Daze of Our Lives
On "Eat the Document," social movements of the 1960s, and what do we mean by "everyone"?
ZOOM Conversation #3 on Memoir
This Saturday, September 23 from 3 to 4pm EST. To RSVP write to me at: lauriestone@substack.com. The Zoom is for paid subscribers, and the cost to upgrade is low right now.
Here’s a taste of what we’ll talk about.
Memory is the enemy of story. What we remember consoles us, even a memory of pain we keep running out tongue along. Memory consoles us because we appear to ourselves as a hero or a victim, and often the victim hero. This won't work for writing to stir pleasure in the reader.
The reader wants an experience the reader can enter as if the experience is about the reader. The narrator has to get out of the way of this experience by not asking the reader for understanding. The reader doesn't want the job.
So, as a writer who uses your life to prompt the things you write about, you need very little of what actually happened as you've recorded it in memory. Run your hand over the memory and find the place that's hot, even for you, and start there. Start there and see what happens to what you write in the moment of writing. Let go of what actually happened or what you think actually happened, and use memory as a prompt for where it will take you now, as you work with language, itself.
There are three buttons at the end of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” I love your reactions. Please tell one friend about the stack. Every comment attracts new readers.
Eat The Document
In the early 1970s, lovers Mary Whittaker and Bobby DeSoto are staging extreme protests against the war in Vietnam when an action goes haywire and results in a death. They go undergound, and Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta’s exuberantly melancholic second work of fiction, tracks their separate fates as figures masked to others and muted to themselves.
The novel reads like a stolen diary or a thriller, advancing via snapshots, fast forwards, jump cuts, and fades. In most chapters, we’re inside the mind of either Mary, called Louise, or Bobby called Nash, in their underground lives. Sometimes we’re inside Miranda, a young idealist who’s attracted to Nash. Or we’re inside Henry, who sets Nash up in a bookstore and who is slowly dying from a mysterious chemical agent.
Folded into the narrative, too, are the diary entries of Jason, Mary/Louise’s 15-year-old son, who is one of those brainy, barely embodied boy animals who live on statistics. In this case the minutiae of 60s’ rock music. He has no idea who his mother really is. Still, he longs for a connection to something he can’t name, and his sardonic takes on the corporation-branded culture he drifts through mark him as her child.
Mary/Louise drinks and ghosts around in her underground life. The novel also shows us her earlier days, when, in flight, she plugs into a collective of women living off the grid, a world Spiotta lovingly evokes with all its cat hair and cooked pinto beans crusting in unwashed pots. Even doomed or fatuous resistance engages Spiotta. Nash, In his bookstore, continues a be as much Bobby as he can get away with. His bookstore becomes a hub for baby dissidents—an unorganized gaggle of logo breakers and hacker subversives who plant information on corporate websites about the damage their products cause.
Nash warms to their “skate-rat rebelliousness,” and even when they steal from him, he won’t bust them. “[H]e absolutely refused to be a cop of any kind,” writes Spiotta. “It really would be the last thing he would ever do. He was certain that the tiniest choices altered the world as significantly as larger choices. It was through accumulation that people gradually became unrecognizable to themselves. He would sacrifice a lot not to become an enforcer."
The book’s rah sixties! sentiment has come to look pastoral against the noir greasiness of our current, mediated state. Spiotta doesn't see society or individuals in terms of broken things that need fixing. She looks at human actions according to the butterfly effect of chaos theory Nash has referred to above, where a small change ripples out to produce large consequences, sometimes destructive and sometimes creative.
Her most scathing portrayal is reserved for Josh, a young reptile whose brilliance captivates Miranda for a while. After immersing himself in a spectrum of youth subcultures, he pimps himself out to a corporation with tentacles in everything from drugs, pesticides, food, media, and housing and sells them passionate yearning as a commodity. “We market meaningful community, privatize it, copywrite it, trademark it,” he says in a presentation for the post-urban environments he’s promoting. “Ultimately we make prefab communities that never feel synthetic or mass produced. It will be the corporate village that will make money on the desire to escape corporate hegemony. We want to attract the people who hate Wal-Mart.”
To Spiotta, words are controlled substances, and they make her pages vibrate. “[T]he semi-retarded, tiny subversion of extreme, physically expert but mentally unchallenging subcultures” is the way she describes the comic-book and video-game obsessiveness of the kids who swarm Nash’s store. We get to know the characters through their moment to moment actions and feelings. There’s no skimping on inner life, and no one is reduced to a case history.
The book laments for all its inhabitants, even for types like Josh, for we are all, you come to feel, locked in the buzz of “controlled simultaneous stimulation” while looking for an angle, a wedge of solid ground to speak from to a culture that spits out any kind of sincerity. Like the characters in Hardy’s novels, the cast here is crushed. Mirrors don’t reflect hope. Spiotta makes no brief for the hubris and stupidity of terrorism, but from the perspective of the corporate matrix we live in and that she lustrously evokes, the communes and resistance movements of the 60s look as airy and twinkling as Walden Pond. Ultimately, she wonders with alarm: Can emotions be manufactured? Before reading again what I’ve written here, I would have said no.
Having reread the Spiotta piece today, I find myself thinking about how political movements sometimes cut through time—bringing the world to a new rock of understanding. The French Revolution comes to mind. The way it grinds away at the divine right of kings and eventually every other doctrine of unequal power based on essentialist beliefs that are false. More often in time—and not even a long period of time—a great new idea gets smushed down by the forces that never liked it in the first place, so it’s unrecognizable as the thing it was. I’m thinking of the women’s movement that sparked to life in the US toward the end of the 1960s and its brilliant insight (borrowed from the French Revolution) that a class of people, inside a category of false traits, were grouped to keep them unknown to themselves and to restrict their freedom in the world.
Part of the reason this happens to good ideas is that people believe things progress in time. They believe in progress, and they believe progress is inexorable, the same way people once believed in the divine right of kings. If progress is always moving human society forward, then the past must be understood as a series of mistakes the present has been anointed to correct.
I get the allure of thinking this way. I thought this way when I was lucky enough to have come of age at the exact moment the sexual revolution and the women’s movement were shaking the past in their fists.
We thought progress meant more freedom for more people. The women’s movement should have been a rock, like the French Revolution, but sadly it has not turned out to be a rock. To lots of people, progress doesn’t mean more freedom for more people. It can mean anything they want it to mean.
There’s a whole other stripe of history that sees the past not as a series of mistakes the present was born to correct. It sees the past as a pure and golden age that has been defiled by the mixing of a refined and essential group with a degrading and essential group, pitching the world into a dark age. In 1984, Patrick Brantlinger published an historical account of this form of thinking—you could call it decline and fallism, after Spengeler’s account of the collapse of the Roman Empire—in a book called Bread & Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture As Social Decay (Cornell University).
It’s a brilliant book in many ways, although Brantlinger has nothing—I mean nada—to say about women or feminism in all his many adventurous pages. He’s a boy doing boy thinking, and although there is plenty wrong with that, I learned a ton from reading him.
I wrote about this book in the Village Voice (February 1984), and this section—that seems to resonate with Spiotta’s novel and with our current swirl of where are we? comes at the end of the piece:
What makes people anxious about democracy and the new isn’t mass culture but the barbarians (remember, they sacked Rome) and what they stand for. By barbarians, I mean the people who, for the last 300 years, have clambered to get into democracy: first the middle class, then workers, ethnic and racial minorities, nonwhites in the west, women, gays, the entire Third World.
From the perspective of a barbarian, the question is: How could a slew of theorists, who disagree about politics but are nonetheless all white, male, and members of the intelligentsia, scan the curve of modern history and NOT come away feeling fear and loss? When democracy includes all the rough beasts, there may be enough good-life niceties to go around, but white male intellectuals will have less power to steer democratization. They feel their range of motion snipped by what they see as chaos.
Accustomed to order (and having someone else shop for them), they push their carts through the supermarket of ideas, see too many barbarians with conflicting desires, and stagger out, reeling from cultural agoraphobia. They gaze at the face of otherness, and a sensation washes over them. They can’t document it, but they feel in their bones that whatever the future has in store, there was once a time when systems worked, when communities were stable, and when the clatter of dissenting voices didn’t drown out the sound of their own thoughts.
With the exception of Freud, whose future is bereft of hope, and Camus, who doesn’t think in terms of progress and regression, all of Brantlinger’s subjects (Marx, the Frankfurts, etc.) construct religious models: equating excellence with permanence, and promising to purge civilization of all its plagues. Brantlinger doesn’t poke at the imaginative hold of utopianism, partly because he thinks in religious terms himself. His “living community” may be a phantom, but it’s a utopian phantom, awaiting the trumpet notes of “the new faith.” He also leans away from psychology. He’s fascinated by Freud (his theories of civilization, not psychotherapy), and he argues against the Lasch/Sennett charge that mass culture is psychologizing society by shifting the focus of consciousness from public to personal problems. Brantlinger omits a central dilemma of cultural theory: that democratic utopias are split down the middle, simultaneously going forward in time and backward in time.
In content, they’re on the side of the new—advocating individual liberty, challenging received authority, appealing to the modern consciousness of the self that evolved as belief in the sacred eroded. But utopias invariably imagine society as a large, embracing family and are as a consequence suffused with nostalgia for childhood—for a personal past remembered as a simpler, surer time, and for a place in the family, a system organized around anything but democratic principles. Utopias are always the golden age revisited or paradise regained, offering shelter from life in the lonely, uncertain self.
The utopian promise, that the system is whole and can correct all problems, is the same as the liberal belief in progress, and like it destined to unravel as the next rough beast points out it’s been excluded. Schisms and exiles follow. In democratic theory, fear of the new is the Frankenstein story—terror of the creature that scrutinizes its origins too closely. From the perspective of the outcast, faith crumbles into depression.
Perhaps Freud miscast the death wish. Perhaps it’s not a preference for death over life and passivity over action but a pervasive cloud of negative classicism we live inside—a wish for revenge against the new for dashing our idealism. Maybe it’s the inability to recover from the discovery of death, the realization that experience consists of fragments, and that desires rise up only to shrink and fade.
How can culture theory keep up with technology? Computers, those anti-classical entities, are also anti-Frankensteins, never too depressed to have a chat. “Would you let your daughter marry a robot?” I asked a friend, quoting a headline from the Star. “If he was good to her,” my friend answered.
Can comedy save us? I doubt anything can. But it may be the pleasure we can all feel.
another writer friend raved about EAT THE DOCUMENT, though i thought it was non-fiction and not a novel. your take as always is fascinating, will have to add it to my teetering TBR pile!
Wonderful. I love this: "Accustomed to order (and having someone else shop for them), they push their carts through the supermarket of ideas, see too many barbarians with conflicting desires, and stagger out, reeling from cultural agoraphobia."