunch hour, the way I could feel my entire mind opening up—as though I’d escaped a suffocating, smoke-filled cell and finally gotten a breath of clean air—and how it felt to walk back into that office, that little bit of life being smothered.

In the year that I survived that job many lunchtime books were a lifeline, but none more profoundly than Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (translated by Idra Novey). Many regard this as the most bizarre and infamous book from a writer who didn’t exactly shrink from eccentricity and controversy. In so many words, it’s the story of a wealthy, sheltered woman who one day squishes a cockroach, experiences a spiritual awakening, spends dozens of pages soliloquizing to the dying creature, and then eats it. She discovers that her whole life is a lie and vows to change. There are Christ-like overtones throughout (hence the title).

Quite possibly Lispector is the only writer on Earth who could have made such a crazy premise work. This should not surprise us. She was an iconoclast who did as she pleased her whole life—for her opener, after dropping a heart-stopping debut novel at the tender age of 23, she promptly left her native Brazil for 15 years. She broke down gender barriers at a time when “woman writer” was virtually an oxymoron in Brazil. She won respect from the establishment while writing about subjects that few—male or female—would dare touch. Her biographer, Benjamin Moser, has written that when she died in 1977, just one day shy of her 57th birthday, she was “one of the mythical figures of Brazil, the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro, a woman who fascinated her countrymen virtually from adolescence.”

Moser has also written that a friend of his once warned, “Be careful with Clarice. It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft,” and indeed, that was exactly my experience with The Passion According to G.H. At a time when I felt myself being dominated by an environment that was intolerably sterile and heartless—lacking any sort of care, humanity, or curiosity—this book was a potent reminder of the world that I felt passionate about.

Within this compact, ferocious novel—that feels like the extended scream of a woman who has quietly wept her whole life—I found so many lines that filled me with inspiration. Above all, The Passion According to G.H. is about shaking off the deception of a world that tries to mold you into what it wants—that in fact uses the lure of material wealth and the fear of rejection to prevent you from ever confronting a reality outside of its own making. At my suffocating job I could very much identify with G.H.’s plight, and her courage helped me find my own.

I underlined so much, because so much of this book felt as though it were written just for me. Here are just a few of the many lines that gave me life:

“Until now, finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it.”

“I’m afraid I’ll start to ‘make’ a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system.”

“Creation isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality.”

“Where was my greater destiny? One that wasn’t just the story of my life.”

I brought these words into one of the most deadening environments I had ever known, and they rejuvenated me. This is what books can do. They do not only help you to find yourself: they help you remain that person, no matter what life throws at you. Through The Passion According to G.H., Lispector reminded me of the self I wanted to stay true to. It also gave me the means to do so. Books like these are little pieces of a better reality that we can take into places that make us feel like a failure—they are reminders that these oppressive environments are not our world and never will be.

I want to return to that word “witchcraft,” because there is something eerie about a book like The Passion According to G.H. Lispector’s mysticism has often been celebrated, and she is indeed a mystic writer, but there is something ironic in the fact that it takes a mystic to put us in touch with the “real world.” After all, we’re constantly surrounded by reality—shouldn’t it be easy to get in touch with?

But it’s not easy: such a basic matter as personal identity is a lifelong quest in which we all struggle to find our true selves. The truth of our world and of ourselves is covered by layers and layers of obfuscation: ideology, marketing, biases, misconceptions, historical narratives, personal psychology, just to name a few. These all must be peeled back if we want to find the truth. This is an idea that has deep roots in the Western tradition—we’ve all heard of Plato’s cave and the shadows its denizens take for real things. And it is still a resonant part of our popular culture—think of The Matrix, where in order for Neo to see the true nature of the world, Morpheus must seduce him with the red pill, then take him on a dangerous journey in which he converses with a riddle-speaking Oracle while watching a young boy demonstrate the artificiality of appearances by bending a spoon with the power of his mind.

The Passion According to G.H. is solidly in this tradition—it’s the story of a spiritual experience that shreds the deceptive layers of the everyday, giving its protagonist a rare opportunity to meditate on the true nature of her life. What Lispector brings to this tradition is prose so original and passionate that it broke right through my deadening office life. She also brings her unique verve: who but Lispector would have the boldness to turn the dying, oozing body of a severed cockroach into an existential crisis that opens up profound realization on the falsity of one’s material life? And she brings her boundless empathy: who else could have taken this symbol of universal disgust, which Kafka turned into the worst sort of alienation and tragedy, and make it into a site of compassion, understanding, and heroic transcendence?

In order to succeed, a writer like Lispector must fight against the decades and decades of conditioning that make us what we are. She must surprise us with premises and characters that are shockingly original. Her prose must be unbeatable. So it is absolutely correct that G.H. draws on absurdity and excess to give its ideas an incandescent, ecstatic energy. This is precisely why it rejuvenated me, and why it remains fixed in my mind as an incomparable reading experience.

Fortunately, that awful job is long behind me, and today I’m able to make my money though truly inspiring work with literature that I love and colleagues I respect. Nonetheless, I still rely on books—they break me out of my complacency and misconceptions. This is an ongoing, lifelong battle. To live in our world is to always run the risk of falling into routine ways of thinking, to stifle the imagination and the empathy that we all need to in order to be authentic, compassionate people. I cannot tell you how essential books are for keeping me where I need to be. With the stressful, busy lives that we lead, plus the hopes we chase and the setbacks we endure—to say nothing of the powerful economic and political forces that seek to define us—we are always in danger of being drawn away from the people we aspire to be. Great literature is that indispensable reality-check.

Fundamentally, a writer like Lispector is a writer of humility. You cannot see the world with such a fresh and penetrating gaze if you are not very aware of your own limitations and personal failings. Nor can you make the search for truth and authenticity such a defining fact of your literature—as it is for Lispector—if you do not approach your art with humility. I very much like the idea of Lispector’s work as a mixture of audacity and humility—to be bold enough to dream up premises that have lost none of their power in 50 years, and to be honest enough to make them live with truth and dignity. It is a rare combination to get right, and it is the mark of an essential writer.

Some Literary Reality-Checks That Might Save Your Life

The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector (tr. Idra Novey)
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Água Viva
Clarice Lispector (tr. Stefan Tobler)
*
Europe Central
William T. Vollmann
*
Torpor
Chris Kraus
*
The Art of Cruelty
Maggie Nelson
*
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
*
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag

Earlier this summer I interviewed my friend and colleague Daniel Hahn, who had just given away £12,500—roughly $16,500. That’s a lot of money, and Danny is not a wealthy man. He’s a literary translator, a line of work with famously low rates, and even though he’s in high demand and tends to be prolific, there’s only so much even the decently paid translators can earn. And yet there it was: he’d just given away half the cost of a new car. Why would he do that?

Here’s another one for you: in 2003, when the translator Michael Henry Heim was 60 years old, he and his wife, Priscilla, gave away $734,000—their life’s savings. They did this anonymously, and their generosity only came out nine years later, after Heim’s death of cancer.

As with Danny, the Heims weren’t particularly rich. Michael Henry Heim was a prestigious and prodigious translator, and for 40 years he enjoyed a professorship at UCLA, but certainly a quarter-of-a-million dollars would have represented an enormous sum to him and his wife. They might have enjoyed lavish vacations with this money, or put it into a gigantic Southern California mansion—but instead they just gave it all away.

The interesting thing is that Danny and Heim gave their money to more or less the same place. Danny’s $16,500 went to establish a new translation award called the TA First Translation Prize, which awards £2,000 to a first-time translator and their editor. The Heims gave their money to establish a line of translation grants now called PEN/Heim grants, each worth a few thousand dollars, and which have so far funded hundreds of literary translation projects.

The reason I’m writing about them today is twofold: first of all, such generosity is noteworthy and should always be recognized; and secondly, it’s emblematic of the sort of values I see all around me in the field of literary translation, where I’ve worked for about a decade. Not everyone in my field gives away quite that much money, but all the time I see my colleagues demonstrate their love for their vocation through various acts of kindness. It’s their generosity that makes my field a rewarding place to be.

Altruism is a complex emotion with many different causes, so I don’t presume to know exactly why my colleagues give so much when they don’t have to. But I am certain that high among the reasons for acts of giving like those of Danny, the Heims, and many, many other colleagues is gratitude for everything the translation community has given them, and an intense desire to see our community remain strong so that it may so benefit the lives of others in the future.

It’s often said that to enjoy your work you have to find people who share your values, and certainly this is why I’ve stuck around so long in the world of translation. Here, money is not a primary motivation. There are high levels of curiosity, a desire to make a unique contribution to the life of our culture, an ethic of being responsible for the community, and a belief that the books we work with are truly important. I don’t mean to romanticize the translation world—I’ve seen pettiness, egos, and self-servingness. These things exist here, as they do everywhere, but they are not common, and they are easy to forget when the charitable values this field embraces loom so much larger. There is a real idealism in the work of translation, and this is a place where one can nourish their idealism, even when other parts of life try to turn us into cynics. Truly, if this wasn’t the case I don’t think I would have been able to sustain myself very long here. Let me quote a little of Danny on how he feels about this field:

The world of people who translate books and publish translations and champion international writing is the most extraordinarily collegial, optimistic, generous tribe I’ve been a part of; every person I know does much more than they’re paid for, everyone is driven by a sense of mission, or a feeling of community, or a drive towards a common good. Every experienced translator I’ve ever met puts a lot of work into helping out those following after them.

I feel the same, and thoughts such as these have been important to remember when the news out of our national government is so grim. We hear stories of immense brutality every day, like ICE agents destroying families, endangering lives, and making sport of killing people’s dreams. Or we watch a Republican legislature attempt to throw millions of impoverished Americans off health care in order to give the rich a tax cut. Or we see that a businessman who is scared to open his taxes to public scrutiny, who has lied in the most grotesque and shameless manner, and who is a serial abuser of women has won the Presidency of the United States, and (if the polls are to be believed) still receives the ongoing support of perhaps as many as 100 million Americans.

These are dire truths that we must grapple with as citizens of this nation. On election night, when I saw that this country really was capable of electing an individual like Donald Trump, I felt as though I had been transported to an entirely new place. I felt like something had been stolen from me. I really could not believe this was possible, and it shook me to my core. And then, in the weeks following the election, I watched the neo-fascist alt-right emerged; I saw a spike in hate crimes; and I witnessed a proud, angry, and hateful white nationalism that had always been a suppressed part of America come into the mainstream.

Undoubtedly many of us were disgusted and betrayed to see what had been hiding under our radar in a country we thought we knew. We should be disturbed at this realization—this is really odious stuff—but we shouldn’t let it define us. It would be factually false and intellectually dishonest to ignore the great good there is here in America. And that is why today I have told you about what I see in the translation world. This community, and so many other artistic communities all throughout America, are also the fabric of this country, even if their good deeds are largely invisible in the cable news cycles, opinion polls, and social media feeds that are now central in shaping our idea of the US.

If Trump can activate much of the bad that America has to offer—make it more visible and give it empowerment and courage—then I think the artistic community has a role in activating the good. If we are ever to defeat Trump—and more importantly, what he stands for—we must make this country see everything about itself that is not Trump. This is one of our duties now, and we are equal to it: we are creative, talented, ambitious people, and we have powerful tools for highlighting this other America, our America. We should take some time out from our indignation and irony to make visible the parts of our world that inspire us.

I am not surprised to see many in my own translation community already doing just this, for this is what translators do by nature: our work is nothing if not the art of making visible something that was formerly unavailable to us. A book that never was a part of America—that virtually nobody here even knew existed—through translation it can be read and known, and just like that our picture of the world is that much larger.

One of the reasons I enjoy translation so much is that in order to show us these things, a translator must be selflessness. He or she must care for a text that belongs to another person, another culture—they must show immense resourcefulness and dedication to this book that is not even theirs. Accordingly, translation is a field in which respect for the other is extraordinarily high, and where you often encounter self-abnegation out of respect for a higher purpose. To me, these are the foundations of an ideal community. Michael Henry Heim embodied much of this ethos when he explained why he himself did not write books, despite translating so many of them:

I’m often asked that question. My answer is simple: There are so many wonderful books that need to be translated, and this is what I know how to do best—I’m not being modest, just honest. As long as there are untranslated books in the world, I know that this is where my duty lies. I have some ideas I could write about if I ever started to, but I prefer to work on those books that I already know can change people’s lives.

I’ve just said very much about the world of translation, so let me conclude by talking about something very different from translation—for there are many ways that those in the arts can change lives. In 1973, a young economist named Sebastião Salgado gave up a prestigious and well-paid job at the World Bank to begin a tenuous life as a photographer. At first the work was lowly and poorly paid, but in the 40 years since he decided to change his life, Salgado has photographed more of the world than any other person on Earth. In the process he has won virtually every honor available to photographers.

His work is extraordinary, and if you have never seen it, I encourage you to google the name “Sebastião Salgado” immediately. Every photograph Salgado takes looks as though it comes from an epic, three-hour, blockbuster film, and also from the Bible. The level of detail in each photo is astonishing, and he photographs people as I have never seen them anywhere else. Even in the small reproductions that I have spent hours looking at in books of Salgado’s photos, the sense of enormity is unmistakable—enormity of landscape, enormity of emotion, enormity of the significance of every person he photographs. Salgado’s career has been defined by photographs of the forgotten: communities devastated by drought in Saharan Africa, thousands of Brazilians carrying 100-pound sacks of mud up rickety, ten-story ladders; a sea of people rushing through a train station in India; nomads traveling through the highlands of the Andes.

Salgado’s photographs have brought attention to countless international causes, and they have spotlighted much of the unremarked grace and heroism that exists every day on Earth, but they can sometimes be excruciating to look at. In particular his Saharan series is brutal. I always think of one of a young boy suffering from a famine: he is being weighed, his whole body suspended in a sling, and you can see his bones clearly through his skin. His posture shows such complete abjection—it is an awful sight.

Salgado himself has been deeply affected by the conditions he has seen. In the 2014 film that Wim Wenders made about him, The Salt of the Earth, he reveals the story of his loss of faith in humanity: the breaking point came after witnessing mass murder during the Rwandan genocide, including that of a dear friend, his wife, and his children. “My soul was sick,” Salgado said, “I no longer believed in anything, in any salvation for the human species.” These horrors made him lose his faith in photography and stop his life’s work.

Salgado’s response to this crisis of faith was to plant trees. After years of hard work, he and his wife, Lélia, had reforested some 17,000 acres of devastated Brazilian rain forest with more than 4 million trees. These years of restoring life to a devastated part of Brazil helped Salgado to see enough good in the world to resume photography, and in 2002 he embarked on a momentous project titled Genesis. For eight years he traveled to some of the most remote places on the Earth, capturing natural beauty all throughout the world.

The artistic world thrives on utopian visions like these. To find a life in the arts requires indisputable hope and optimism, for it is a vocation that sits uneasily within the prevailing capitalist culture. I think we are all hopeful people, and I think right now we need to call on that part of ourselves to believe in our country and make it what we want it to be. I would like to ask that everybody reading this take some step, big or small, to reveal and encourage the America that we live in—the true face of this country, and the America that will still be here long after the tides of hate, resentment, and buffoonery have subsided.

Utopian Visions to Help See the World Anew

Workers · Genesis
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Sebastião Salgado

Understanding a Photograph
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John Berger

The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim and a Life in Translation
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Eds. Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, Russell Scott Valentino

Hope in the Dark
*
Rebecca Solnit

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
*
Lauret Savoy

Education for Critical Consciousness
*
Paulo Freire

Belonging
*
bell hooks