Anxiety of the Future #5: Trumpocalypse Part Two
*This is part two of this essay. For part one, go here.
As the horrors of the twentieth century began to fade from memory, leaving behind nostalgic feelings for the good old days “when America was great,” our society also remains haunted by the cultural residue of fascism, of genocide, of nuclear conflagration. Confronting our own existential threats in the form of environmental collapse and global warming, the comfort of the known is tangible while the fear of the worst that could happen hovers nearby. The growth of antidemocratic and authoritarian impulses on the right (as I have discussed in depth in other posts), threatening the continued existence of many in our society, makes seeing a dystopian future in our current moment all too easy.
“What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn’t help but find it interesting, watching people, herself included, compulsively foul their nest.”- Crudo, Olivia Laing
“… just up until now, there have been two tracks or timelines: the one ... in which the future is predictable, an extrapolation from the past, a steady progression in which we are gradually turning into our mothers and fathers, men and women who make plans and save for retirement. Then there’s the second track, the occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising out of history to meet us. I am the ragged membrane, the porous barrier between the two.” — Red Pill, Hari Kunzru
At last Alma sighed. “All those good intentions we once had,” she said in a trembling voice, “and yet the fuse has been lit.”
“The fuse had always been lit,” Brettigan said. “The fuse is eternal and so is the bomb it’s attached to.”- The Sun Collective, Charles Baxter
Is an apocalypse happening? Has the end of the world already come? As I talked about in my 2020 entry, several novels I read could be looked at as “pre-apocalyptic literature,” works that grapple with perceptions of a world on the brink, hovering between our normal “late capitalist” world of podcasts and yoga and bookstores, and the final collapse of these things.
Novels such as Olivia Laing’s Crudo, Charles Baxter’s The Sun Collective, and Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill all explore their protagonist’s anxieties and complacency in inhabiting this moment, all too quotidian and yet with that air of a coming earthquake. All writing before the pandemic, responding to the unsettling political modes of the last five years, in a certain sense they were right.
Published in 2018, Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo, for instance, captures the horrific yet banal atmosphere of everyday life for many in the tense year of 2017. Trump. Brexit. Charlottesville. Focusing on Kathy, an English woman living in the US who has just turned 40 and is getting married for the first time, she finds that these personal landmarks pale in comparison to the continued onslaught of apocalyptic news continually pouring out, which even a holiday to Tuscany can’t ease. The continuous feed of the social media landscape, Trump’s Twitter in particular, adds a constant air of fear to Kathy’s narrative. An intense, compact novel, Laing channels the work and emotion of Kathy Acker in her anxious rumination on living in a time when the future seems far less certain than we’ve come to be accustomed to.
Hari Kunzru’s novel 2020 Red Pill is also a chilling and relatable work that captures, to use a word that the novel’s unnamed narrator might, the zeitgeist of the fraught 2010s with all its anxiety, fear, and sense of uncertainty. With a languid, meandering pace, broken up by lengthy asides, the novel ultimately lacks needed clarity in its reflection of the current state of the world, even as it builds to a fever pitch with the US election of 2016. Centering on a middle-aged freelance writer sharing certain biographical similarities to Kunzru himself, the novel becomes increasingly claustrophobic as he leaves his wife and young daughter in New York to cloister himself at a prestigious writer’s fellowship outside Berlin hoping to finish his latest book.
Realizing that the Deuter Center’s stifling atmosphere leaves him completely unable to write, he quickly spirals into bouts of existential dread and paranoia, becoming lost in the dark history of his new surroundings at Wannsee, getting sucked down various online rabbit holes, and binging on the disturbing and pessimistic cop show, Blue Lives. A chance encounter with Anton, a fellow American writer, whom the narrator sees as the literal embodiment of all of the existential fears that were occupying his mind, the calculated transgression, laughing bigotry, and incipient fascism of the alt-right, causes him to spiral completely into madness. As his narrator loses his grasp of reality, Kunzru does capture something of the fractured nature of reality in a time of “fake news” and echo chambers, as his friends and family see their own realities crumble upon that final, horrific revelation of November 3rd, 2016, making the narrator, in his anxious paranoia, a kind of harbinger. But, the narrator is, after all, far from being alone in noticing the worrying shift in the facade of liberal democracy before 2016, the growing undercurrents of fascist thought online and in politics, so it seems odd that he never seems to find anyone to share his fears, his concerns. If we are going to oppose this fascist resurgence, we’ll need an organized response. Whether through voting or action, I think it’s important to recognize that there are many people who are bringing eloquent and passionate rebuttals to the Antons of the world.
Charles Baxter’s novel The Sun Collective, also published in 2020, had an intriguing premise, a magical realist depiction of the late 2010s pre-apocalyptic moment set in a Minneapolis seething with anxiety. With the oppressive administration of a bombastic and incompetent president, a beinginly sinister leftist community action group, and troubling Internet rumors of suburban Republican thrill killers victimizing the city’s homeless, Baxter is working with some powerful ideas. Unfortunately, I feel the novel ultimately had nothing interesting to say, and despite its description on the dust jacket as a “blistering social critique,” for me The Sun Collective was at best a droll comedy of manners, a highbrow Garrison Keillor.
This is exemplified by the viewpoints Baxter uses to frame his critiques of the current political zeitgeist, of rising houselessness, generational tensions, anti-capitalist leftist organizing, and an ascendant fascism. Both the Brettigans, a retired couple of bourgeois bohemian professionals nostalgic for the days as hippie radicals, and Christina, a millennial member of the titular Sun Collective, represent a sort of white privileged class haplessly bewildered by what is happening in their country. While this has a certain accuracy, it is a perspective that is never actually challenged for all of the hand-wringing and self-flagellating liberal guilt shown by the Brettigans as they argue what should be done. In fact, in spite of all of these deeply political topics, it feels like an oddly apolitical novel. In the end, the complex tapestry of literary allusions and symbolic motifs Baxter weaves becomes smothered under a suffocating blanket of smug irony and insufferable prose that renders any insights hollow.
In all three of these novels, the role of the internet in fostering this breakdown of reality is a major theme, and whether they become obsessed with the feed (Kathy and the narrator of Red Pill) or are unable to grasp it at all (The Brettigans), its influence is malign. Even more than the ambiguous depictions seen throughout the novels I read for Internet Apocalypses, these works take a suspicious attitude toward the technological advances that have poisoned the vulnerable, leaving them unable to tell reality from fantasy. There is undoubtedly some truth in this. However, throughout these works the inability of our privileged, mostly heteronormative, wealthy narrators to really grapple with what’s going on in the world makes them often feel bleak and hopeless, fatalistic.
“Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders. What comes next?”- The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
“Every spot on the planet has something in its past that is worth haunting about. Or if, miraculously, it does not, then there’s always the future, which holds far worse for everyone. It haunts backward.”- Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt
The final two books I will discuss, acclaimed Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence and English author Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, were both published in 2021. Each examines the present moment as an extension of the past, making them feel more grounded, if not any less horrifying, than the anxious accounts above. It is perhaps no coincidence that these final two are written from generally more marginalized perspectives. Both look at political realities through the lens of hauntings, a useful literary motif to capture the zeitgeist of a world still ruled by old memories, recalling my readings of last year. Both Erdrich and Rumfitt’s characters confront entities that recall injustices and oppression that still possess our cultures. Still, in exorcizing these spirits they look towards futures in which their identities survive.
Blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, for instance, much of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Sentence is set at her bookstore Birchbark near Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. Set between November 2019 and 2020, Erdrich captures a nuanced and vivid picture of Minneapolis during these fraught months as COVID-19, the uprising against racist police violence after the murder of George Floyd, and the tense election period challenged the social order of our nation in ways not seen in decades. The narrator, Tookie, an indigenous ex-con and worker at the bookstore confronts the restless spirit of a contentious white customer as the Pandemic reduces retail itself to a surreal half life is a compelling lens to view these themes.
As a descendant of settlers and immigrants in the US and in Minnesota in particular, it is always important, I feel, to recognize that this land is not ours. From what I have read of Erdrich’s work so far, she creates an intimate and personal atmosphere yet interweaves some very big questions and ideas into her narratives, particularly the continued presence of native society in a landscape that was taken from them. Adeptly drawing on magical realism in the recognizable landscape of the Twin Cities, Erdrich’s work expresses and celebrates the continued vibrancy of indigenous life and ideas and their continued existence and place in a society that often fails to recognize them. The Sentence was, I feel, very effective at exploring these ideas as Tookie’s unreliable memory serves as a poignant microcosm of this history, of a landscape and a state, a life, that belongs to them but has been completely altered by alien forces. The significance of sentences themselves, whether they are the time Tookie spent in state custody or the power that words have on people and our societies tie the novel together in a very effective way.
Effective and topical horror, discomforting and real, in Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt draws from many frightening aspects of daily life for trans people in the UK and refracts them through the lens of a haunted house, exposing the dark heart of England and the pain it’s imperialistic xenophobia continues to inflict. Rumfitt’s work is visceral and sickening and does not turn away from the trauma endemic to the specter of fascism, that nightmarish entity that continues to haunt the world. Told from the alternating perspectives of Alice and Ila, queer college grads, and The House known as Albion, which inflicts horrific abuse on both, absorbs their friend and inserts itself into each, driving the two apart as Ila embraces TERF ideology. Moving backward and forwards through time, the story is both hallucinatory and grounded, engaging in all of the transphobia, queerphobia, racism, and misogyny that haunts our lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Exploring this blurry area between metaphor and reality, and wearing her influences on her sleeve, especially Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter, Tell Me I’m Worthless is full of interesting if grim insights and meta-commentary, befitting the way history haunts the present and pulls us toward the future, in a way that does not pull away from the terror. In spite of Rumfitt’s utterly terrifying scenes, though, the ultimate message delivers a kind of strange catharsis. Taken together, this is a novel that captures the fear and humanity of our scary moment and offers much to think about.
As, here in the US, anyway, we build up to another Trump versus Biden election horrorshow, the climate around the world spirals in ways that shock even me. All of the tension the authors of the works I’ve discussed wrestled with in their narratives are building again if they ever lessened. As we watch the former President continue to campaign for 2024 under the threat of multiple indictments, we will see whether the office truly is above the law, and what may happen in the unprecedented case that a presidential candidate suffers legal consequences for his crimes. So much in the politics of the US has seemed unprecedented in recent months. In my next Anxiety of the Future entry, I’ll look at works that imagine the worst for the US, civil war, and the collapse of the Union, and why it is so compelling to stare at future maps where all the borders have been messed up.