Vice and virtue in fiction and the real world
Hi, there, world. It’s been a while. I’ve been on the road quite a bit in the last six weeks, and I’ve been consumed by important family matters. Though I’ve had all sorts of ideas about something I might write about in the blog, I’ve not had the energy and discipline to come up with anything I thought was worth posting. But the longer I go without posting, the more likely this will be yet another still-born blog, sinking into the internet wasteland of so many others (including a couple of mine from the old days). I’ve been saying for more than a week now that I really should either write something or admit that I won’t be writing.
When I started on the day’s tasks this morning I was thinking that I didn’t have time to write anything for the blog today. But then I quite accidentally stumbled on a journal entry from February 2024. Here’s the paragraph of that journal entry that brought me back into the blog:
I’m about half-way through Prophet Song, a novel that I’m finding to be powerfully unsettling. Paul Lynch, the author, is really pulling me into the world of the novel. One literary strategy is that he doesn’t make it easy to follow a conversation – there are no quotation marks, and back and forth exchanges between two characters run together in the same paragraph. I had the impression that at times he leaves deliberately ambiguous which person in a conversation says something. Perhaps not – what’s clear is that I have to stay with the text to get a sense of who is saying what to whom. It’s even more complicated than that, since it’s not unusual for a person’s internal dialog to be brought into the exchange as well, sometimes without a clear indication until a bit later that this was internal and unspoken instead of something said in the conversation. Another powerful element in the novel is the way that the political and cultural dynamics shape and reshape the relationship dynamics of the family at the center of the novel. It brings home how much of our immediate family context is shaped by and shapes the larger world in which we live. Yet another element in the power of the novel is that I can easily see us living in a world much like the one in the novel, especially if Trump is elected next November. Lynch does a very good job of showing how such a world gradually emerges, with people early on unwilling to accept clues that it could be coming. It’s so easy to envision a world a year or two from now in which we’re saying that we should have been paying more attention to what was going on.
Indeed.
All of this leads me to describe a novel that I’m reading now – The Oppermanns, by Lion Feuchtwanger. A month ago I’d never heard of the book or the author. I was browsing the shelves at McNally Jackson in New York City, and happened to see Claire Messud’s comment on the cover of this book. “Feuchtwanger’s masterpiece … At once unbearable and unputdownable.” So, at the risk of not being able to put it down, I pulled it off the display shelf and read the introduction by Joshua Cohen, a novelist who won the Pulitzer for his book The Netanyahus in 2012. (Oh, drat — yet another book to add to the TBR pile). Cohen’s introduction led me into the first few pages on the novel itself, and I found myself agreeing with Messud. I barely managed to put it down, but only long enough to let the sales clerk ring it up. That evening I started to read the book in earnest. Feuchtwanger wrote it in Germany in the spring and fall of 1933; the novel itself is set in Germany, from late 1932 into 1933. It’s fiction, but it runs close to historical truth. It’s an account of a prominent Jewish family — three brothers and a sister — living through Hitler’s rise to power. Ironically enough, Feuchtwanger’s life very quickly mirrored the novel: “in 1933, his property in Berlin was seized; his books were purged from German libraries and burned; he was banned from publishing in the Reich; and he was stripped of his German citizenship” (from the book’s Introduction, p. xii). He eventually found refuge France; after the German occupation of France, he managed to escape to the United States. A personal note – in his escape across Portugal he was assisted by the human rights organization that my wife now directs. It’s a small world, both temporally and spatially.
One of the brothers in the novel thinks that there’s really nothing to worry about — everyone, he thinks, will soon see just how ludicrous this man Hitler is. Another has concerns, but thinks that he can avoid trouble by rearranging business interests. The sister’s husband is decidedly less optimistic about the future. I’m now halfway through the novel; all of them remain in Germany, even as they watch friends and associates leave the country. Though they remain, there’s a deep unsettledness.
I’m planning to write more about The Oppermanns after finishing it (even as I realize that there are more than a few books in What I’m Reading that are marked “notes pending”). But I have to say now that I’m finding it more and more difficult to dissociate the world of the novel from the world in which I’m living now. It’s an odd feeling. Even as I wish/hope for the Oppermann siblings to “come to their senses” and recognize the full import of what’s going on around them, I wonder how I can continue to go about “normal life” in the midst of things around me. Both Lynch and Feuchtwanger are adept at pulling me into the world of their novels; the world itself seems more and more to be bringing these novels into the world. There’s so much going on in this world that echoes what I see in these two novels. Andrea Pitzer does a better job than I could do of cataloging these things, even though there’s a lot that she doesn’t say. But she goes beyond this cataloging, insisting that there are things that we can do: “we are singularly poised to act in ways that most citizens and residents of other countries that got mired in hardening authoritarianism were not. We have more options than those facing rising oppression in places like Hungary and Turkey, which have faced similar political degradation in the last decade.”
Pitzer’s take on the current climate includes the observation that our country is divided between authoritarians and their supporters on one hand and those who favor a more inclusive and diverse society on the other. Between these extremes, she suggests, there is a “mushy middle,” not fully endorsing the claims of the authoritarians but open to being persuaded or manipulated into supporting them. In fact, she says, much of what the administration does, and the way that it does all of it, is directed not only toward the base but also to this mushy middle, seeking to persuade the latter that Trump offers security in troubled times. “People fall for it — with enough propaganda, a lot of people. And some of them are willing to go along with the harm someone like Trump will do, even if they know that these actions are wrong.” I’m reminded of a museum exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany that I saw several years ago. The exhibit tracked Frankfurt’s rapid and radical transformation from a moderately liberal city to a strong supporter of the Nazi party. One thing I remember from that exhibit is that early on the Nazis acted as though they were much more numerous and much more powerful than they were. In a sense, they faked it until they made it. At the risk of being overly cynical, I’d call it vice signaling.
But what about virtue signaling? Pitzer insists that a response that many might dismiss as mere virtue signaling is in fact crucial in these times. “There’s value,” she says, “in everyone showing up in some way to demonstrate what they stand for, whether it’s quietly in smaller communities or before the whole world. What principles are bedrock to the society you want to live in? Ask yourself, figure it out, and let others know how you feel, from your family and neighbors to your representatives to your state or the entire country.” Let those in the mushy middle know that there are plenty of people who have a different view of the world and who believe that there’s actually some security in a society open to all sorts of diversity.
As I said above, I’m only halfway through my reading of The Oppermanns. But I’m deeply impressed by one character, the 17-year-old son of one of the brothers. He, at least, is willing to stand up for values even at considerable cost. It remains to be seen how long he’ll be able to hold to those values, and what cost he’ll pay for his stand.
I’m just one person, posting to this blog sporadically, a blog that even on a good day might have three readers. (I’d say four readers, but my mother died years ago.) But I can at least say here that I’m on the side of those who favor diversity.
And what about the so-called “normal life” I mentioned in passing above? I thought I was going to write about that here, but it turns out that it’s a topic for another post.
