American Political Fictions

War on Errorism in Contemporary American Literature, Culture, and Politics

Peter Swirski

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349704613
  9781137518880
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137514714
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Through a discussion of diverse art and media such as apocalyptic thrillers, rap, and television, Swirski debunks the American political system, sieving out fact from a sea of bipartisan untruths. Engaging with close analysis and multiple case studies, this book forges a more accurate picture of contemporary American culture and of America itself.

1

A Picture Is Worth a Hundre d T housand Words

Joseph Heller, Picture This

Keffiyeh in the Knesset

History is bunk, says Henry Ford, the American industrial genius, who knew almost none.

Joseph Heller, Picture This

In 1961 a first novel by a then unknown writer won the National Book Award, edging out another first novel by a then unknown writer. But while few readers today remember the winner, Walker Percy’s existential novel Moviegoer, with every year the runner-up looms bigger than ever. With tens of millions copies sold in every corner of the world, with translations ranging from Chinese to Finnish, Catch-22 has even wormed itself into everyday language, boasting entries in English dictionaries from Webster’s to the OED.

A modern classic and a staple of college literary curricula, it is also—in spite of its pacifist tenor—required reading at the US Air Force Academy, which in 1986 even sponsored a symposium to mark the quarter-centenary of the book’s release. This last accolade sounds less peculiar in the light of the little-known fact that, for the 1970 film adaptation, Hollywood assembled not only a cast fronted by Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Martin Sheen, Martin Balsam, John Voight, and Bob Newhart, but also the twelfth largest bomber fleet in the world.

Much of this enduring success can be attributed to Heller’s reader-friendly aesthetics: acerbic humour, immaculate and complex plotting, pleiades of oddball characters, and an almost rapperlike countercultural iconoclasm. But, at the end of the day, the reasons for its abiding place in the twentieth-century zeitgeist have more to do with history than with literature. Ostensibly set during the Second World War, Catch-22 came to epitomize so much of the decade it ushered in because it so uncannily presaged the mindset of the Vietnam War. Little wonder that, while the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations waged war to make peace, pacified Vietnamese villages in order to save them, debased language into a public relations spin-cycle, and turned the Cold War into a comedie bouffon, Americans turned en masse to their up-and-coming master of black comedy.

More than a decade later, amid the chaos of Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed another book of Heller’s for The New York Times, predicting that Something Happened would be to the 1970s what Catch-22 was to the 1960s: rooted in history, visionary about the future. Were he writing at the end of the 1980s, he could have said the same things about Picture This, a historical tour de farce written after eight years of Reagan that reads today as if it had been written after eight years of Bush II. This prophetic intimation of the future past is one compelling reason to revisit this extraordinary novel from the writer who passed away in 1999, after completing his farewell Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.

In Picture This Heller breezes through two and a half millennia of history, politics, economics, and art to deliver his most searching sermon and his darkest satire. Exhuming long stretches of Western history, ancient and modern, time and time again he fast-forwards to his Reagan-era present, splicing history and literature into a novel type of narrative: historature. Naturally, the cynic in him has few illusions about the efficacy of art—or, for that matter, history—against ignorance, apathy, or worst of all, television. If there was never another novel written, he shrugged in a 1971 interview, “no one would care. But if there was no more television, everyone would go crazy in two days.”¹

In Picture This his cynicism is equally corrosive. You will learn nothing from history that can be applied, he tells his readers, so don’t kid yourself into thinking you can. Yet the artist in him belies the cynic. Having conceded previously that he was no good at writing nonfiction, he yokes his genius for the surreal to the retelling of sober fact. Having confided elsewhere that the easiest part of writing for him was the dialogue, he now crafts a novel-as-history—or history-as-a-novel—with scarcely any dialogue at all. Having traded ink for acid, he takes the artistic risk of his career by composing a summa historiae that stands out from his oeuvre like a keffiyeh in the Knesset.

In the autumn of his career, like the elder, more vitriolic Twain, Heller takes on a subject of epic proportions: the American empire. On a narrative canvas befitting his ambitions in size, he clothes Periclean Athens and the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic in military fatigues in order to juxtapose their spectacular rises and even more spectacular falls with the state of the American union. He is, to be sure, too canny a historian to shut his eyes to the differences among the three superpowers. But the stirring consonance of his comparisons suggests that the differences may be only superficial, and the analogies profound. Shuttling back and forth between the internecine wars on the Peloponnesus and the colonial heyday of the Dutch East India Company, Picture This lives up to its author’s catchphrase of being a book about money and war. Recto and verso of the same political coin, these twin engines of history impose an almost classical unity of theme on what some critics panned as a scattershot (not to say scatterbrain) book.

Is Heller a prophet? Or is it just that we don’t care to learn from history? In the year that Picture This came out, the author himself favored the latter alternative: “No one can change history, but it keeps on repeating.”² Indeed, the pity and pathos that permeate the book arise from his focus on the historical invariants in human affairs, particularly when it comes to politics, war, and money. Barring military technology and the means of economic production, precious little, after all, has changed since the Golden Ages of the Greek and Dutch republics.

“I went back to ancient Greece because I was interested in writing about American life and Western civilization,” explained Heller in an interview with Bill Moyers. “In ancient Greece I found striking—and grim—­parallels.”³ And if his literary thesis is right—if the historically dissimilar superstructures are driven by the same political and military engine—Picture This goes a long way to explaining why Americans regularly find themselves at war with countries many could not even place on the map.

The Rise of the Dutch Republic

The bust of Homer that Aristotle is shown contemplating is not of Homer. The man is not Aristotle.

Joseph Heller, Picture This

Wearing the chiton of Cassandra under the burgemeester’s finery, Heller tops both with a jester’s cap and proceeds to dismember three different bodies politic that, as he is at pains to portray, have fallen prey to imperial hubris. That is why behind his satirical récit of the history of the ancient Greek imperial democracy and the Dutch corporate regime—peppered with his puckish, other times scathing, ad libs—always lurk the decades that belonged to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.

Stitching these disparate epochs and geographical locations is the painting depicting one of the world’s greatest philosophers, executed by one of the world’s greatest painters, purchased in 1961 by one of the greatest American museums for then the greatest sum of money ever spent on a work of visual art. The end result is a narrative structure perfected already in Catch-22: time-warped chronology that mixes and remixes cyclically amplified flashbacks and flashforwards to a handful of central events, the book’s structural and thematic leitmotifs.

One of these is the life and death of Socrates: soldier, cynic, philosopher, and gadfly on the Hellenic body politic. Another is the destructive and, as Heller goes to extraordinary lengths to document, self-destructive succession of wars between Athens and Sparta. Finally, there is the genesis in 1653 of the painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer by Rembrandt van Rijn and its subsequent vagaries on the international art scene.

Even without Heller’s sardonic asides, it does not take a degree in history to recognize in the sundry episodes from the lives of the Greek and Dutch empires the archetypes of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the conservative revolution under Reagan, and—uncannily—the neoconservative revolution under Bush II. Projected onto a canvas at once panoramic and intimate, the fates of the three empires are catalysts for the author’s ruminations on the nature of democracy, war, law, art, money, and not least, human nature.

Heller’s chronological jump-cuts underscore the common fate of republics that come down with an acute case of manifest destiny. The historical fact that in 1609 Henry Hudson seized a prime chunk of real estate on North America’s eastern seaboard in the name of the Netherlands only tickles his sardonic bone. So does the fact that mercantile Holland was in its time as fearsome a commercial power as is the United States today. And that, enshrined as the democratic torchbearers of the Western civilization, both Athens and America got there on the backs of political demagoguery, domestic slavery, and overseas militarism.

Heller takes no prisoners when savaging the disparities between accepted historical pieties and the actual historical circumstances. So overriding, in fact, is his allegiance to history that some reviewers were scratching their heads over whether Heller’s novel was a novel at all, as opposed to “a history text in which the pages have been scrambled.”⁴ In the face of a syncretic satire like Picture This, one can, of course, debate where solid fact ends and poetic licence begins. But there is no debating that what holds its thirty-seven chapters together is not a conventional hero or storyline, but a sense—and the senselessness—of history.

Heller cribs from a staggering number of sources, from Plato’s Apology, Laws, Republic, Seventh Epistle, and Symposium and Aristotle’s Poetics, Metaphysics, and Ethics, to Xenophon’s Hellenica, Diogenes Leartius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—not to mention Hesiod, Aristophanes, Aeschines, Homer, and who knows who else. As if that were not enough, he lifts entire sections almost verbatim from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, particularly on the bloodbath of the city of Corcyra, the deliberations leading to the massacre of the island of Melos, and the calamitous campaign of Athens against Syracuse.

His portrait of Rembrandt and his times, on the other hand, owes at least as much to Gary Schwartz’s Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings, Paul Zumthor’s Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, and John Motley’s more than a century old yet still unsurpassed treatise The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Little wonder that in the face of this cornucopia, some literary critics threw up their hands in despair, sounding for all the world like Mordecai Richler when he grouched that Richard Condon’s political satires were not so much to be reviewed as counter-researched.

True enough, Picture This flouts every rule taught in creative writing classes. Piling fact upon fact and trivia upon trivia, it wastes no opportunity to digress into—among a myriad others—thumbnail biographies of Alexander the Great, William of Orange, Philip II, or Spinoza among disquisitions on curing herring, the invention of the telescope, and the Dutch shipbuilding industry, not to mention Rembrandt’s birthweight, schooling, marital and extramarital life, and even such crumbs of art history as the fact that the corpse in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was that of a man hanged for stealing a coat.

At first blush all this may seem just a slapdash inventory of historical ins and outs, no more than narrative fodder for the author’s irrepressible rhetorical flourishes and ironic editorializing. Heller’s ruminations on his craft, however, offer good reasons to believe that this fre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 A Picture Is Worth a Hundred Thousand Words: Joseph Heller, Picture This
• 2 No Child Left Behind: Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days
• 3 A Planet for the Taking: Alistair Beaton, A Planet for the President
• 4 (R)hyming (A)merican (P)oetry: Various Artists
• 5 The Left Wing: Aaron Sorkin, Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., Eli Attie, et al., The West Wing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index