No Action
History, the novel, and the historical novel
The past arrests me in its several ways. Last night at a bar a TV attacked me with nostalgia in the form of music videos by Blondie (“Rapture”), Lionel Richie (“All Night Long”), and Sting (“Shape of My Heart”). This morning on my Substack feed I wasted twenty pleasurable minutes on reading fellow GenXer Michael Elliott’s post “The Best of 1985,” a survey of the best music of the year of Marty McFly, when I was an impressionable 14-15 years old. (Pleasurable wasting: as good a description of the affect of nostalgia as any.) I am also reading Jennifer Clement’s gripping memoir The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat and Me, which describes her extraordinary childhood in 1960s Mexico City and her as-extraordinary young womanhood in 1970s New York. Magic and squalor inseparably abound: it’s like Patti Smith’s Just Kids but a lot less sentimental. In the typically poetic, deadpan fragment I just read, Clement and a friend see Elvis Costello performing “No Action” at CBGB’s. “It was our anthem,” the friends decide.
But what really got me going was Brandon Taylor’s long review of Ross Barkan’s novel Glass Century, which I haven’t read, was thinking of reading, may yet still read. But it gave me plenty to think about in terms of my own historical novel, which I finished writing on June 11, the day scholars agree was the day that Clarissa Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. What a lark! What a plunge!
But is my novel a historical novel? On what terms is a work of fiction properly arrested by the past? Nostalgic surfaces, however accurately reproduced, are insuficient, though there is an undeniable Mad Men sheen to my mid-Sixties scenes. Brandon Taylor, who listened to the audiobook while strolling Florence, felt thoroughly immersed in the dreamworld of Barkan’s novel, which covers the period from the erection of the Twin Towers to their downfall and beyond. But in his view Glass Century fails to be a Historical Novel (TM). He writes:
Here, I believe, we see what has become of the social-historical novel after the golden bowl broke, so to speak, with the dissolution of all the old coherent myths. The historical novel survives into the contemporary moment much reduced in scale and altered in its aim. Rather than serving to illustrate the development of the social process through character conflict, where the characters themselves serve as emanations of distinct social forces (the revolutionary spirit vs conservatism, for example), the contemporary historical novel is more akin to a chamber drama whose elucidations are merely descriptive. At least in the case of Glass Century, where there is no demonstrable evolution in the social process through the characters or their conflicts. Rather, history is a thing that happens to them with the strangeness and randomness of weather. The reader recognizes history solely through the recognition of certain brand names that pass over them.
Taylor doesn’t mention Gyorgy Lukács but is basically quoting The Historical Novel chapter and verse: for Lukács, the function of the historical novel is to dramatize social contradictions through characters who are not only shaped by historical forces but are agents within them. Taylor indicts Barkan’s book for being insufficiently dialectical, for not depicting the social whole through the actions of the characters: “No one does anything.” What Barkan gives us is closer to a family saga, which Taylor sagely calls “[a] distinctly American attempt to make up for the lack of history’s presence in our fiction.” Instead of action, Barkan gives us essayistic disquisitions on various historical phenomena, presented from the perspectives of his two main characters—one street level, one panoramic. That sounds like a smart approach, like a pair of pincers capable of grasping events as theory and practice. But the characters are observers rather than actors—and they don’t even observe, in Taylor’s judgment, in their own voices, which gives the novel an overly “written” quality.
Does my own novel elude these pitfalls? It has a couple of things going for it. In Glass Century, as in the novels of Sir Walter Scott (who literally wrote the book on historical fiction), the main characters are fictional; they exist in the same universe as real figures like Trump and may even interact with them, but as in the more rigorous forms of time-travel narrative, they are unable to affect events. In the Arendtian terms I find useful, they may labor (reproduce the conditions for their own lives) and work (be part of the “human artifice,” make the objective things, including artworks, that sustain the world). But they are incapable of action, which for Arendt means taking initiative, rolling the dice, performing public deeds the outcomes of which are as unpredictable as they are irreversible. For Arendt, only speeches and deeds in the public realm count as political, world-constituting activity. Were Mona Glass or Saul Plotz (I love the names!) to somehow thwart the 9/11 attacks, we would leave historical fiction behind and enter the déclassé neighborhood of the SF-adjacent alternate history novel. The alternative would be to give each character the function of representing a particular attitude or a particular class, and through dialogical conflict (as in Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy) wrestle a particular historical question to the ground. But Taylor seems to suggest that contemporary writers are incapable of producing such grand narratives in the approved magisterial fashion.
The Last Words of Jack Ruby, on the other hand, has three protagonists, two of whom really existed: the titular amateur assassin (Norman Mailer’s pet name for Ruby) and my cousin the boxer Barney Ross. The third protagonist, FBI Special Agent Jon Bergman, is fictional: assigned to interrogate Ruby one last time as he lays dying in Parkland Hospital, Bergman finds his own identity challenged as he follows Ruby down rabbit holes of nostalgia and paranoia. Nothing Bergman does or can do will change history, but his investigation is his work in the Arendtian sense, an attempt to reify history as object of contemplation, as truth—he tries to make the inassimilable deeds of Oswald and Ruby usable, in Van Wyck Brooks’ sense of the usable past. (Bergman does ultimately commit a deed, an action in Arendt’s sense—but you’ll have to read the novel to find out what it is.)
Ross and Ruby are useful protagonists because of the differing scales of their memorability: Barney Ross was a genuinely heroic figure who is largely forgotten today, while Jack Ruby remains the infamous author of the infamous postcript to the crime of the century, Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul.” Dov-Ber Rasofsky’s devout father wanted him to be a scholar, to follow the viva contemplativa as a rabbi or at least as a teacher in a cheder, but Reb Rasofsky was murdered in a holdup when his son was 14 (the age at which I was mooning along to my cassette tape of The Dream of the Blue Turtles). Ultimately that crime transformed Dov-Ber Rasofsky into Barney Ross, a man of action, who fought his way to three simultaneous championships, won the Silver Star in World War II, ran guns to the Irgun in 1948, and became an anti-drug advocate after recovering from the opiate addiction he picked up on Guadalcanal. All his life he was shadowed by the insignificant figure of his boyhood friend Jack Ruby, born Jacob Rubinstein, who failed completely to leave any sort of mark upon history until his egregious act in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters on November 24, 1963. Barney was a character witness as his trial, part of a defense conceived by the flamboyant attorney Marving Belli which argued that Ruby was incapable of culpable action due to mental illness. He never decided to shoot Oswald, he just saw red at the right (or wrong) place and time.
Fictional Jon Bergman is assigned by the real J. Edgar Hoover to learn whether or not Ruby was an actor, an instrument, or a malfunction of history. The Last Words of Jack Ruby tries to unravel that particular knot.
Back when I was on Twitter my bio read, “Nostalgia is my weapon of choice.” I meant it ironically, cognizant of nostalgia as a regressive affect; its temptations only increase as I get older and the world gets worse. Everywhere this GenXer is assaulted by algorithmically manufactured nostalgia, from the songs they play at Trader Joe’s to shows like Stranger Things or Duster whose naked designs on my D&D-playing, Dukes-of-Hazzard-watching younger self leave me cold. But I also thought, and still think, that there’s a utopian element to nostalgia, because its essence isn’t its content—Optimus Prime dolls, Kermit the Frog singing “The Rainbow Connection,” etc.—but the wistful feeling of potential that nostalgic memories bring. When we are nostalgic we are traveling in time back to moments that were once defined by their openness and fluidity—that’s the true meaning of being at home, in the nostos of nostalgia, since our home (our oikos) is part of us, created by us, as a snail creates its shell. The pain (the algia) comes with the ossification of history. Nostalgia is the mood, the Heideggerian Stimmung, of it might have been otherwise. The might have is the residue of action; the algia is aroused by contact with the work of those days. A song, for instance:
The work of history is to keep the contingency of the past alive.
