Power and Class in Political Fiction

Elite Theory and the Post-War Washington Novel

David Smit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030267681
• eBook ISBN: 9783030267698
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book introduces Elite Theory to the literary study of class as a framework for addressing issues of the nature of governance in political fiction. The book describes the historical development and major tenets of Elite Theory, and shows how each of four post-war Washington novels—Gore Vidal's Washington, D.C.; Allen Drury's Advise and Consent; Joan Didion's Democracy; and Ward Just's Echo House —illustrates the way class-based political elites exhibit forms of "ruling-class consciousness" and maintain their legitimacy in an ostensibly democratic form of government by promoting themselves as models of behavior, promulgating an ideology that justifies their rule through their control of the media, and accepting new members from the lower classes. Reading these novels through a socio-political lens, David Smit offers suggestions for ways to work for a more just and equitable society in light of what this analysis reveals about the "culture" that produces our political elites.

© The Author(s) 2019

D. SmitPower and Class in Political Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David Smit¹

(1)

Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA

David Smit

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Political fiction covers a wide range of genres and subject matter in almost all national literatures. These genres range from the spy novel and political thrillers to serious portrayals of characters wrestling with the ideas that shape political behavior. The subject matter ranges from electoral battles and crises in foreign affairs to utopian and dystopian visions of the social order. In American literary history, popular novels based on how the government actually functions at the national level are quite common, but serious literary novels about the function of government at various levels—national, state, and city—are relatively rare.¹ It is generally accepted that serious literary fiction about American governance began with Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age and Henry Adams’ Democracy in the 1870s and was only continued a century later after World War II in three novels about local and state governments: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men , whose protagonist is the governor of Louisiana; Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah , whose protagonist is the mayor of Boston; and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, whose protagonist is the governor of Texas. There is some dispute over whether there are any post-war novels about national politics, a sub-genre of what are often called “Washington novels ,” that are sufficiently insightful and eloquent to be called “literary.” In any case, American literary scholarship has tended to focus on the ideology and philosophy implicit in political fiction; there has been little work on how the class status of those who actually govern America influences their exercise of power.²

In this book I nominate four novels as candidates for the genre of serious, literary “Washington novel” and study how the class status of their authors influenced the way they portray America’s ruling elites in the second half of the twentieth century and how these representations capture the paradox of elite rule: that America, despite its self-proclaimed myth of being a classless society, is ruled by a political directorate (a concept I borrow from Stanley Aronowitz), composed of a range of opposing factions, whose members are primarily from the upper-middle and upper classes. I argue that these four novels illustrate how such an upper-class directorate manages to maintain its legitimacy, given that its existence contradicts a major myth the nation is supposed to embody. The four novels are Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C., Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent , Joan Didion’s Democracy , and Ward Just’s Echo House . As a framework for understanding how elites maintain their legitimacy, I use a body of scholarship called Elite Theory.

In my analyses of these writers, I engage in the “politics” of representation in fiction. As Cora Kaplan (2000) has pointed out, the novel as a genre is a site where social forces can be debated, theorized, or even policed, a form that is influential in shaping the ways we think about the factors that contribute to our notions of gender, race, and class. And individual novelists, as William Dow (2009, 221) puts it, necessarily express, even reify their own class interests, which in turn shapes the identities of their characters, which are built on class goals and aims. These social and psychological demands of representation raise a number of critical issues about authors: how their identity has been influenced by their class milieu, how that milieu informs their literary practice and their social allegiance, and how authors shape their novels to be accepted by their audiences, conditioned by the culture to expect fiction to follow certain conventions and meet certain expectations. The demands of representation also raise a number of critical issues about the epistemology of fiction, such as how or in what sense various characters can represent a certain social or economic class; whether the characters fairly represent the class; whether the author intended them to do so; whether the author is, intentionally or not, presenting the characters as positive models of their class or subtle critiques of the inadequacies of the class; and whether issues of class in particular works of fiction do in fact or ought to supersede or complement other issues important to cultural studies, such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and national identity. Of course, looming over all these issues is the larger “meta-critical” issue of how or in what sense the authors of fiction or the characters in their fictions have the “agency” to act independently of their class standing, the freedom to transcend the ideology of their class.³

Thus, I study my four novels as complex fictive constructs—“imaginaries,” if you will—that, on the one hand, embody the inherent point of view and biases of their authors but, on the other hand, taken as a group, offer us a reliable, even sociologically valid, portrayal of a significant faction of America’s ruling elite in the last half of the twentieth century. I explain how all four writers, as members of the upper classes but temperamentally “outsiders,” are qualified to write about our ruling elite and how they each deal with their fraught relationship with their class, taking into account the generic qualities the authors attribute to the class, the tropes they use to describe the class, and the ways they depict how upper-class ideology influences the gender expression, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and national identity of their characters. I show that while these writers do not, indeed cannot, transcend their elite status, in composing their novels they paradoxically draw attention to the unconscious ways in which their characters are limited by their elite status, and thus are incapable of seriously considering the needs and desires of those outside their class, especially members of the poor and working class.

These novels also reinforce the common perception promoted by the popular media that politics is primarily a matter of individuals performing in an electoral game, of winning or losing battles based on strategically manufacturing images and promoting cultural issues that will excite the most voters and bring them out to the polls. These novels make explicit the ideology behind this strategy: that elite rule is less a matter of representing the interests of the great majority of citizens and more a matter of negotiating sets of policies among other factions of the elite out of the public view in order for the elites to further their own interests. What these novels elide or ignore—the needs and desires of “the people,” those whom our ruling elites supposedly represent—becomes a metaphor for what ruling elites themselves elide or ignore: that the poor and working class need to have some agency, some power, or at least some access to governance, in order to be represented at all.

The Political Novel

The four Washington novels I study are “political” in two specific meanings of the term in the history of criticism. First, the novels I study are “political” very narrowly in the common-sense notion articulated by the first major theorist of political fiction, Morris Edmund Speare in The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America. To Speare (1924, 22) political novels are devoted to “the complex machinery of politics” and portray how those who “exercise the levers of power” are influenced in their decision-making and how the consequences of those decisions affect the essential life of the country: “wars, industrial adventure, economic adjustment, commercial progress, diplomacy in foreign lands, social experiences of every kind, education, art, science, discovery and exploration, expansion and internal development—all are the grist of the [political novelist’s] mill.” Thirty years later Joseph Blotner in The Political Novel would basically accept Speare’s definition but distinguish it from social novels that had political overtones. To Blotner (1955, 2) the political novel “directly describes, interprets, or analyzes political phenomena”; it does not merely foreground social or economic conditions, as do The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath.

The four novels in my study portray politics as defined by Speare and Blotner: they focus on politics fairly narrowly construed in the popular sense as getting things done, such as passing legislation, confirming nominees for federal posts, or, more broadly, influencing the way the actions of federal government are conducted. Politics in this sense involves four rings of power: (1) the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, (2) the bureaucracy that interprets laws and implements policy, (3) the lobbyists, consultants, and the media who try to influence how laws are formulated or implemented, and (4) the think tanks, commissions, media barons; the boards of special interest groups; and the leaders of social movements that try to shape the ideology of those who exercise power more directly and promote their causes to the public at large.

The four novels I study also illustrate another tradition in literary studies that defines the political novel much more broadly as dealing with ideology. In his highly influential book Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe (2002, 19) argues that the political novel, which arose in the nineteenth century, was based on characters for whom “the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society,” had so “penetrated the[ir] consciousness” that they could be identified as behaving according to “some coherent political loyalty or ideological identification” that drives them to “think in terms of supporting or opposing society” and rallying others to action in the name of that ideology. Howe had in mind such novels as The Possessed, Man’s Fate, Darkness at Noon, and The Princess Casamassima. Howe realized that this ideological aspect of the political novel had shallow roots in America and by the mid-twentieth century, the twin ideologies of representative government and free-market capitalism had become so pervasive that the main characters in more recent American political novels, such as Ben Compton in the USA Trilogy, Jack Burden in All the King’s Men, and John Laskell in The Middle of the Journey, all of them with an ideological vision for America, could not hope to rally others to their cause and were therefore shown at key moments to be isolated, exhausted, alone. This Howe called the politics of isolation: “an isolation that a wounded intelligence is trying desperately to transform into the composure of solitude” (Howe 2002, 200).

In Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, Robert Boyers (1985, 18, 20, 22) expanded on Howe’s definition of the political novel as the study of political or ideological ideas in relation to experience by adding the notion that political novels are a “sustained inquiry into the conditions of power and the ideas likely to move the world,” “a consideration of causes and probabilities and unforeseeable consequences” conditioned by an ideological “absent cause,” a concept he borrows from Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson. Boyers (1985, 22) defines an absent cause as a total system of social relations so various that it is impossible to describe in its totality, and, the “material habitat” in which all of us act, even though it is, in Jameson’s words (1981, 25), “nowhere empirically present as an element.” To Howe and Boyers, then, we should expect political novelists to draw attention to the unconscious assumptions and biases, the unconscious ideology, of their characters, and of course, one dominant influence on any ideology is class standing.

Following Howe and Boyers, I also analyze the unconscious assumptions and biases of both the authors and their major characters, pointing out the “absent causes” that shape their beliefs and actions. What these novels reveal is that their authors are only capable of portraying a limited range of what I call “ruling-class consciousness,” a spectrum of consciousness that in its most developed form expresses the collective effort by a faction of the political directorate to dominate all other factions among the elite by controlling all three branches of government and the electoral system, thus denying much of the electorate, especially the working class, minorities, and the poor, any political agency or influence. This highly developed form of ruling-class consciousness became increasi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Class Consciousness in Late-Twentieth-Century America
• 3. Elite Theory and the American Political Directorate
• 4. Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C.: Maintaining Legitimacy
• 5. Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent: Moderate Ruling-Elite Ideology
• 6. Joan Didion’s Democracy: Moderate Ruling-Elite Constituencies
• 7. Ward Just’s Echo House: Implementing Policy/Accepting Others
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter