Literature for a catastrophe

This week, rather than rail directly against the daily outrages of Donald Trump—it gets old and there are always too many to cover in one column–I am going to focus on works of literature written long before Trump and the pandemic but that nonetheless speak to our current condition. They take place in troubled times, real and imagined. These are three works of fiction the themes of which have eerie resonances to what we are going through.

Chaos, Confusion, and an Awful Clarity

“It Can’t Happen Here,” the ironic title for the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, is about how it—fascism–would happen here.

The thoughts of one of the characters, Doremus Jessup, a liberal newspaper editor, sound chillingly current:

“Ever since 1929, [the year of the stock market crash and the start of the great Depression] Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast that was general in the country.” Later, Doremus thinks that “it was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.”

But the election of the authoritarian demagogue, Buzz Windrup, to the presidency makes everything clear:

“After Buzz’s inauguration everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again—the country is going to be run as his private domain.”

Chaos and confusion. Like the country during the life of Doremus, we are in a sea of troubles, rudderless and adrift. Yesterday, the Postal Service is being dismantled piece by piece just in time to prevent voting by Democrats. Today, the anti-democratic forces running rampant realize they went too far too fast and take a half step back, stopped in their tracks, but only after much of the damage has been done. They realize that they need to figure out how to disenfranchise voters without killing old veterans that rely on the post office for their medications.

Chaos and confusion. Schools and universities reopen today, get hit by the virus tomorrow, and send the students home the next. It is a time where it is futile to plan anything more involved than having breakfast—at home.

Chaos, confusion, insecurity. Today, the rules for the “new normal” haven’t been written, or they change every other day, or from county to county, and depending on whom you ask.

A country being run as a private domain right into the ground. Sinclair Lewis knew exactly what he was talking about. How could he know? There must have been something hiding in the American marrow waiting to come out.

Betrayal

While Sinclair Lewis was writing at and about the height of the Great Depression, Phillip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America’ (2004), takes place a decade later, at the start of World War II in Europe, but before Pearl Harbor and the U.S entry in the war. It is about another U.S. president with fascist tendencies who comes to power by winning the 1940 election against the incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The victor is none other than the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.

The central theme of Roth’s novel is betrayal. Lindbergh meets Hitler in Iceland and agrees that the United States will stay out of the war. This is a betrayal of democracy and, specifically, of America’s historical allies, Great Britain and France. Anybody familiar with a president that picks fights with allies and cozies up to tyrannical adversaries? “Russia, if you are listening?”

Meanwhile, as the president is throwing the European democracies under the bus, at home fascist thugs, some of them organized into a militia, are terrorizing Jews in several states. Jewish neighborhoods are attacked. They abduct a Jewish woman and burn her alive in her car. They assassinate an anti-fascist politician, arrest top Jewish political and religious leaders and liberal politicians, including the mayor of New York. Even the First Lady, no friend of fascism, is not spared. She is forcibly whisked away to a mental institution and held incommunicado. The government sends Jewish kids from Newark to Kentucky to “Americanize” them.

Shades of murder, mayhem, and terror in Charlottesville. Echoes of “the Jews shall not replace us” and of “there are good people on both sides.” The woman in Roth’s book was burned alive in her car. A fascist named James Fields drove his car into a crowd and killed Heather Heyer, a protester against Confederate monuments. A premonition of a murderous attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh inspired by presidential rhetoric and carried out by an anti-immigrant fanatic convinced that the Jews were funding immigrant caravans. The next killer skipped the middleman and attacked immigrants directly, carrying out an even bloodier rampage in El Paso. The scapegoats change but fascism always needs scapegoats.

Pestilence Tests Character

The Plague by Albert Camus (1949) is about what happens when the bubonic plague strikes the city of Oran on the Mediterranean coast of what was then French Algeria.

Fascism doesn’t play a role in the story, although many have seen in this novel an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France because of the oppressiveness of the situation in a city locked tight from the rest of the world. And the carnage.

While Camus was the editor of the main newspaper of the French Resistance, Combat, The Plague deserves a more universalist reading. It’s about how people face the tragedy of life, always under threat of extinction, plague or no plague. A plague makes the fragility and uncertainty of life more evident and immediate. The plague, like racism or fascism, may appear to go away but it is always there, sometimes dormant, invisible but latent.

Uncannily familiar character types appear in the Plague. There is the protagonist, the good doctor who works to save lives and speaks the truth to power and power does not want to hear it. There are the heroic ones who volunteer for the worse jobs, disposing of bodies that soon become too many to bury and are burned. There are the ones who suffer most from isolation and separation. There are the selfish and the irresponsible, the ones who try to let the good times roll to give them courage or to forget or just for the hell of it.

These books may not offer a distraction or consolation for us now except if you are like me and  think that seeing and understanding—lucidity—is the best revenge against obfuscation and deception, the essential thing to fight the flood of lies that threaten to drown us.