Last night, I saw a live performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at the San Francisco Symphony. One of the people I went with had never seen the original television cartoon—yes, it’s true.
Afterwards, she asked a simple question: “Why did Charlie Brown pick such a bad tree for Christmas?”
As we walked, we talked a bit about Linus’ speech at the end, and how the story asks about the “true” meaning of Christmas. This was all fine, but it merely danced around her question of the tree.
What I said next sprung from me. It wasn’t something I formulated or ever considered before:
“Charlie Brown recognizes something familiar in the tree. It’s been overlooked and doesn’t seem to have much to offer anyone, which is what he’s experienced in life. At the end, the other kids see the beauty in the tree, and in decorating it they’re appreciating Charlie Brown too.”
I don’t claim this is a deep insight, or even an original one, but it came to me all at once. I watched the TV show as a child in the 1970s, and rewatched it countless times over the years, and yet I’m still finding meaning in this Christmas tale.
Wearily, I started his essay expecting more of the same, and lo, finding it: Computers and the Internet, he contends, has done much to destroy literary fiction. By this point, I’m surprised any writer pursuing such a thesis would bother fortifying their argument with examples or statistics. Blythe does not fail on that count either: Other than some “c’mon, look around, you know what I’m saying,” the argument is made sans corroborative evidence. Of course the Internet has wrecked American literature. Why bother denying it?
It’s telling, then, that Blythe opens with the usual barrage of accusations about digital distractions—”Can you read anything at all from start to finish, i.e. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?”—and then, to prove how things used to be so much better way back when, he segues to life as an Esquire editor in the 1980s and 90s:
[Rust Hill] and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch, sometimes at the New York Delicatessen on 57th Street, and talk about the writers and novels and short stories we loved (and hated). … Then he and I would happily weave our way back to the office at 1790 Broadway, plop down in our cubicles and make enthusiastic phone calls to writers and agents, our voices probably a little louder than usual.
The jokes about fiction editors at a national magazine choosing stories to publish after a three-cocktail lunch write themselves, so I won’t bother. (Although I should, since, as an early writer, I had high hopes for placing a short story with a publication like Esquire. Perhaps I should have mailed a bottle of Bombay with each of my submissions.)
The dichotomy Blythe illustrates is telling: The hellish “after” is the mob writing Amazon user reviews and him not knowing how to turn off iPhone notifications; the blissful “before” is editorial cocktail lunches and not having to give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks.
One counterpoint to Blythe’s thesis: The 1980s had plenty of distractions, including the now-obvious inability to silence your telephone without taking it off the hook. Another counterpoint: If you want to drink Negronis and argue literature over Reubens, well, you can do that today too. A third counterpoint: A short story printed in the pages of Esquire was sandwiched between glossy full-color ads for sports cars, tobacco, and liquor—most featuring leggy models in evening gowns or swimsuits. Distractions abounded, even before the Internet.
But none of these are what Blythe is really talking about. What he bemoans is the diffusion of editorial power over the past twenty years.
Blythe throws a curveball—a predictable curveball—after his reminisces about Negronis and schmears. Sure, computers are to blame for everything, but the real crime is that computers now permit readers to make their opinions on fiction known:
Writers and writing tend to be voted upon by readers, who inflict economic power (buy or kill the novel!) rather than deeply examining work the way passionate critics once did in newspapers and magazines. Their “likes” and “dislikes” make for massive rejoinders rather than critical insight. It’s actually a kind of bland politics, as if books and stories are to be elected or defeated. Everyone is apparently a numerical critic now, though not necessarily an astute one.
I don’t actually believe Blythe has done a thorough job surveying the digital landscape to consider the assortment and quality of reader reviews out there. There are, in fact, a plenitude of readers penning worthy critical insight over fiction. Just as there are so many great writers out there that deserve wider audiences, there also exist critical readers who should be trumpeted farther afield.
Setting that aside, I still happily defend readers content to note a simple up/down vote as their estimation of a book. Not every expression of having read a book demands an in-depth 8,000 word essay on the plight of the modern Citizen of the World.
Rather, I believe Blythe—as with so many others in the literary establishment—cannot accept readers could have any worthwhile expressible opinion about fiction. The world was so much easier when editors at glossy magazines issued the final word on what constituted good fiction and what was a dud. See also a book I’m certain Blythe detests, A Reader’s Manifesto, which tears apart—almost point by point—Blythe’s gripes.
When B. R Myers’ Manifesto was published twenty years ago, a major criticism of it was that Myers was tilting at windmills—that the literary establishment was not as snobbish and elitist as he described. Yet here Blythe is practically copping to the charges.
Thus the inanity of him complaining that today’s readers hold the power to “inflict economic power” when, apparently, such power should reside solely with critics and magazine editors. I don’t even want to argue this point; this idea is a retrograde understanding of how the world should work. This is why golden age thinking is so pernicious—since things used to be this way, it was the best way. Except when it’s not.
Of course the world was easier for the editors of national slicks fifty years ago, just as life used to be good for book publishers, major news broadcasters, and the rest of the national media. It was also deeply unsatisfying if one were not standing near the top of those heaps. It does not take much scratching in the dirt to understand the motivations of the counterculture and punk movements in producing their own criticism. The only other option back then was to bow to the opinions of a klatch of New York City editors and critics whose ascendancy was even more opaque than the bishops of the Holy See.
That said, it’s good to see a former Esquire editor praise the fiction output of magazines that, not so long ago, editors at that level were expected to sneer down upon: Publications such as Redbook, McCall’s, Analog, and Asimov’s Science Fiction all get an approving nod from Blythe.
But to cling to the assertion that in mid-century America “short fiction was a viable business, for publishers and writers alike” is golden age-ism at its worst. Sure, a few writers could make a go at it, but in this case the exceptions do not prove the rule. The vast sea of short story writers in America had to settle for—and continue to settle for—being published in obscure literary magazines and paid in free copies.
No less than Arthur Miller opined that the golden age of American theater arced in his own lifetime. Pianist Bill Evans remarked he was blessed to have experienced the tail end of jazz’s golden age in America before rock ‘n’ roll sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Neither of those artistic golden ages perished because of the Internet.
What caused them to die? That’s complicated, sure, but their demise—or, at least, rapid descents—were preceded by a turn toward the avant-garde. Which is to say, it became fashionable for jazz and theater to distance themselves from their audience under the guise of moving the art forward. The only moving that happened, though, was the audience for the exits.
Blythe then turns his attention to a third gripe in his meandering essay. Without a shred of evidence, he argues that the digital revolution of the last twenty-five years metastasized into a cultural Puritanism in today’s publishing world:
Perhaps because of online mass condemnations, there’s simply too much of an ethical demand in fiction from fearful editors and “sensitivity readers,” whose sensitivity is not unlike that of children raised in religious families… Too many authors and editors fear that they might write or publish something that to them, at least, is unknowingly “wrong,” narratives that will reveal their ethical ignorance, much to their shame. It’s as if etiquette has become ethics, and blasphemy a sin of secularity.
I cannot deny that there appears to be a correlation between the rise of the Internet in our daily lives and the shift over the last decade to cancel or ban “problematic” literature. What I fail to see is how pop-up alerts or a proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots is to blame for this situation.
If Blythe were to peer backwards once more to his golden age of gin-soaked lunches, he would recall a nascent cultural phenomenon called “political correctness.” P.C. was the Ur-movement to today’s sensitivity readers and skittish editors. Social media whipped political correctness’ protestations into a hot froth of virtuous umbrage—a video game of oneupsmanship in political consciousness, where high scores are tallied with likes and follower counts. Using social media as leverage to block books from publication was the logical next step. But blaming computers for this situation is like blaming neutrons for the atom bomb.
After a dozen paragraphs of shaking my head at Blythe’s litany of complaints, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in agreement with him:
The power of literary fiction—good literary fiction, anyway—does not come from moral rectitude. … Good literature investigates morality. It stares unrelentingly at the behavior of its characters without requiring righteousness.
At the risk of broken-record syndrome, I’ll repeat my claim that Charles Baxter’s “Dysfunctional Narratives” (penned twenty-five years ago, near the beginning of the Internet revolution) quietly predicted the situation Blythe is griping about today. Back then, Baxter noticed the earliest stirrings of a type of fiction where “characters are not often permitted to make intelligent and interesting mistakes and then to acknowledge them. … If fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.” He noted that reading had begun “to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action,” and that this type of fiction was “pre-moralized.”
Unlike Blythe, Baxter did not fret that literary fiction would perish. Baxter was a creative writing instructor at a thriving Midwestern MFA program. He knew damn well that writing literary fiction was a growth industry, and in no danger of extinction. What concerned him was how much of this fiction was (and is) “me” fiction, that is, centered around passive protagonists suffering through some wrong. He noticed a dearth of “I” fiction with active protagonists who make decisions and face consequences.
As Blythe writes:
Too many publishers and editors these days seem to regard themselves as secular priests, dictating right and wrong, as opposed to focusing on the allure of the mystifying and the excitement of uncertainty. Ethics and aesthetics appear in this era to be intentionally merged, as if their respective “good” is identical.
If Blythe is going to roll his eyes at the glut of reader-led cancellations and moralizing editors, perhaps he could consider another glut in the literary world: The flood of the literary memoir, with its “searing” psychic wounds placed under microscope, and its inevitably featherweight closing epiphany. These testaments of self-actualization may be shelved under nonfiction, but they are decidedly fictional in construction. In the literary world, stories of imagination and projection have been superseded by stories of repurposed memory, whose critical defense is, invariably, “But this really happened.”
It was not always so. Memoir was once synonymous with popular fiction. Autobiography was reserved for celebrities such as Howard Cosell and Shirley MacLaine, or a controversial individual who found themself in the nation’s spotlight for a brief moment. It was not treated as a high art form, and perceived in some quarters as self-indulgent. No more.
There remains an audience for great fiction. Readers know when they’re being talked down to. They know the difference between a clueless author being crass and a thoughtful author being brutally honest. They also know the difference between a ripping yarn and a pre-moralized story they’re “supposed” to read, like eating one’s vegetables.
The death of literary fiction—especially the short story—will not be due to iPhone notifications and social media cancellations. Perhaps the problem Blythe senses is the loss of a mission to nurture and promote great fiction. The literary world has turned inward and grown insular. Its priorities are so skewed, I’ve witnessed literary writers question if fiction can even be judged or critiqued. The worsening relationship of class to literary fiction should not be overlooked, either.
If Blythe laments Asimov’s Science Fiction, perhaps he should check out the thriving Clarkesworld. Substacks of regular short fiction are regularly delivering work to thousands of readers. I don’t know if these publications’ editors are gulping down Negronis during their daily Zoom meetings—but as long as they’re putting out quality fiction that challenges and questions and enlightens, maybe that doesn’t matter, and never did.
Kat Rosenfield at Unherd claims she knows why men are no longer wild: “Our sense of adventure died with Chris McCandless.”
I last wrote about the mythology around Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in 2015. Rosenfield’s article motivated me to survey the situation once more.
The meat of Rosenfield’s argument lies within this claim:
McCandless’s story became the object of fascination — and not long after that, backlash. His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity; his death was either a tragic accident or an idiotic, avoidable bit of foolishness.
My motivation for this post started right there, in the above assertion. Compare it to what I wrote in 2015:
If this framing—reckless versus romantic—sounds wearily familiar, it’s because the debate over McCandless’s death has become nothing more than a flash-point in a broader argument we’ve had in America since he and I were born…
McCandless’ life has been converted into a proxy for this country’s culture wars, a string of battles where no one—no one—raises the white flag. … I’m unable to see how this situation honors or respects Christopher McCandless’ life.
Eight years later, Chris McCandless is still serving as a proxy for whatever culture war debate is on our collective brains at the moment. His life and death, cleansed and romanticized, provide a mythic framework to hang any number of ideological flags: anti-materialism, anti-woke, anti-technology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and more.
This is vital to recognize. Culture war ushers in an inevitable and putty-like transitive logic: Criticism of Krakauer is interpreted as an attack on McCandless; criticism of McCandless is read as an attack on his values; criticism of McCandless’ fans is an attack on progressivism; and so on.
So, yeah, I have and will criticize Krakauer, the actions of some of McCandless’ legions of fans, and the politicization of Into the Wild. I’ll even criticize some of McCandless’ choices. I’m trusting you to recognize that doesn’t make me a “Chris hater.”
“He’s emerged as a hero”
From there, Rosenfield takes what has become a standard approach in modern rhetoric: She claims her reasonable and clear-eyed position is the one under attack, even if she has trouble locating the hordes mounting said attack:
The lumping-together of McCandless with Thoreau was inevitable, and not just because the latter was a major inspiration for the former: here was an expression of the timeless desire to take these icons of male self-sufficiency down a peg. Today, the mention of either man tends to elicit a snarl — but the bulk of the anger is saved for McCandless, fuelled by a contemporary media ecosystem that keeps finding new ways to tell his story. [Emphasis mine.]
I cannot recall anyone “snarling” over Thoreau, who remains required reading in American high school and university curricula. He may have been dismissed in his time as a fraud or a crank, but I’m pretty sure Thoreau’s preeminence in American culture and letters is secure.
As for McCandless, Into the Wild has been translated into thirty languages and has remained in print since it was first published in 1996. It was made into a major motion picture by Sean Penn. It’s on high school and college reading lists across the nation, and was selected by Slate as one of the best nonfiction books of the past twenty-five years. A web site dedicated to Chris McCandless (christophermccandless.info) is still going strong, hosting papers written by young people affected by McCandless’ life story, a memorial foundation, a documentary, and more. The PBS special “Return to the Wild” promised to “probe the mystery that still lies at the heart of a story that has become part of the American literary canon and compels so many to this day.”
Yet Rosenfield somehow concludes McCandless and his life story are under a brutal and withering assault. If the debate could be placed on a scale like produce aisle apples, I’m certain we’d find any snarling criticism of Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer is far outweighed by McCandless’ legions of fans and sympathetic media sources.
It doesn’t help that Rosenfield’s adoring portrayal of McCandless as the kind of masculinity we need more of in our on society is framed just as she outlined at the top of her article: “His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity.” There are no alternatives, apparently.
“But lately,” she writes, “the controversy surrounding McCandless as a mythological figure is no longer an accompaniment to the story; it is the story.”
I don’t know that “lately” part is true. The controversy around McCandless began almost immediately after Krakauer’s story was published in Outside magazine. Its editors reported they’ve never received as much mail about a single story, before or since. The controversy became the focus of all subsequent accounts of Chris McCandless for the same reason Twitter melted down over the color of a dress: People couldn’t believe any sane person would disagree with their interpretation—and if you did, there was something wrong with you.
Here’s a good question: Why is McCandless a mythological figure? He was a human being, “full of vim and vigor, a complicated young man of effusive talents, predictable weaknesses, and eccentric foibles,” as I wrote in 2015. We can valorize a man, we can valorize his values. Why valorize his avoidable death?
Much of the time I agree with the “he had a death wish” camp because I don’t know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the “what a dumbshit” territory, tempered by brief alliances with the “he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest” partisans. Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.
I don’t agree with the “death wish” angle, nor do I think he was a “dumbshit” for entering the Alaskan interior. (I would say “grievously unprepared.”) “An all-American quest” ticks a few of my personal checkboxes, as does “I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero.”
The diary
In an aside, Rosenfield complains that McCandless’ sister’s memoir The Wild Truth (2014) has been weaponized: “It was received less as additional context to his story than a debunking of it: McCandless wasn’t a latter-day adventurer, he was a spoiled trust-fund kid with daddy issues.” (It would have helped if Rosenfield could have linked to an actual “debunking.” The single link she provided goes to a perfunctory summary of the memoir by USA Today.)
Carine McCandless does offer eye-opening “additional context” to Chris’ story. The real issue her memoir introduces is that Krakauer agreed to withhold these key details from Into the Wild at the request of the family. By doing so, Krakauer created a hole in his narrative and in our understanding of McCandless’ motivations. The Wild Truth was not weaponized for a mass “gotcha” campaign, or if it was, the campaign made not a dent on the beatification of Chris McCandless. Rather, as with the evolution of the poisonous seeds (explained below), its details were smoothed over by sympathetic media sources as completing and supporting Krakauer’s story, and further buttressing the McCandless hagiography.
“After a brief review of its contents and intention, we concluded that this fictionalized writing has absolutely nothing to do with our beloved son, Chris, or his character,” they wrote. “The whole unfortunate event in Chris’s life 22 years ago is about Chris and his dreams—not a spiteful, hyped up, attention-getting story about his family.”
There was another narrative hole, though, that is more substantial and of far more interest to people like me: The contents of the journal McCandless kept while in the Alaska wilderness. Initially only Krakauer had access to the diary, which he used while writing Into the Wild.
When the journal was finally released, it amounted to
approximately 430 words, 130 numbers, nine asterisks and a handful of symbols. Other than this, all Krakauer had to go on was several rolls of film found with the young man’s body and a rambling, cliche-filled, 103-word diatribe carved into plywood in which McCandless claimed to be “Alexander Supertramp” off on a “climatic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage.”
Craig Medred of Anchorage Daily News has much more to say about “the fiction that is Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild“. That Krakauer reconstructed McCandless’ last weeks in minute detail from such sparse documentation should be a flare in the sky to anyone who still believes the label “nonfiction” means something.
“It is as if the late writer Ernest Hemingway found a 430-word journal written by Nick Adams containing the words ‘railroad,’ ‘fish,’ ‘forest fire,’ ‘camp’ and a few others,” Medred writes, “and from that wrote ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ as the true story of Adams’ biggest fishing adventure.”
If that sounds like hyperbole, then reread the final three chapters of Into the Wild and reckon them against the source material Krakauer was drawing from. Here’s a portion of the journal, from the McCandless’ memorial site:
Day 2: Fall through the ice day. Day 4: Magic bus day. Day 9: Weakness. Day 10: Snowed in. Day 13: Porcupine day…. Day 14: Misery. Day 31: Move bus. Grey bird. Ash bird. Squirrel. Gourmet duck! Day 43: MOOSE! Day 48: Maggots already. Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life. Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster. Day 69: Rained in, river looks impossible. Lonely, Scared. Day 74: Terminal man. Faster. Day 78: Missed wolf. Ate potato seeds and many berries coming. Day 94: Woodpecker. Fog. Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy. Day 100: Death looms as serious threat, too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in wild—no game. Day 101-103: [No written entries, just the days listed.] Day 104: Missed bear! Day 105: Five squirrel. Caribou. Day 107: Beautiful berries. Day 108-113: [Days were marked only with slashes.]
Chris McCandless’ entire diary, from day 1 to day 113.
McCandless notes on day 69, six weeks before his death: “Rained in, river looks impossible.” (I assume he means the river between him and civilization looks impossible to cross.) On day 100, he realizes “have literally become trapped in wild.” Earlier he writes, “Lonely, Scared.” Earlier still, he writes, “Weakness.”
“Male self-sufficiency”
McCandless entered the Alaskan wilderness packing ten pounds of rice, a .22-caliber rifle, ammunition, a camera, and a selection of books. Although his exact date of death is unknown, it appears he only survived for 113 days, or about sixteen weeks. All evidence is that he leaned heavily on a single food source, the seeds of a wild plant.
Rosenfield takes a crack at those who knock McCandless as unable to distinguish a moose from a caribou (“He could, actually”), although that’s beside the point. The real failure was him bagging a beast and lacking the skills to preserve it. After mere days he lost the carcass to maggots. Properly preserved, the meat and organs could have fed him for months, providing him with vital protein and fat. He wrote the waste was “one of the greatest tragedies of my life,” one of the few lucid and complete entries in his journal. Other than the wild seeds, he appears to have had no success in securing an additional food source.
The usual rejoinder to these failures is that the seeds he foraged were a good source of nutrition but, due to understandable circumstances, McCandless was poisoned by them, or some substance growing on them.
The seeds are, without a doubt, the most frustrating aspect of the entire affair. It’s oft-reported that over the years Krakauer required three tries to explain the puzzle of the poisonous seeds. As I wrote in 2015, the count was actually four, and is now closer to five:
and a modified fifth explanation in a peer-reviewed 2015 article, which he also discussed in a 2015 New Yorker article.
Diana Saverin of Outside magazine has a good summation of the history of the questions surrounding the seeds. (This article is also the first and only time I’ve seen a major media source acknowledge that the debate over McCandless’ legacy may be more than a Manichaean battle of “Chris supporters” vs. “Chris haters”: “[Some] readers don’t dismiss McCandless’ intention—spending time in the wilderness—as invalid or stupid. Rather, they reject his endeavor because of the consequence it led to: his death.” While not exactly my position, at least there’s an acknowledgment of a spectrum.)
With Krakauer’s later explanations for the seeds came sympathetic media outlets announcing he’d “solved” the mystery once and for all. NPR has declared the case closed on a couple of occasions. Salon originally titled their 2013 article “Chris McCandless’ death wasn’t his fault” before changing it to the blander “Into the Wild’s twist ending”. (The original title is still there in the page’s URL.)
The Salon switcheroo neatly encapsulates the stakes in play: By declaring McCandless was not culpable for his own death, the lessons and morality people wish to attach to McCandless’ life are preserved. Krakauer’s first explanation paints McCandless as fallible, and perhaps even liable for his own death (that Chris mistook poisonous seeds for edible ones). The later explanations (a mold or bacteria growing on edible seeds) reassures the faithful that McCandless’ death was understandable and unavoidable.
The various poisonous seed theories led to disputes between Krakauer and biologists. Even after the dust settled, the best the scientific minds could declare was “it is possible” the seeds were poisonous and “contributed” to McCandless’ death. That is not the indisputable evidence that some sources reported.
I’ll say it here, just as I said in 2015: I do not think McCandless was an idiot. I do not think he was reckless. He was far more prepared to enter the Alaska interior than a high majority of his admirers who’ve made similar attempts—but he was not prepared enough. I suspect he only realized his mistake when he could no longer trek out of the area (day 69, “river looks impossible”). Unlike living off-the-grid in places like the American Southwest, where he did well, McCandless’ resourcefulness was not enough in a truly remote and brutal location.
But even if rock-solid evidence arrived showing McCandless was poisoned by the potato seeds and nothing more, that does not prove his death was unavoidable. His survival in Alaska hinged on a single food source. He suffered from a single point of failure, and when that point failed, he was doomed. That is not “self-sufficiency.”
The cult
Rosenfield again:
On the 15th anniversary of McCandless’s death, Men’s Journal published a story titled ‘The Cult of Chris McCandless’, an examination of the young man’s legacy in and around the wilderness in which he perished. One gets the sense that there’s still little sympathy amongst Alaskans for McCandless’s death, and the quotes from locals range from pitying to contemptuous.
It’s true: A magazine wrote an article quoting some Alaskans’ contempt for Chris McCandless.
But it’s bewildering that Rosenfield could read the Men’s Journal story and come away with nothing more than the Alaskan angle. It’s titled “The Cult of Chris McCandless” for a reason. The bulk of the article regards the number of people—in particular, young men—inspired by McCandless to enter the wilderness and make a go of it themselves. They are almost always far less prepared for the ordeal than McCandless was when he entered Denali National Park.
I question the choice of the word “cult,” but confess I cannot offer a better alternative. The obsession with McCandless has made him a kind of secular saint, and the location of his death has become a pilgrimage site. TripAdvisor offers several pages on how to reach it; Google Maps still points to the site of Bus 142 before it was removed by the Alaska Army National Guard to discourage further sightseers. Authorities are routinely called in to rescue lost and stranded hikers. Deaths continue to occur. (Tellingly, Rosenfield mentions the reasons for the bus’ removal without pondering the implications of people losing their lives in the name of “authenticity.”)
If McCandless’ story truly inspires people to learn self-sufficiency—if it leads them to pause and hone the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness—I can only applaud that person for making the vision a reality. But when the inspired believe self-sufficiency is simply a matter of good intentions and a canteen of Evian, there’s a problem.
Compare the evolution of McCandless’ story—the beatification, the successive theories on the seeds, the guarded interpretation of his diary—to Charles Baxter’s observation of a proliferation of “dysfunctional narratives” in America:
Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.
That sounds an awful lot like what happened to Chris McCandless’ story over the span of thirty years.
The politics
Krakauer:
A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless.
Rosenfield picks up where Krakauer leaves off…and makes a serious detour:
The guy who hunts his own food, chops his own wood, and builds his own home, is a suspicious character: a little too trad, a little too in-your-face masculine, probably a Trump voter. And the guy a step beyond that, the one who doesn’t just paint outside the lines but wants to buck the system entirely? There’s something really wrong with him. He’s no pioneer; he’s a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel. … We’re afraid of men like this, and we’re afraid of the people who admire them.
This characterization is off-the-rails.
Without exception, criticisms of McCandless as an irresponsible privileged twerp are coded right-wing. The type Rosenfield describes sounds more like a standard-issue take-down of libertarians and hard-right Republicans (“a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel”). Those take-downs inevitably come from sources coded as left-wing—the same sources who trumpet McCandless as a modern icon (Salon, NPR, etc.) These sources will question the myth of rugged individualism in American history—and then, with no apparent introspection, hold up high Chris McCandless’ rugged individualism as an example to follow.
If anything, the animus toward Chris McCandless is a mirror-image of the one Rosenfield describes. Critics like to portray him as a coastal elite, a hipster from a privileged enclave who foolishly launched a narcissistic quest for authenticity, and certainly not as a Trump voter. I’ve never heard anyone describe themselves as “fearful” of McCandless’ admirers. “Idiots” is the terse word one acquaintance used when I brought up the subject.
Recall Sherry Simpson: “Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.”
“Gather, cook, and eat”
If you still think of me as a “Chris hater,” in return I ask for your opinion of other individualists who forsook modernity and escaped to the wild.
There’s Alastair Bland, the student I wrote about eight years ago. The similarities between Bland and McCandless are remarkable: Both were anthropology majors who believed hunter-gatherer societies were freer and enjoyed more leisure time than agricultural/industrial ones. Both expressed a sharp disdain for modern consumerism and materialism. Bland did not penetrate the Alaska interior, but he did live off the land in and around U.C. Santa Barbara in 2002. Bland found people around him cheering him on:
They marveled at how great [his experiment] was and exclaimed that they would some day try to do something similar. They thought it was a good thing to boycott the American market and a shame more people didn’t appreciate nature’s bounty the way I did.
Like McCandless, Bland wound up concentrating on a single food source—tree figs—which left him bleeding from the mouth and nauseous. His days were spent scrounging for his next meal. He dreamed of climbing trees and eating figs. His life became “gather, cook, and eat.”
Just as McCandless attempted to flee the Alaska interior sooner than planned, Bland too quit his experiment early:
Even now I don’t believe what I did was very constructive. It was a memorable time in my life, to be sure, and it was a good thing to have tried. But to carry on like that forever would have been, for me, social suicide.
There’s Timothy Treadwell who, like McCandless, found a spiritual refuge in the Alaska interior. He lived there for thirteen seasons among the coastal brown bears, both alone and with his girlfriend. Like McCandless, he came from a well-to-do family, and was athletic and gifted. After some failures as an aspiring actor and a bout with alcoholism, he turned his life around. He grew famous for spending time close to the bears in Alaska, daring to approach them to gain their trust. He was immortalized in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.
In October 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were attacked and killed by a bear. Treadwell’s running camera captured the audio of the attack. It was the first and only incident of a bear killing a person in the history of Kitmai National Park.
John Rogers of Kitmai Coastal Bears Tour writes of “The Myth of Timothy Treadwell,” although this myth never took on the heroic proportions of McCandless’. While Rogers says, “Timothy Treadwell was not the foolhardy person the media portrays him to be,” he does not acquit him of culpability in his own death, either.
There’s Christopher Thomas Knight, the recluse who lived twenty-seven years in isolation in the north of Maine. In a bit of philosophizing that could have come from McCandless, he said by living alone “I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for … To put it romantically, I was completely free.”
But Knight survived while habitually breaking into nearby cabins. He was accused of performing over 1,000 burglaries over a quarter-century, pilfering goods and supplies for his own survival.
Note that McCandless has also been accused of breaking-and-entering by Craig Medred:
Three cabins — two privately owned and one a property of the National Park Service — were broken into while McCandless was at the bus. It had never happened before. It has not happened since.
There’s Robert Bogucki, raised in Malibu and a student at Georgetown University. As a young man, he began to question materialism and capitalism. He traveled to Australia to walk solo across its interior desert.
He entered the desert carrying a week’s worth of food and 26 liters of water. When his supplies ran out, he began digging for moisture, and cutting himself to drink his own blood. His absence sparked what was the largest and most expensive manhunt in Australia’s history. After forty-three days, he spelled out “HELP” with rocks and was rescued by a search helicopter. Bogucki “lost more than 30kg [66 pounds] from his 86kg [189 pounds] and it took him a full year to regain his previous strength and stamina.” (McCandless’ corpse weighed 66 pounds—half of Bogucki’s final weight—when he was discovered.)
Why did Bogucki do it? To see God. He desired to model Jesus’ forty days in the desert. He claimed God spoke to him and directed him to water sources. Where McCandless packed in a book on Alaskan horticulture, Bogucki carried a Bible.
Why are these “self-sufficient males” not idolized by the legions of McCandless followers? Why don’t we praise their “sense of adventure”?
Perhaps due to the faulty optics of each story: Bland’s admission of failure in a soft Southern California beach town; Bogucki’s distasteful Bible-thumping; Knight’s “self-reliance” revealed as a reliance on others; Treadwell’s violent attack recorded on tape, supplying us an unromantic record of nature’s grim realities.
Are optics really what makes McCandless different? Doesn’t such a cynical and relativist view smack face-first into McCandless’ values of authenticity—honesty with others, and honesty with one’s self?
It’s taken me nearly a year to write this post. I gave up twice. Researching and writing this has been exhausting. Why spend so much time and energy?
As I wrote in 2015:
Jon Krakauer introduced me to a vivid and lucid life, one that will stay with me for years.
That life has been flattened into an icon, propagated as a cult of personality, and used to buttress petty political divisions. In the least I must register my protest.
What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?
Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?
In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on the state of American literature. It opens with “Dysfunctional Narratives: or, ‘Mistakes were Made,’” a blistering piece of criticism that not only detailed the kinds of stories he was reading back then, but predicted the types of stories we read and tell each other today.
Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expounded and expanded upon it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from poet Marilynne Robinson, who described this modern mode of writing as a “mean little myth:”
One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.
Baxter adds that the source of this injury “can never be expunged.” As for the ultimate meaning of these stories: “The injury is the meaning.”
To claim this mode of writing has become the dominant one in American culture demands proof, or at least some supporting evidence. Baxter lists examples, such as Richard Nixon’s passive-voice gloss over the Watergate cover-up (“mistakes were made”), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and conspiracy theories, among others.
“Dysfunctional Narratives” doesn’t succeed by tallying a score, however. Rather, it describes a type of story that sounds all-too-familiar to modern ears:
Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.
Don’t merely consider Baxter’s descriptions in terms of books. News stories, the social media posts scrolling up your daily feed, even the way your best friend goes into how their boss has slighted them at work—all constitute narratives, small or large. Dysfunctional narratives read as if the storyteller’s thumb is heavy on the moral scale—they feel rigged.
It does seem curious that in contemporary America—a place of considerable good fortune and privilege—one of the most favored narrative modes from high to low has to do with disavowals, passivity, and the disarmed protagonist.
(I could go one quoting Baxter’s essay—he’s a quotable essayist—but you should go out and read all of Burning Down the House instead. It’s that good.)
Dysfunctional narratives are a literature of avoidance, a strategic weaving of talking points and selective omissions to block counter-criticism. If that sounds like so much political maneuvering, that’s because it is.
“Mistakes were made”
Let’s start with what dysfunctional narratives are not: They’re not merely stories about dysfunction, as in dysfunctional families, or learning dysfunctions. Yes, a dysfunctional narrative may feature such topics, but that is not what makes it dysfunctional. It describes how the story is told, the strategies and choices the author had made to tell their story.
Baxter points to Richard Nixon’s “mistakes were made” as the kernel for the dysfunctional narrative in modern America. (He calls Nixon “the spiritual godfather of the contemporary disavowal movement.”) He also holds up conspiracy theories as prototypes:
No one really knows who’s responsible for [the JFK assassination]. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanations we need to enclose it. We don’t know who the agent of action is. We don’t even know why it was done.
Recall the tagline for The X-Files, a TV show about the investigation of conspiracy theories: “The truth is out there.” In other words, the show’s stories can’t provide the truth—it’s elsewhere.
More memorably—and more controversially—Baxter also turns his gaze upon Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which features the use of recovered memories (“not so much out of Zola as Geraldo“) and grows into “an account of conspiracy and memory, sorrow and depression, in which several of the major characters are acting out rather than acting, and doing their best to find someone to blame.”
In a similar vein, a nearly-dysfunctional story would be The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. It centers on a family man who, via therapy, digs through memories of a childhood trauma which has paralyzed him emotionally as an adult. He gradually heals, and goes on to repair his relationship with his family. Notably, his elderly father does not remember abusing him years earlier, leaving one wound unhealed.
Another example would be Nathanael West‘s A Cool Million, which follows a clueless naif on a cross-American journey as he’s swindled, robbed, mugged, and framed. By the end, the inventory of body parts he’s lost is like counting the change in your pocket. It might be forgiven as a satire of the American dream, but A Cool Million remains a heavy-handed tale.
This leads to another point: A dysfunctional narrative is not necessarily a poorly told one. The dysfunction is not in the quality of the telling, but something more innate.
Examples of more topical dysfunctional narratives could be the story of Aziz Ansari’s first-date accuser. The complaints of just about any politician or pundit who claims they’ve been victimized or deplatformed by their opponents is dysfunctional. In almost every case, the stories feature a faultless, passive protagonist being traumatized by the more powerful or the abstract.
There’s one more point about dysfunctional narratives worth making: The problem is not that dysfunctional narratives exist. The problem is the sheer volume of them in our culture, the sense that we’re being flooded—overwhelmed, even—by their numbers. That’s what seems to concern Baxter. It certainly concerns me.
A literature of avoidance
In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco offers this diagram:
one
two
three
four
abc
bcd
cde
def
Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or various factions within a political party.) Groups one and two have traits b and c in common, groups two and four have trait d in common, and so on.
Eco points out that “owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one,” even though they do not share any traits. The traits form a chain—there is a common “smell” between the political groups.
Not all dysfunctional narratives are exactly alike, or have the exact traits as the rest, but they do have a common “smell.” Even if a 9/11 conspiracy theory seems utterly unlike A Cool Million, they both may be dysfunctional.
Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they need to buttress their message:
A disarmed protagonist
An absent antagonist
Minimal secondary characters
An authorial thumb on the scale
“Pre-moralized”
A vaporous conclusion
Authorial infallibility and restricted interpretations
The most common trait of the dysfunctional narrative is a faultless, passive main character. Baxter calls this the “disarmed protagonist.” Baxter differentiates between “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”) and “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”). Dysfunctional narratives are the “me” stories.
And the errors these “me” characters make—if any—are forgivable, understanding, or forced upon them by dire circumstances. Compare this to the mistakes the people around them make—monstrous, unpardonable sins:
…characters [in stories] are not often permitted to make interesting and intelligent mistakes and then to acknowledge them. The whole idea of the “intelligent mistake,” the importance of the mistake made on impulse, has gone out the window. Or, if fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.
Power dynamics are a cornerstone of all narratives, but one “smell” of the dysfunctional variety is an extraordinary tilting of power against the main character. The system, or even the world, is allied against the protagonist. Close reads of these narratives reveals an authorial thumb on the story’s moral scale, an intuition that the situation has been soured a bit too much in the service of making a point. This scale-tipping may be achieved many ways, but often it requires a surgical omission of detail.
Hence how often in dysfunctional narratives the antagonist is absent. A crime in a dysfunctional novel doesn’t require a criminal. All it needs, in Robinson’s words, is for the main character to have endured some great wrong: “The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.”
Poet Marilynne Robinson
Name the harm, not the perpetrator. Why not the perpetrator? Because often there’s no person to name. The harm is a trauma or a memory. The perpetrator may have disappeared long ago, or died, or have utterly forgotten the wrongs they inflicted (as the father does in Prince of Tides). The malefactor may be an abstraction, like capitalism or sexism. But naming an abstraction as the villain does not name anything. It’s like naming narcissism as the cause of an airliner crash. This is by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice. Even Satan gets to plead his case in Paradise Lost.
No ending is reached in a dysfunctional narrative, because there’s only a trauma, or a memory, or an abstraction to work against. These injuries never heal. Memories may fade, but the past is concrete. By telling the story, the trauma is now recorded and notarized like a deed. “There’s the typical story in which no one is responsible for anything,” Baxter complained in 2012. “Shit happens, that’s all. It’s all about fate, or something. I hate stories like that.” These stories trail off at the end, employing imagery like setting suns or echoes fading off to signify a story that will never conclude.
The most surface criticism of these narratives is that we, the readers, sense we’re being talked down to by the author. “In the absence of any clear moral vision, we get moralizing instead,” Baxter writes. A dysfunctional narrative dog-whistles its morality, and those who cannot decode the whistle are faulted for it. The stories are pre-moralized: The reader is expected to understand beforehand the entirety of the story’s moral universe. For a reader to admit otherwise, or to argue an alternate interpretation, is to risk personal embarrassment or confrontation from those who will not brook dissent.
And making the reader uncomfortable is often the outright goal of the dysfunctional narrative. The writer is the presumed authority; the reader, the presumed student. It’s a retrograde posture, a nagging echo from a lesser-democratic time. (When I read A Brief History of Time, I was most certainly the student—but Hawking admirably never made me feel that way.) Dysfunctional narratives are often combative with the reader; they do not acknowledge the reader’s right to negotiate or question the message. With dysfunctional narratives, it’s difficult to discern if the writer is telling a story or digging a moat around their main character.
“What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy,” Baxter writes. “No one is in a position to judge.” A dysfunctional narrative portrays a world with few to no alternatives. A functional narrative explores alternatives. (This is what I mean when I write of fiction as an experiment.)
This is why so many dysfunctional narratives are aligned to the writer’s biography—who can claim to be a better authority on your life, after all? But the moment a reader reads a story, its protagonist is no longer the author’s sole property. The character is now a shared construct. Their decisions may be questioned (hence the passive nature of the protagonists—inaction avoids such judgements). If the author introduces secondary characters, they can’t claim similar authority over them—every additional character is one more attack vector of criticism, a chipping away of absolute authority over the story itself. That’s what happened to sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson in 2019, whose debut novel was pulped due to questions over his secondary characters.
Of all the traits listed—from the disarmed protagonist to the vaporous conclusion—the trait I find the “smelliest” is authorial infallibility and restricted interpretation. That’s why I used weasel language when I called Prince of Tides “nearly-dysfunctional:” The book is most certainly open to interpretation and questioning. In contrast, questioning a conspiracy theory could get you labeled an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, or worse.
A Cambrian explosion
What Baxter doesn’t explore fully is why we’ve had this Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives. He speculates a couple of possibilities, such as them coming down to us from our political leadership (like Moses carrying down the stone tablets), or as the byproduct of consumerism. I find myself at my most skeptical when his essay stumbles down these side roads.
When Baxter claims these stories arose out of “groups in our time [feeling] confused or powerless…in such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them,” it seems Baxter is offering a dysfunctional narrative to explain the existence of dysfunctional narratives. He claims these dysfunctional stories are produced by people of “irregular employment and mounting debts.” I strongly doubt this as well. In my experience, this type of folk are not the dominant producers of such narratives. Rather, these are the people who turn to stories for escape and uplift…the very comforts dysfunctional narratives cannot provide, and are not intended to provide.
Rather than point the finger at dead presidents or capitalism, I’m more inclined to ascribe the shift to a handful of changes in our culture.
The term “The Program Era” comes from a book by the same name detailing the postwar rise and influence of creative writing programs in the United States. This democratization of creative writing programs was not as democratic as once hoped, but it still led to a sharp increase in the numbers of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upwardly-striving classes. And, as part of the workshop method used in these programs, it also led to a rise in those people having to sit quietly and listen to their peers criticize their stories, sometimes demolishing them. (Charles Baxter was a creative writing professor and the head of a prominent writing program in the Midwest. Many of his examples in Burning Down the House come from manuscripts he read as an instructor.)
With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in aspiring writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are lodestones when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. Naturally, these writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter.
Another reason related to the Program Era is the heavy-handed emphasis on character-driven fiction over plot-driven fiction. I explore this theory here.
Another reason is staring back at you: The World Wide Web has empowered the masses to tell their stories to a global audience. This has created a dynamic where everyone can be a reader, a writer, and a critic, and all at the same time.
The natural next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work—to remove any fault in the story’s armor, to buttress it with rearguards and fortifications. (This is different than working hard to produce a high-quality experience, which, in my view, is a better use of time.) And there’s been a shift in why we tell stories: Not necessarily to entertain or enrich, but as an act of therapy or grievance, or to collect “allies” in a climate where you’re either with me or against me. Inaction in fiction has come to be praised as a literary virtue. Stories with characters who take matters into their own hands often are derided as genre fiction.
Pick up a university literary magazine and read it from cover to cover. The “smell” of dysfunctional narratives is awfully similar to the smell of social media jeremiads.
These are not the kind of stories I want to read, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance myself from them. Writers should strive to offer more than a list grievances, or perform acts of score-settling. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to connect dots. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.
White Noise is not the kind of book one associates with popular entertainment, nor its author as the kind of person to acquiesce to its adaptation.
This merely touches the surface of my reaction to Netflix’s latest project.
If you’re not familiar, the novel White Noise is a 1985 literary comedy about Jack Gladney, a “professor of Hitler studies,” and his nuclear family in a fictional Midwestern college town. The early chapters depict suburban life as one soaked in crass consumerism, commercialism, and the ubiquitous nature of mass media. Things go pear-shaped when a railroad car spill on the edge of town triggers an “airborne toxic event,” leading to an evacuation and the concomitant strain on the family unit.
Remember, this is branded a comedy. The comic thrust of White Noise comes from its supposedly scathing parodies of American middle-class life. Take the novel’s opening paragraphs, where Gladney observes the college’s students returning to campus in single file:
The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags — onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.
You’re forgiven if you stopped reading halfway through and skipped down. You didn’t miss anything.
Critic B. R. Myers categorizes this manner of list-making as a symptom of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” That’s pretty much what the first half of White Noise adds up to. There’s more of these dreary lists in the book, and plenty of tin-eared dialogue to boot, as evidenced in this exchange between Gladney and his wife:
“It’s not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”
“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”
“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.
“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”
“Not that we don’t have a station wagon ourselves.”
“It’s small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door.”
Or this moment—the most famous in the book—when Gladney’s school-aged daughter talks in her sleep:
She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.
Toyota Celica.
A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform.
I suppose for a certain type of person, this is a scream, gold-shot and looming. I’m not that type of person.
It’s the phoniness of White Noise I can’t let go of. The excuse of “it’s a satire” does not forgive the writer from grasping and depicting the reality of a situation. The power of satire is to capture the genuine and turn its underbelly over to tickle it—to reveal its absurdities in both premise and execution. DeLillo never accomplishes this. Professors don’t inventory their students’ goods from afar; husbands don’t tell their wives that the station wagon has a junky door (when any wife would full-well know this); and if a daughter was repeating a car make and model in her sleep, no one would declare it a religious experience. The absurdity of White Noise is not the mindless consumers populating it, but that this novel somehow is considered a smart skewering of them.
Compare the above to George Carlin’s ridiculing of American materialism in his infamous “Stuff” sketch:
DeLillo’s range-finding jabs are timid compared to Carlin’s honed wit, from the basic observation that homes are just lockboxes for our precious objects, to the game-theoretic anguish of weighing which personal goods make the cut for an overnight excursion. He even indulges in his own Consumerland-like list (“Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray”) that is far briefer, funnier, and better-curated than DeLillo’s weary catalogs. The laughs aren’t merely at Carlin’s on-stage antics, but in the gnawing sensation that we’re guilty of what he’s describing—and Carlin’s tacit admission that he’s guilty of it, too. Meanwhile, in White Noise, we’re supposed to be chortling at the mindlessness of our inferiors. DeLillo is othering America—for whose benefit? Why, Americans like him: Americans who deny their American-ness.
(In this sense, I suspect the Netflix adaptation will execute much like Adam McKay’s smug Don’t Look Up, a spoof also predicated on an America stupefied by cable television and fast food.)
It’s not merely the elitism that fails to connect. Gladney’s field of “Hitler studies” is never really fleshed out. It could have been a fascinating device (although it risked from page one falling into the trap of Godwin’s Law). As the book wears on, the Hitler studies thing feels like a gag DeLillo thought would reap comic gold, and only realized chapters in that the idea had run out of gas. The best he can do is have Gladney deliver a lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis Presley—there’s your Godwin’s Law at work. When Gladney admits he’s only recently learned German, you realize how thin the satire really is: This is not a real professor of Hitler studies.
When I say “Gladney is not a real professor of Hitler studies,” I don’t mean it in the same way that W. H. Auden said Shrike is not a real newspaper editor in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Auden meant that Miss Lonelyhearts is not about newspapermen or journalism—the premise of a man taking a position as an advice columnist is merely a convenience to place the book’s heart-wrenching confessional letters into his hands. Gladney’s field is very much intended to satirize him and academia, but the joke is never explored and left unfulfilled. It becomes a shingle to hang around Gladney’s neck, doing precious little to inform his worldview or way of life.
The main course for White Noise, though, is the American bourgeoisie. The metaphysics of supermarkets are discussed by the book’s characters (always with a straight face). Death is discussed in excruciating abstractions and legalistic terms. The book concludes with Gladney looking out over a hazy dusk, the air thick with toxic chemicals, and admiring its beauty. (No—really.)
What’s the problem with Netflix adapting the book? In truth, I don’t care much one way or the other. What stunned me—and motivated those posts on social media—is that White Noise was always intended to be a sharp poke in the eye for middle America, with plenty of scorn reserved for major corporations and the mass media.
In other words, White Noise satirizes the type of corporation that’s adapting it into a movie, mocks the people that corporation will be marketing the film at, and despises the corporation collecting its profits as the mindless mob watches on from the comfort of the sofas in their McMansions, with their living rooms, their family rooms, their bedrooms, their candy rooms, their office rooms, their great rooms.
Mystery and Suspense Magazine has published my article “Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective” on their web site. In it, I explore the traditional reasons why critics and fans think the Baker Street detective remains popular—even immortal—to this day, and offer in return my own thoughts on the subject:
What is the enduring appeal of this shape-shifting character? Doyle gives no indication that Holmes is particularly attractive or magnetic in personality. He can be cold, abrasive, and downright rude in moments. One cannot help but feel Dr. Watson is a man with a remarkable reservoir of patience. How many Sherlock Holmes adventures open with the detective challenging Watson to discern the history of a person from nothing more than a walking stick, a battered hat, or a muddied shoe? Watson entertains Holmes and his games of deduction, but always as the lesser, never as the equal. (In my experience, medical doctors are not the sorts of people who take well to being talked down to.) Why would such a man continue to fascinate and entertain well into the 21st century?
My thinking on Doyle and his creation has shifted over the past few years due to a renewed appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes canon and, of course, writing a reinterpretation of his classic The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Update, 7 Jul 2022: I’ve taken a fair amount of heat for the sin of admitting I’d not read Sadly, Porn before producing the following post. Note that I did read the Amazon sample before writing what follows, which is 10% of the book’s opening; I don’t count that as a full read, and didn’t want to quibble about that point when I first published this. Scott Alexander’s review quotes substantially from the book as well, but again, another quibble.
What my detractors don’t seem to get is that this post spends the bulk of its energies examining W. H. Auden’s “West’s Disease” and not Edward Teach’s book. The post originated as a comment to Scott Alexander’s follow-up to his review, but as my comment grew and became more involved, I decided to publish it here, on my blog.
As such, this post should be framed as “If Astral Codex Ten and Resident Contrarian are correct about this one point in Sadly, Porn, it relates to West’s Disease in this way…”
But, of course, it depends on the reader to carry the logic from there, and not simply dunk on me and walk off with LOLs.
I am now reading Sadly, Porn. For the record, I’ve read nothing so far that changes my mind on any of my thoughts below. If anything, it’s only cementing my position.
Allow me to state this up-front: I’ve not read Edward Teach’s Sadly, Porn. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (ACX) has, though, and in response wrote a rather lengthy and discursive review, as well as a follow-up on the comments it elicited. At this moment, most of my understanding of Sadly, Porn comes from these sources (which I freely admit is an imperfect substitute for reading the book).
From what I’ve gathered, Sadly, Porn is a meandering and intentionally obscure treatise (diatribe?), grounded in psychoanalytics, which purports to explain—among other things—the ways people lie to themselves. Released in December 2021, the Kindle edition clocks in at over 1,100 pages, brimming with extended discourses on topics you might think plucked from the air, such as a ten-page examination of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. It’s also larded with David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius-style exhortations directed at the reader. The author opens with a thirty-page erotica story which, he later claims, is only included to scare off readers. (An odd strategy, since there are a multitude of writers producing such fiction for a lucrative living.) Really, to get a good idea of the book’s scope, read the ACX review.
What lit my interest in it comes from ACX taking a stab at boiling down Sadly, Porn to its core thesis:
Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.
Psychologically unhealthy people, e.g., you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it.
Again, from what I’ve gathered, Edward Teach believes that social status is the chief (or even sole) motivator of human behavior. (Or, perhaps he doesn’t; ACX makes it clear the book is too cagey to state its arguments plainly.)
Teach certainly paints us all as loathsome meat-bags of pettiness. Yet there’s something familiar about his observations that makes it difficult to reject his assertions. In a time where social media has devised a multitude of ways to score our social standing (via follower counts, likes, retweets, and so on), and in a culture endlessly promoting concepts like self-actualization and fame, his claims about the primacy of status-seeking has substance.
Now compare Teach’s accounting of Man’s damnable condition with W. H. Auden’s analysis of Nathanael West’s novels, where he first describes “West’s Disease”:
This is a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires. … All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.” [But the sufferer] cannot desire anything, for the present state of the self is the ground of every desire, and that is precisely what the wisher rejects. [Emphasis mine.]
Nathanael West
To simplify Auden’s distinction: A wish is the simple act of imagining oneself as a different person, or in a different situation; a desire is imagining how one might convert one’s current self into a different person or situation. A wish is wanting to be thin; a desire is vowing to join a gym and work-out every day (even if one doesn’t act on it). West’s Disease is the inability to transform one to the other, leading to inaction, loathing, and rage.
The finest examples of West’s Disease may be found in The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s most well-known novel. It’s a brilliant and acidic look at 1930s Hollywood, as witnessed by a motley group of misfits well-distanced from Tinseltown’s glamour, money, and success. “Hollywood’s success as a dream factory is predicated on knowing our wishes and actualizing them on the silver screen,” I wrote two years ago. “That’s why Hollywood appears a tantalizing cure for West’s Disease.”
Auden’s diagnosis that a person with West’s Disease “cannot desire anything” echoes another summation of Sadly, Porn from blogger Resident Contrarian:
[Teach asserts] we in general are incapable of action; we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. … we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that RC’s example (“you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”) sounds like a stock scene in a Hollywood romantic comedy. And I do equate wishing, in Auden’s terms, with Teach’s idea that we crave an externality to occur that actualizes our wishes for us. Teach is perhaps exploring Auden’s wish mechanism a bit more fully, but it looks to me that Auden in 1962 struck upon the same vein of thinking that Teach is attempting to communicate in 2022.
Poster for The Day of the Locust (1975) movie adaptation
West’s Disease is what paralyzes the misfits in The Day of the Locust. These Hollywood outsiders witness the fruits of Hollywood’s money and glamour being distributed to others, never themselves. They want success, but success is supposed to come to them, not vice-versa. Faye Greener, the only character who can claim to have a film career in front of the camera, complains “the reason she wasn’t a star was because she didn’t have the right clothes.” (There’s a similar shrugging passivity in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?)
But Auden is less absolutist than Teach. It’s West’s Disease, after all: It only afflicts certain individuals, whereas Teach finds it to be widespread. (Perhaps Teach is right, though. Perhaps West’s Disease is contagious and has spread virulently since 1962. Or since 1939, when Locust was published.)
Auden also does not pin down West’s Disease as a natural state of the human psyche, but as a result of modernity:
There have, no doubt, always been cases of West’s Disease, but the chances of infection in a democratic and mechanized society like our own are much greater than in the more static and poorer societies.
When, for most people, their work, their company, even their marriages, were determined, not by personal choice or ability, but by the class into which they were born, the individual was less tempted to develop a personal grudge against Fate; his fate was not his own but that of everyone around him.
But the greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail.[Again, emphasis mine.]
This jibes with one of my intuitions as I read ACX’s review: That Teach’s near-universality of status-seeking in the human psyche is more likely the result of (or greatly amplified by) recent trends in technology and social organization. Auden wrote the above when notions like meritocracy were ripe in the air and corporate ladders were being erected sky-high. Today, social media and tabloid-esque journalism is king, can show you the numbers to prove it, and has disjointed our culture in unexpected ways.
What’s more, 21st-century American popular media doesn’t merely make “inequalities of talent and character” obvious; our celebrity-obsessed culture revels in and celebrates them. As Budd Schulberg wrote about status climbing: “It will survive as long as money and prestige and power are ends in themselves, running wild, unharnessed from usefulness.”
The Day of the Locust opens describing those with West’s Disease as those who “loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. … They had come to California to die.” In the final chapter, they rise up in revolt, and Los Angeles burns. Auden saw West’s Disease as damaging not merely to the individual, but to the society around them.
Teach seems to treat West’s Disease as an intellectual, and perhaps masculine, failing. (Apparently cuckoldry is a running theme throughout Sadly, Porn.) The book adopts a scolding and sneering tone toward the reader, implicating them as weak and blithe to this delusion of false desires and status envy.
