Читать книгу The Political Fiction of Ward Just - David Smit - Страница 4

Despite the myth of America as a classless society, scholars, historians, and literary critics have produced a remarkable body of work on the nature of class in American culture, a literature that includes analyses of a range of classes—upper, middle, and working class—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.^[1] In literary studies, this scholarly literature has focused on fiction by and about the working and middle classes, and with the rise of multiculturalism, an increasing number of studies also deal with the relationship of class to politics and race.^[2] However, studies that deal exclusively with politics in fiction tend to focus on political ideology and philosophy; there has been little work in literary studies on class in political fiction written about those who actually govern America, fiction devoted to what the first major theorist of political fiction, Morris Edmund Speare in The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America (1924, 22), called “the complex machinery of politics,” portraying 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.^[3]

One reason why we have no major studies of the class status of those who govern the United States may be the myth that America has no substantial class system. We find it difficult to think of those who govern us as a distinct class, or even as a ruling elite. However, there is substantial evidence that our ruling elites overwhelming belong to the top three classes in America—the two tiers of the upper class, commonly referred to as Old Money and New Money, and the upper-middle class—and that the class status of our ruling elites has a significant influence on how they govern.

In this book I study eight novels by Ward Just that portray the nature of America’s ruling elite, portrayals that raise the issue of the degree to which this ruling elite adequately represents the interests of its citizens. I analyze Just’s personal vision of the ruling elite as a distinctive “imaginary,” aware of all that the term implies: existing only in the mind, lacking a factual reality. But of course, as a noun, an “imaginary” is now used by a variety of disciplines to suggest how social groups share a sense of themselves through an imagined set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols. In these disciplines the term implies that there is a fictive quality to our sense of how we belong, that a shared reality may be in some sense “socially constructed,” but that “shared reality” may not be the same for every member of the group, just as the significance of a literary text may not be shared by all of its readers. As a result, an imaginary of a ruling elite is subject to a host of competing interpretations, as all literature is. Still, I argue that Just’s imaginary has a high degree of sociological validity.

Indeed, in his political imaginary, Just provides complex illustrations for three major theoretical frameworks of representation: literary representation, which deals with issues that arise when authors characterize or “represent” any group of people in fiction, not only members of a social class, but individuals grouped by gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, or any other forms of human identity; political representation, which deals with the issue of how or in what sense any form of “representative government” can credibly represent its citizens; and diplomatic representation, which deals with the issue of how or in what sense members of a foreign service can represent their country as a whole.

In exploring these three fundamentally different meanings of “representation,” I begin by showing how the class status of the ruling elite in Just’s imaginary influences the ways they develop a coherent “upper-class” form of consciousness that limits their ability to adequately represent the poor and working class. I wrestle with issues related to “representing” the very nature of social class in fiction and argue that Just’s imaginary of our ruling elite, despite the limits of his own personal experience and his own inherent biases, can be reasonably taken to “represent” the ruling elite in ways that allow us to use his novels as case studies of the behavior and ideology of that elite. I go on to illustrate how the “upper-class” consciousness of Just’s political protagonists determines the way they exercise power in American policy, not adequately “representing” the interests of the majority of their constituencies; and how Just’s diplomats do not adequately represent the interests of America to the rest of the world.

I chose Ward Just’s novels for this study because I consider his body of work to be our greatest chronicle of those people who have governed America and represented us to the world from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to that of Barack Obama. As a novelist Just is unique in his knowledge and experience of ruling elites in what we might consider the four concentric circles of power and influence in the American government. At the center are our elected officials in the executive and congressional branches of government and those sitting on the Supreme Court. In the next circle are all those bureaucrats and supporting staff whose job it is to help shape and implement the programs and policies decided on by the White House and Congress, both at home or overseas through the foreign service, or to research the law for members of the Supreme Court. At the third level are all those lobbyists, consultants, and public interest groups, whose explicit job it is to influence the government as it composes legislation, implements programs, or interprets the law, either in the bureaucracy or the courts. The fourth circle is composed of the foundations and think tanks that promote the ideological rationales for differing policies and programs and the television networks, major media conglomerates, and influential New York and Washington law firms that control between half and three-quarters of the country’s industrial and insurance assets, banking interests, and private university endowments (Dye 2002, 10).

Ward Just is knowledgeable about how power functions at all four of these levels of power and influence. As the son of a prominent newspaper family in Waukegan, Illinois, Just had an upper-middle-class upbringing, but his education at private prep schools and Trinity College made him aware of those above him in the class system. As a nationally-known reporter for Newsweek, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly, Just covered Congress and three major election campaigns. As a war correspondent, Just covered civil wars on Cyprus and the Dominican Republic, and for a year and a half he covered the Vietnam War. Overseas, Just developed a host of contacts in the foreign service and became good friends with future ambassadors and people connected to the CIA. He writes about our ruling elite as an outsider with an intimate knowledge of what it feels like and means to be on the inside of the American government, both at home and abroad.

Because Just was a journalist primarily during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, his political fiction tends to focus on that period. Still, his novels are also set during each of the following decades until the 2010s, and portray the way our ruling elites have not only implemented policy at home and abroad but gradually become part of a larger global elite participating in an expanding version of what some experts call a “neo-liberal” transnational version of capitalism around the world.

Just’s view of our nation’s ruling elites at all levels is that they govern not from any deep ideological commitment but because of who they are, what Neil Gordon (2004) calls the “intricately woven fabric of relationships and expectations out of which grows [their] political and ethical identity.” Their political and ethical identity is shaped by their upper- and upper-middle-class status, which isolates them from the ways the poor and the working class actually live. Our ruling elites live in upper-class enclaves and generally only associate with those from the same class. They are raised in families that expect them to fulfill their potential, to be the best at what they choose to be, and they are given all the support they need to succeed: they are sent to exclusive private schools, they are given private tutoring if they need it, and they are introduced to networks of relatives and family friends who can help them achieve their personal goals. They are not class-conscious in the Marxist sense of a group organized to oppose another group. They do not think of themselves as being in conflict with anyone. Neither do they think of themselves as prejudiced in any way. Once launched into the world—the men into business, finance, or the law; the women into household management and public service—they accept members of other classes and minorities as equals, but have no sense of what these minorities may have gone through to makes themselves “equals” professionally.

Just’s focus on the shaping influence of class in American politics may be unique in modern literary fiction. Other modern fiction writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and Louis Auchincloss, have dealt with the rich, but none of these writers explores in any detail the ideology of our ruling elites or the way they exercise power. Alan Drury in Advice and Consent focuses on the politics of the Senate confirming a nominee to be Secretary of State, but he does not provide enough background on his numerous characters for us understand why they do or do not support the nominee other than because of their political affiliation or their personal knowledge of the nominee. Drury’s later political novels deal more melodramatically with international crises and rely on stereotypes of various political factions with little insight into how his characters make the decisions they do. Gore Vidal in his Narratives of Empire series has traced the history of two elite American families, the Sanfords and the Days, involved in American politics since the Civil War, and the two novels that end the series—Washington D.C., and The Golden Age—deal with contemporary American life, but, perhaps because he has modeled his characters after people in his own family lineage, Vidal takes his characters at face value and provides little context for assessing their social roles and sense of identity in our political system. He does not dwell on how their particular personalities, past experience, or social and business interests influence their behavior. His characters seem to vie for power simply as a game, trying to beat their opponents because they can.

Although Just has not attracted much attention in the academy, he is highly respected in literary circles in the larger world. Just himself claims that he is not underappreciated, only that he is undersold. His work is widely reviewed, including without fail, a review of his latest novel in the New York Times Book Review. He has received a number of major awards and honors: Jack Gance, a bildungsroman about the rise of a U.S. senator, received the Chicago Tribute Heartland Award in 1989. Echo House, a three-generation saga of a Washington political family, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997; A Dangerous Friend, a “romance” about a naive American foreign service officer in Vietnam, received the Cooper Prize for Fiction from the Society of American Historians in 1999. And An Unfinished Season, a coming-of-age story about a UN mediator, won a second Heartland Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Just has also received a fellowship from the American Institute in Berlin, and been accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Each of the three kinds of representation in Just’s fiction—literary representation of social class, political representation, and diplomatic representation—has, of course, its own particular theoretical difficulties, and perhaps the “politics” of representing any social group in fiction, especially the “politics” of class, may be the most fraught. Andrew Lawson has categorized three basic ways of conceptualizing class: as structure, as process or relationship, and as performance. All three notions of class have their limits and fail to capture the paradox of class as an abstract concept and the myriad ways in which class is manifested in the world. Peter Hitchcock (2000, 24) reminds us that since “class is not a thing but a relation and one that puts a heavy burden on representation,” the idea of class will always pull us toward “various class markers or signifiers,” which will take our attention away from the nature of the relations between the classes. Hitchcock is adamant that we never lose sight of the abstraction at the heart of class formation, but he is less clear about what aspects of that abstraction would be most helpful in furthering our understanding of how to use the concept to promote social action.

In discussing the class status of Just’s protagonists, I focus on an issue raised by William Dow (2009, 221): how novelists cannot avoid “reifying” their own class interests. I examine the degree to which Just’s characters fairly or accurately represent their upper-class status and whether Just, intentionally or not, presents these characters as positive models of their class or as a subtle critique of the inadequacies of the class. I conclude by arguing that Just’s imaginary provides us with a reasonable basis for understanding the abstract structure of elite power and suggests ways to further the cause of social justice.

Political representation raises issues about how a ruling elite or governing class of a democratic nation can be said to “represent” the interests of the larger public, including the poor, the working class, the marginalized. There is a vast literature in political science about how America’s government officials do or should represent their constituents at the national level. The key work that often provides a framework for the arguments about political representation is Hanna Pitkin’s classic philosophical investigation, The Concept of Representation. Pitkin (1967, 232–33) argues that for the idea of representation to have “substantive content” there must be a two-way street of influence: the represented should be able to influence their representatives, but representatives should still be able to exercise their own personal judgment and influence those who are represented, in effect building support for their policies. The people should not be “merely passive recipients” of government actions but “capable of action and judgment, capable of initiating government activity, so that the government may be conceived as responding to them,” and government officials representing the people should be in a “constant condition of responsiveness, of potential readiness to respond.”

Of course, the difficulty is in the details of how this two-way street of influence might actually function. Using Pitkin’s work as background, I survey the literature on political representation, which in the case of the United States means finding the appropriate metaphor for a person “acting for” or in the interests of someone else, the most common metaphors being the trustee or delegate relationships, and I make the case that we should evaluate representatives on the basis of how well they are attuned to the needs and interests of all their constituents and how well they respond over time to those needs and interests, which might include seeking to shape the views of their constituents and build consensus on particular issues, testing ideas for policies through polling and the media.

In describing the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and consultants as they go about the job of governing, Just portrays the degree to which these characters consider their responsibilities and obligations to the conflicting demands of their larger public, consisting of a host of competing constituencies, citizens at all levels—national, state, and district—including members of their own and the opposing political party, special interest groups, and those voices not often heard in the tumult of election campaigns and the drafting of legislation. In Just’s imaginary, the “representatives” of the people have a complex relationship with the “represented”: Just’s representatives generally only consider those who have easy access to them: donors and fellow officials. They rarely consider their larger constituencies, and when they do so it is primarily as a means of gaining support in an election or of placating a particular interest group that feels that its needs have been slighted. For all practical purposes, in doing their jobs, Just’s representatives seem barely aware that the poor and working class exist at all.

Finally, diplomatic representation deals primarily with how foreign service elites should represent the idea and interests of the country, issues similar to those related to domestic policy. On the one hand, diplomats represent the country in a number of obvious ways. They are in effect symbols of the country at ceremonies recognizing the relationship between countries, and they engage in what R. P. Barston (1988, 2) calls the “tasks” of diplomacy: keeping the channels of communication open between nations by “listening, preparing the ground for initiatives, reducing friction, and contributing to orderly change,” and more substantive tasks such as “explaining and defending national policy, negotiating, and interpreting the policies of receiving governments.” Much of this work is largely a matter of interpreting America’s foreign policy to the representatives of those nations affected by these policies. In these matters diplomats are allowed a certain amount of flexibility and leeway.

On the other hand, because they are aware of the tenuousness of international relations, foreign service officers also understand that they may need to represent a higher calling than simply advancing and defending the interests of their own nation: they may also need to promote peace and cooperation between nations or some vision of a stable world order. Diplomats may consider politicians and the public in general as amateurs who take the idea of national sovereignty too literally and carry it to extremes. As a result, diplomats often think of themselves as committed to a larger vision of the international order, which often necessitates their curbing the nationalist and imperialist impulses of those who govern individual nation-states.

Because of the limits of their upper-class status, Just’s foreign service elites represent only a limited range of “ideas” about America—its capitalist system and preoccupation with technology—and their class status often influences them to put their family and class interests above those of their home country or even their personal vision for a stable and harmonious international order.

The Political Fiction of Ward Just then is divided into three sections, each containing two chapters. In the first chapter of each section, I summarize the theoretical issues involved with a particular form of representation: how or in what sense fiction can represent social class, how or in what sense the elected officials of a nation can represent their constituents, and how or in what sense diplomats and foreign service officers can represent their countries. I go on in the first chapter of each section to argue that as a novelist and short story writer Ward Just is uniquely qualified to create characters whose lives illustrate that form of representation. In the second chapter of each section, I analyze two or three novels—in section two I analyze two novels and one short story—pointing out how Just’s upper-class representatives are conditioned by their class status to act as they do and the manner in which they represent their constituents and their nation.

The first section is about “Literary Representation.” Chapter 1 deals with “Theories of Class Representation,” and the second chapter, titled “Representing the Development of Ruling-Elite Consciousness,” analyzes two of Just’s novels that treat the developing consciousness of elite young people: Exiles in the Garden and Rodin’s Debutante.

The second section is devoted to “Political Representation.” Chapter 3 deals with “Theories of Political Representation,” and the fourth, titled “Representing the Few,” examines three of Just’s works that illustrate how various government officials consider their constituents: the two novels In the City of Fear and Jack Gance, and the short story, “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert.”

The third and final section deals with “Diplomatic Representation.” Chapter 5 deals with “Theories of Diplomatic Representation,” and chapter 6, “Representing the Idea of America,” illustrates how in three novels Just’s American diplomats and foreign service officers represent their nation. The novels are The American Ambassador, A Dangerous Friend, and Forgetfulness.

In the conclusion, I consider the value of literary criticism of class representations in fiction, and how such criticism can contribute to the cause of social justice by encouraging us to think of ways to make our ruling elites more responsive to the “will of the people.” Just’s characters in particular can encourage us to think about ways to make our ruling elites more sensitive to the needs of their constituents and the means with which they try to impose America’s values and interests on the rest of world. I suggest that the best way to make our politics more representative of the country as a whole is Stanley Aronowitz’s conception of a large social movement dedicated to making the country more democratic. I end with a summary of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch, a German Jewish philosopher, who in his book The Principle of Hope argued for a form of consciousness rooted in hard-core reality but always oriented toward the future, trying to survive current difficulties by imagining possibilities for a better society that are always capable of implementation.