Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  At the turn of the millennium, a novel by a writer who did not exist became an international sensation. “Does it matter,” asked The New York Times, “that he is 20 years old? That he grew up in West Virginia and later on the streets of San Francisco? That he started publishing at 16, under the pseudonym Terminator?” It shouldn’t, the reviewer concluded, “but it does.” Only a time traveler could prove it, but JT LeRoy’s fame would have likely been impossible without his youth and biography. That his novels were in fact written by a woman fifteen years his senior—that Laura Albert created LeRoy alongside the fiction that wore his name—ultimately proved unpalatable to his fans. Six years after announcing a “deft and imaginative first novel,” that same paper exposed LeRoy as a “hoax.” In 2002, Albert watched people “bowing down and kneeling before JT” (or Albert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, buried under sunglasses and a blonde wig); but in 2006, “the media came after me, calling me the antichrist.” They attacked “with the fury of wasps.”

  Today, one might say LeRoy was canceled, or at least a version of it. Once adored, his books accumulated single-star ratings on social reading platforms. Worse, as Szilvia Molnar writes in Literary Hub, they were forgotten: “The complicated story . . . was reshaped into scandal, and ended up overshadowing the books. There was so much talking to and from Albert that Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things lost their value, their real ability to present as fiction.” But even if there is no “JT” to have ostensibly lived their lives, Cherry Vanilla and Jeremiah feel, to the right reader, necessary characters to know. Readers only diminish themselves in getting rid of them, however lied to, however hurt.

  “Fiction gets victimized,” Molnar went on, “when we try to wring the truth from its authors.” In 2019, Zadie Smith interrogated this same imagined idea, “popular in the culture just now,” that “we” should stick to characters “who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.” To believe in fiction’s ambition to understand the other, or at the very least try to, has become not only passé (Smith fears), but harmful.

  As if to confirm this, two writers, shortly before Smith’s essay appeared, took issue with fiction’s politics—the novel’s specifically:

  Anne Boyer: “Do novels have bad politics because they are novels?”

  Jeet Heer: “The bourgeois mimetic novel limits our political imagination and ability to imagine change. It’s going to kill us all.”

  These critiques of the novel as a form arrived via Twitter, a medium whose own form is politically dangerous at best, unforgivably apocalyptic at worst. For several days, in a small sphere, these opinions elicited an unusual rage, a niche frustration; yet their implications betray an astounding irresponsibility—not only toward “the novel,” but toward literature, toward art, as a human activity. They are, in a word, cynical, which is far more likely to “kill us all” than a mode of fiction. If the “bourgeois novel” limits the political imagination, cynicism eradicates it. CF. P48

  Neither is it helpful that Boyer and Heer never clarified what they meant monolithically by “novels” or “the” novel, which seems to gesture at a British-American, institutionally sanctioned mode—when the “literary” in literary fiction doesn’t mean literature so much as a genre in which dogs bark in the distance, parents die of cancer, couples are dishonest with each other, and professors suffer the youth of their students.

  We have, Smith claims, turned away in our distrust: “In the process of turning from [fiction], we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naïveté, political and moral irresponsibility.” Smith, unfortunately, never identifies this “we”—nor those who claim that “only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction.” But the cynicism she senses is, I think, very real. “A performative display of non-interest,” she calls it—“a great pride in not being interested in the other, which is sometimes characterized as revenge and sometimes as an act of self-preservation.”

  It strikes me how many of these same accusations have been leveled at photography, as if the sensibility of the image—mute, spatial, politically slippery, at the mercy of context—were suddenly applicable to long, narrated works of art that create their own contexts.

  Cynicism has always attached itself to the personality as rejection. In his History, Russell introduces this philosophical milieu, born as Grecian city-states fell to Alexander’s empire: “When political power passed into the hands of the Macedonians, Greek philosophers, as was natural, turned aside from politics and devoted themselves more to the problem of individual virtue or salvation.” This inward focus, “increasingly subjective and individualistic,” laid the groundwork for Christianity’s “gospel of individual salvation.” At last invited to love our neighbors, our neighbors had become politically irrelevant. Their souls passed from citizenship into aesthetics: eternal things no longer worth understanding, only saving. Only collecting. It’s no coincidence that Christianity and colonialism are companions, nor that Catholicism is the most image-centric, iconographic of religions.

  Today, we are differently conquered, and with different systems of external, impersonal control. Our lives are constantly and overwhelmingly transactional, inflicted with a seemingly intentional exhaustion. Cynicism, as a reactionary philosophy, remains—in fact flourishes, expressing itself, Smith writes, “in some version of I’ve had enough of, I just can’t with—fill in the blank.” It’s how “we” cancel, shun, ignore, humiliate, dissociate: our tired and wounded mutilations of citizenship, of justice.

  Arendt sees this same exhaustion as a predicate to fascist destruction: “Excluded from participation in the management of public affairs that involve all citizens, the [bourgeois] individual loses his rightful place in society and his natural connection with his fellow-men . . . By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals.”

  “Fill in the blank” is apt. It implies a single word or short phrase, easily encapsulated, copied, discarded, used. It implies something fixed and shareable, like currency—the function of the image in a visual culture. This is in direct contrast with a project like fiction because, as Smith notes, fiction is “suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye.” In fiction, the self is a fluid of varying viscosities. It wouldn’t make sense to show someone a photograph of a fictional character, not in substitution for their story. Just as we, out here in real life, can’t introduce the fullness of ourselves to others with a single image—or even a single social media profile—neither can the characters we meet on the page.

  What fiction offers is the representation, or re-creation, of change. “Without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking,” Smith writes, “we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible.” In fiction, we can see that lives are in flux, that even stable and consistent identities are fluid. While not as rampant as Smith imagines, if readers turn away from or distrust fiction, they deprive themselves of relatively safe, private, and aesthetically stimulating opportunities to practice seeing other human beings as beings-in-time. This is, I think, why so many scientists tell us that fiction tends to foster empathy in readers: we allow ourselves, from a distance, to allow others their pasts, their mistakes, even their violences—all without turning away.

  After the 2016 election, when fiction felt not only “more important than ever” but also an escape from noise, I decided to read Suite Française—that final, unfinished masterpiece of Irène Némirovsky’s. A Ukrainian émigré who found celebrity writing in French in the interwar period, Némirovsky felt tragically, eerily necessary to read.

  The Suite conjures first a France in chaos as t
he Reich sweeps through Paris and into the countryside, and later a hushed, claustrophobic France, both tense and indifferent as German soldiers occupy its towns and villages. Némirovsky thrusts her readers into the pandemonium of cities under fire: “Panic-stricken, some of the women threw down their babies as if they were cumbersome packages and ran.” One woman, clad in costume jewelry, writhes in agony: “Her throat and fingers were sparkling and blood was pouring from her shattered skull.”

  All of this, strangely, Némirovsky portrays alongside absurd comedy. The servants of one household, whose “need to follow a routine was stronger than their terror,” insist on packing to flee Paris “exactly as they had always done when getting ready to go to the countryside for the summer holidays.” These extremes make Suite Française the perfect war novel. Rather than poetic or honorable, war is absolute hell (and impossible to replicate in any photograph).

  Her most moving pages are those set in provincial France, where the temptation of kindness encourages the French to share their culture with those who seek to destroy it. Despite the German demand for heavier meals, “the French couldn’t believe anyone would be crazy enough not to recognise the excellence of their food, especially their golden round loaves, their crown-shaped breads. There were rumours they would soon have to be made with a mixture of bran and poor-quality flour. But no one believed it. They took the German’s words as a compliment and were flattered.” Naturally, kindness done to power cannot buy kindness in return—only leniency; and even that, as the villagers learn, is never guaranteed.

  Call it harrowing, call it absurd, call it tragic, call it brave: Suite Française, revealing as it does our psychological incompatibility with life during wartime, is literature par excellence. Yes, it’s horrible that people go on gardening and cooking, living laughing loving, while their friends and families are killed, incarcerated, or tortured, while their cities and books burn, but it’s also inspiring: we find a way to survive, even if we end up having to lose what it was that made us us. We have our tethers to this realest of worlds, no matter what else happens: weather, seasons, food, sensuality. The human ability to adapt is as admirable as it is repulsive.

  Némirovsky’s work is part of a reading pattern I’ve developed over the last several years, turning more and more, intentionally or not, to work that confronts the atrocities of fascism, totalitarianism, and ideologies of supremacy—at first intuitively, and later for what would become this book. Many of these books examine or evoke the Second World War, to which it became quite fashionable, in the early days of the Trump presidency, to compare the political arc of the entire contemporary world.

  Not that this fashion isn’t justified. It’s hard not to think of World War II when many Americans have stopped hiding their swastikas, and even fly them proudly. Nor was it hard to make the leap, in one’s head, from the rescinding of protections to the proclamation of persecutions, from propaganda to concentration camps—at least until the president built actual concentration camps, and the intuition was no longer necessary.

  Familiar, too: our desperation to joke about it all. The renewed popularity of satire when it’s almost indistinguishable from reality is another of the twenty-first century’s vintage throwbacks. It’s easy to grow benumbed to the absurdity of day-to-day life in the United States, where “satire” is simply a reenactment of what happened earlier that week, but with an audience’s anesthetic laughter (at least until the physical isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, where even that went silent). With respect to Trump, the contemporary comedian is barely capable of exaggeration. Aside from expressing genuine compassion or indicating a shred of intelligence, there’s nothing the former president can say, at this point, to shock anyone. What is there to exaggerate?

  From the beginning, it’s been difficult not to think of this when people engage in “resistance” cosplay, online or off. Those who oppose Trump seem just as enthralled as those who support him. So many tweets, websites, blogs, bumper stickers, memes, and books—including this one—are borne of frustration, anger, fear. Many adults call this Trump burlesque the resistance. Look at how stupid he is, their memes say. Can you believe how awful he is? their T-shirts demand. As if one hasn’t already formed an opinion. The American fascist aesthetic is one of noise and merchandise: rallies and red hats, T-shirts, tiki-torches, and ideologies reduced to marketing slogans; everything superficial, cheap, stupid, and easily swallowed is prey to its usage. I wish I could say otherwise, but the aesthetic of resistance is no different—equally noisy and commodified, right down to the T-shirts, the slogans, and stupid tweets.

  The assumption that sharing an image of the president’s smirk with a direct, word-for-word quote highlighting his racism or cruelty or incompetence will generate political action is the same assumption one makes when sharing an image of suffering and believing the mere sight of it will end all suffering—rather than fortify the market for images of suffering.

  A marketable, usable resistance isn’t a resistance at all: it’s a gentrification of leftist politics that will soon discover its reliance on a fascist counterweight in order to pay its rent and keep shouting words we don’t even need to listen to because they’re exactly what we expect to hear. In case I haven’t thus far, I want to be completely clear about this: amplifying hate, stupidity, and moral repugnance for sensation’s sake does not seem an ideal way to resist a president whose only concern is fame, nor a political attitude that feeds off overwhelming visibility. Nor do many media organizations—whose marketing campaigns profess a need for support so they can explore the “truth,” so they can “resist”—honor themselves by brandishing Trump’s pastel face and propagating his latest threat to “democracy.”

  Even more astonishing is the rate at which this news is recycled into memes. Throughout 2016 and well into and beyond his presidency, Trump’s words and images have been co-opted and transformed into comedy; it’s a natural substitution for what is, without laughter, pure horror. But comedy belittles the threat of someone like Trump. It makes light of the fact that he exists and, even more shockingly, that he won. But in this contradictory nation that refuses to reconcile itself to its own atrocities, its own global and domestic terrorism, what needs to be resisted is the sensation of Donald Trump. Even getting rid of him cannot change who elected him—this nation that not only allowed all of this to happen, but, with its disdain for critical thinking and its worship of profit above all else, encouraged these circumstances to take root.

  After the Holocaust, Adorno noted how it had become “difficult to write satire.” In the wake of Nazi atrocities confessed during the Nuremberg Trials, it no longer seemed possible to strip malevolence of its political disguise: “Irony’s medium, the difference between ideology and reality, has disappeared. The former resigns itself to confirmation of reality by its mere duplication. Irony used to say: such it claims to be, but such it is; today, however, the world, even in its most radical lie, falls back on the argument that things are like this . . . The gesture of the unthinking That’s-how-it-is is the exact means by which the world dispatches each of its victims.” When loving or admiring Hitler, say, is no longer rhetorical hyperbole but a simple dramatization of the truth, what power does the satirist retain?

  Political satire is powerless when it’s based on the assumption that the powerful are ashamed of their actions, or at the very least fearful of repercussions. Nor, in a system like this, can satire change the minds of those who could hold power to account. That’s how it is, we say—those words Adorno feared. If this is what we accept, how it is becomes how it remains.

  In July of 2020, when Trump was confronted with the reality of COVID-19—that it was killing a thousand Americans every day—he told an interviewer, “It is what it is.”

  But satire, to return to Némirovsky, is one of Suite’s great strengths. Even in the midst of the Reich’s destruction of France, bourgeois men and women fret over what china and what linens to pack as they flee Paris. One woman, having just lea
rned that her two eldest sons have died, performs her grief: “She drew herself up and, already imagining the black veil fluttering around her, showed her cousin the door with pride and dignity.” At every turn, Némirovsky’s besieged France is peopled with families and individuals who can’t bear to part with their possessions or break decorum. With bombs falling all around them or with German soldiers sleeping in their homes, it’s tempting to laugh at their smallness. But the novel’s genius is that we don’t laugh, at least not at these characters, not when their lives are ripped apart and irretrievably scattered: “Everything caught fire. Roofs caved in, floors cracked in half . . . Everyone was shouting at once, calling to each other, and the voices all merged into one—the village was reduced to a roar. ‘Jean!’, ‘Suzanne!’, ‘Mummy!’, ‘Grandma!’ No one replied.”

  No one is spared war’s blood and smoke: “None of them knew why they were bothering to flee: all of France was burning, there was danger everywhere. Whenever they sank to the ground, they said they would never get up again, they would die right there, that if they had to die it was better to die in peace. But they were the first to stand up when a plane flew near.” It’s this precise juxtaposition of life’s lightness and its sudden fragility that makes the comedy in Suite so affecting. In her notebooks, Némirovsky acknowledged this ambition: “If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show but the prosperity that contrasts with it.” With village girls flirting with their German occupiers; with moments of spring birdsong in between bombing raids; with the scent of cherry blossom coming in through the windows of a bedroom a German officer has taken over; and with the attention given to choosing the right bottle of wine, the right cheese, to using the best flour or the ripest peaches, Suite Française is a monument to the human wish for continuity, for familiarity. Living in terror, one reads in this fiction the wish to wake up every morning and recognize even a small piece of one’s world.