Talk of Class Warfare

People say outrageously bizarre and stupid things sometimes. A couple of months ago Stephen Miller accused the media of having a "cosmopolitan bias". When I heard this, I simply couldn't understand what he was trying to say. The word "cosmopolitan" literally means "familiar with and at ease in many different countries and cultures". 'Cosmopolitan bias' seems to me an oxymoron or contradiction-in-terms. How can someone have a 'cosmopolitan bias'? Surely to be cosmopolitan is by definition to be unbiased? It perplexed me so much I even looked up an article in Politico about the phrase, an article that argued that this term has an ugly history in Russia and in Eastern Europe. I wondered though: has the term 'cosmopolitan bias' ever been used at all in English-speaking countries? Miller's employment of this expression isn't evil, it's stupid. Ironically he used it in a press conference in which he was promoting Trump's policy of only admitting English speaking immigrants – ironic because it seems to me that he can't speak English himself.

I felt another sense of disconnect or unreality in the wake of the Charlottesville riots when I saw on TV clips of neo-nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us!" Again, I simply couldn't understand what they were trying to say. I had a vision of something like The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in which Jews take over the bodies of poor white trailer trash. I think now that what they were trying to say is that the US is presently and rightfully ruled by WASPS and that they don't want it taken over by Jews. There are two reasons why this chant confused me. First, the white supremacists were, as I said, poor white trash, not senators or congressmen or billionaire Republican sponsors. They don't currently own the country, they aren't the ruling class. Second, there are already plenty of Jews in the elite already, on both the Left and the Right, in the entertainment industry, in business – and in the Trump administration itself. This is not I should say to posit a Jewish conspiracy, it's simply to state facts.

Another problem with the white supremacist movement is with the word 'white' itself. What does 'white' even mean? Does the term designate only those descended from the English? From the Germans? In 1900, the Irish weren't considered white and today they are. Arguably Ashkenazi Jews are white, although they often don't identify as such. As I said in a previous post, I concede provacatively, you could argue that white supremacist movements are the bastard children of identity politics.

A huge chunk of the American electorate suffers from what Marx called 'false consciousness'. The white working class privilege their colour over their class. This insanity, in which the poor identify with the rich, is a massive part of the problem with modern America – the Republican Party has bamboozled the lower classes into supporting a corrupt wealthy few. Everyone in America seems to think he or she is going to be a millionaire one day. A second part of the problem with modern America relates to Evangelical Christians, who tend to support the Republicans. The Christian Right is so hypocritical, the religion has become a parody of what it once was. The Prosperity Gospel, for instance, holds that the rich are rich because God wants them to be rich and that if one prays to God sincerely enough, one will be rewarded with fame or money; climate change can't be happening because God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent and He wouldn't allow it. The status-quo is part of God's plan. These Evangelicals cling to Trump, continue to pretend he's a Christian even though, as the Pope rightly pointed out, he isn't, almost seem to accord him magical powers that will somehow miraculously improve their lives (so long as Washington 'insiders' can be conquered or at leat bypassed). Now, I don't think Trump is exactly 'racist' but I do think him a narcissistic confidence trickster whose whole raison d'être is to be followed and praised by his base and by Fox News, and will say anything he thinks will make his followers like him. I certainly don't think he's a Christian.

Christianity, as it was originally conceived, was the religion of the poor and oppressed. It was a movement for political change; it was left-wing. This has not been the case in the US for decades. What has happened in the States is that a religion once dedicated to love and helping the poor has been captured by hate, by hypocrisy, by the powerful.

If there is insanity and stupidity on the Right, there is also irrationality on the Left and I need to mention this as well. Yesterday I read a front-page article in my daily newspaper reporting a study that purported to show that in New Zealand approximately eighty percent of the pay disparity between men and women could be attributed to 'sexism'. Now, I may be wrong but something ineffable about this article struck me as bogus.  'Sexism' is a simple word for a complicated concept, something hard to identify and even harder to quantify. The article didn't explain the study's methodology, a study which perhaps oversimplified a picture that is probably far too complex to sum up in a single word. It overlooked the fact that maybe the top 1% of the wealthiest people in New Zealand are all men, probably all with trophy wives; 'sexism' seems an inappropriate word for this. The intuition that something about this study was bogus is a feeling I get from a lot of social theory, a lot of official and academic discourse. So much of social science is suspect. It has been argued by John Cranshaw for instance that because there is a correlation between alcohol abuse and youth suicide, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide. Surely alcohol abuse and youth suicide are both effects of something temporally and environmentally antecedent? Ideas like these, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide or that the pay disparity between men and women is simply the result of 'sexism' (whatever that means) float out of academia and government departments and simply get reported uncritically. I read a poem once with the line, "Reification won't get you out of the parking lot" and this sentiment applies here. Sometimes I feel issues like the ones I mentioned are raised by the media simply to distract attention from the real issues, such as the concentration of money and power in the hands of a very small few.

What I'm getting at here, perhaps indirectly, is that the Left, here in New Zealand and in America, has a problem with propagandist political correctness and with an uncritical reliance on the social sciences.

This post started off about America and I'll get back to it now, even though I'm an outsider who is probably not entitled to lecture anyone at all about it. The American Left needs to change. It needs to focus on social class, not group allegiances. For one thing it needs to bring in Christians, good Christians who value honesty and fairness. Christianity needs to change as well and it is changing a little – Pope Francis seems to me a very good man and the Anglican Church in Scotland a couple of months ago altered doctrinal law to permit gay marriage. The challenge the American Left faces is how to bring Protestant Christians in under the Democrat umbrella while still including the various other groups that make up the liberal Left: atheists like Bill Maher, Catholics like Stephen Colbert, Muslims like Hasan Minaj, Buddhists, Scientologists, Jews like Sarah Silverman and Lewis Black. This of course has been the problem for a while now – but one way to unite people of different colours and creeds is to find a position that everyone can agree on, the pursuit of social justice and truth, and to face up to the common enemy, the unscrupulously wealthy, the powerful who misuse their power, the dishonest. Barack Obama when in office was reluctant to talk about 'income inequality' because he was afraid people in the media, particularly the rightwing media, would immediately accuse him of trying to incite 'class warfare', but maybe a little class warfare is precisely what the Left should embrace. The rich should be taxed more, not less. There is a related problem with respect to attempting to bring Protestant Christians into the Democrat fold: how to represent Christians who have a problem with homosexuality and still also represent openly gay men and women. It is a problem that would never have occurred if psychiatrists and psychologists hadn't invented homosexuality in first place.

Although I have said the Left needs to bring in Christians I myself am not exactly a Christian. I have sometimes thought God might be evil. In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus says "God is a shout in the street"; I think God might be what other people think. Sometimes I identify as a Gnostic. During my life people have sometimes mistaken me for something I'm not and on several occasions I myself have even been mistaken for Jewish. I am not denying that racism and sexism exist, but perhaps everyone contains a little of everyone else.

On "The Sellout" and "An Angel at My Table"

In tonight's post, which probably follows too soon after the last one, I want to talk about two very different, in fact quite disconnected, topics, Paul Beatty's novel The Sellout and the second volume of Janet Frame's autobiography An Angel at my Table. But first I feel I need to say a little about the violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, several days ago. My post "Identity Politics" was written before this abomination occurred but it seems relevant.

I know I have American readers even though I am a New Zealander, and perhaps overseas readers may be interested to learn a little about race relations here in Aotearoa. The indigenous people in this country are the Maori, now a minority and often an underclass. However, over two hundred years of intermarriage mean that today it is often difficult to distinguish a Maori from a Pakeha. Both groups are well integrated. In our parliament, we have a party ostensibly dedicated solely to representing Maori interests, the Maori Party, but many other members of parliament are Maori: for example, the leader of the party New Zealand First, Winston Peters, a populist sometimes compared unfairly with Trump, is Maori, and the former co-leader of the Greens, Metiria Turei, who was recently forced to resign because she was honest enough to admit, I think unprompted, that she had committed benefit fraud in the 'nineties, is also Maori. I live in Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city and one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. Auckland has the world's largest Pacific Islander community and has also attracted many immigrants from East Asia and India, among many other regions. We have a small but growing refugee community from Somalia. Auckland is a great city to live in; despite this heterogeneity, I don't believe New Zealand has a significant problem with racism. Perhaps this is because immigrants assimilate, perhaps because New Zealanders value tolerance so highly. Identity Politics, in my view, features almost not at all in New Zealand's political landscape, unlike in the US. We don't, as far as I'm aware, have white supremacists. Something the American Left doesn't want to acknowledge is that the white racist fringe groups that congregated in Charlottesville are the bastard children of Identity Politics. Incredible as it may seem, it appears that many white working class men and women in the poorer US Red states actually appear to believe that they belong to an oppressed minority. This couldn't happen in New Zealand.

Identity Politics is also at the core of Beatty's novel. I talked about The Sellout in the post "Identity Politics" but I feel that I need to spell out more explicitly what I think it is trying to say. In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and this also a good entry point into interpreting Beatty's book. The Sellout is of course concerned with race relations in America. Early on, the narrator of The Sellout, who has been hauled before the Supreme Court for infringing the Constitution, identifies his crime as being to "whisper 'racism' in a post-racial world". This statement is ambiguous. Is the narrator right in supposing he has exposed the lie that is the white liberal's wishful fantasy of a post-racial world? Or are we really in fact living in a post-racial world and it is the narrator who has lied?

Extraordinary as it may seem, it is the second sense that is correct. The world Beatty presents is indeed a post-racial world. In The Sellout, Beatty is arguing, absurdly, that racism is kept alive by black people, not white people. The narrator, who is black, early on acquires a black slave called Hominy at Hominy's insistence; it seems that Hominy wants to be a slave, needs to be a slave, because it furnishes him a sense of identity he would otherwise lack. Later, the narrator re-institutes racial segregation within public transport and in the local school, hoping in this way to create group solidarity among the blacks and Hispanics who make up the bulk of the school roll. Black identity, Beatty is arguing, is grounded on a history of black oppression, the one needs the other. This is the tension that informs and underlies the whole book, the contradiction between the desire to preserve history in the service of identity and a yearning to transcend history, escape from it, awake from it.

In my other post, I said that Beatty is describing "historical racism, present-day racism" but, in fact I was wrong. It only describes historical racism. The world it presents really is post-racial. On Last Week Tonight recently John Oliver attacked Trump by saying something like, "There's a weakness in your argument if you don't mention the Nazis" and this charge could also fairly be levelled at Beatty. How can he present a post-racial world when the world plainly isn't? But this would be to misunderstand Beatty's purpose. The Sellout is a satire, and the idea of a 'post-racial world' is the butt of its biggest joke. I can empathise with Beatty. In this blog I have included a comic story called 69 in which a lesbian couple invite a man to join them for three-ways; at the end of the story one of the lesbians runs off with the man. This is the opposite of what I think happens in real life. I called it 69 not only to refer to a sexual position but also to suggest an inversion of what usually occurs in the real world.

Perhaps the essence of satire is to present the opposite of the truth.

I want now to turn to a completely different topic, the second volume of Janet Frame's autobiography An Angel at My Table. I know this is a sudden shift but I wanted to talk about both Beatty and Frame even though they have nothing in common. I have written about Frame before but the post about her was both badly written and too reliant on Wikipedia. I have since actually read her book. An Angel at My Table is a wonderful work written by a wonderful woman, It is vital to say that the chronology it presents is quite different from the timeline of her life sketched out in Wikipedia. For instance, in Wikipedia it describes the events surrounding her first immersion in the world of mental illness and imprisonment in lunatics' asylums in the following way: in 1945 Frame attempted suicide, started receiving counselling from John Money, several months later panicked when a school inspector came to scrutinise her teaching and subsequently was taken to an institution for an eight-week period of observation. In An Angel at My Table, the story is very different. According to Frame's own account, the suicide attempt followed the inspection. As part of her teacher training, she had been tasked with writing a short autobiography and she decided to include the suicide attempt because she thought it would make her seem more interesting. "In a way, I was rather proud for I could not understand how I had been so daring." Very shortly after, Frame was coaxed by her lecturers into going to hospital "for a few days rest". Her sessions with the junior lecture in psychology, identified as John Money by Wikipedia but called John Forrest by Frame, occurred after she was released.

An Angel at My Table is written very much like a novel. It even seems to have three acts. The chapter describing how she escaped receiving a leukotomy is harrowing: it was only because her book of short stories The Lagoon had unexpectedly received a literary award that she narrowly avoided it. Her psychiatrist at the time apparently said, "I've decided that you should stay as you are. I don't want to see you changed." However, the passage I personally found most poignant is a description of a dance she attended at the age of about 29, her first ever dance, having endured around eight years of on-off confinement in insane' asylums and having finally been released. She is sitting on one side of the dance floor, with her set of false teeth (her real ones having all been pulled out at the age of around 22), her mass of frizzy red hair and her dress which she had sewn herself especially for the occasion, silently entreating some man, any man, to approach her and ask her to dance, saying over and over again in her head "Pick me, pick me" – and no man ever does.

There is another moment in the book that I want to pick out. Back in 1945 when she was still only 21 and seeing the psychologist she calls John Forrest, Frame developed a crush on him. She enjoyed the attention he gave her and even started inventing symptoms to please him. She knew at the time that her attraction to him was 'transference' – but how could she resist a man who told her that she was "suffering the loneliness of the inner soul" and said "When I think of you, I think of Van Gogh, of Hugo Wolf..."? She researched schizophrenia, a condition then still called dementia praecox, and learned that it was both progressive and incurable. She read Freud and found that 'fear of the dentist' was interpreted by him as an indication of secret guilt about masturbation, finding also that this was was considered both a cause and continued symptom of schizophrenia. She decided she could use this fact in her sessions with Forrest. Frame did indeed have a fear of the dentist but, at this stage of her life, she herself had never in fact masturbated at all. Having read about it though, and suiting deed to thought, she tried it, and afterwards "couldn't return to a state of not knowing". At her next appointment with Forrest, she dutifully reported to him that the cause of her illness was "worry about masturbation"; she would imagine later that a look of triumph had crossed his face – "Here was a textbook schizophrenic." Perhaps, at the time though, this was her way of innocently flirting with him and she didn't realise that it would cause her trouble later on.

I'll digress for a moment. When I first became 'unwell' in 2007, the established medical wisdom was that schizophrenia was like diabetes, and that there was probably a 'schizophrenia gene'. The psychiatrists now know there isn't one. At an independent review last year, I asked the shrink on the panel, "So what do you think the cause of schizophrenia is?" eliciting an extemporised bit of bullshit that it was most probably caused by cannabis use. I saw on the news a little while ago an estimate that 85% of New Zealanders under the age of 25 have tried pot, and so any theory that attributes schizophrenia to cannabis use without taking into account the vast number of people who have smoked pot without developing schizophrenia is plainly defective. In 1945, established psychological wisdom held that schizophrenia was caused by "guilt over masturbation" – but if everyone masturbates (I started when I was eleven or twelve) and everyone feels a little guilty about it (which is why people don't masturbate publicly) this theory is also cretinous. Without a control group, both theories are unfalsifiable. In the nineteenth century, a psychiatrist and sexologist, I forget his name, opined that homosexuality was caused by excessive masturbation; this theory is stupid again and goes to show the mixture of puritanism and prurience of the psychiatric profession. Sexuality, to digress further, has nothing to do with how much one masturbates and everything to do with what one thinks about when one does so.

To get back to Frame – two of the normal symptoms of psychosis are voice-hearing and paranoid delusions and Frame, in her autobiography, describes neither. As I said in the other post about her, "one could be forgiven for thinking Frame was never ill at all". It is possible that she did indeed, at some point in life, experience psychosis but, if so, she decided to hide it, chose not to talk about it in any of writings. Perhaps this is understandable given the era in which she was diagnosed and the treatment and stigma she suffered and lived with. I for one can't hold it against her.

Narrative Theory and an Analysis of "West Side Story"

When I began writing this blog, its subject was narrative theory. I thought I had worked out a radical new way of interpretively tackling stories. For a paper I'm studying this semester, I was tasked with analysing a text with respect to an established literary theory, such as the narrative theories developed by Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell; my lecturer graciously allowed me to pitch my own theory and analyse a story in terms of this one rather the another. The day after dispatching my essay on Sunday, I had an epiphany; the theory that I had developed many years ago was wrong and I had conceived a better one. In tonight's post I thought I would upload the essays I wrote, the first an exposition of the theory and the second an analysis of the film West Side Story. The theory proposed is the old one, not the new improved model. I may write about the superior version in a later post or I may not, depending on whether I feel I'm being original or simply reinventing the wheel, unintentionally parroting something someone else has said, depending on how I feel.

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A Narrative Theory

The theory I wish to propose did not emerge from a vacuum. In The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946) Lajos Egri proposed that at the heart of any story is a premise, a simple statement or proposition that guides the process of writing the work. For example he argues that, at its heart, Romeo and Juliet is founded on the premise: “True love defies even death.” Egri contends that many dramatic works fail because the playwright isn’t clear what his or her premise is, doesn’t know what he or she is trying to say. What Egri calls the premise, Robert McKee in Story (1997) calls the controlling idea. McKee also introduces the term counter-idea which is important to my own theory. Rereading McKee many years after I first read it, I find my own theory more derivative of this section of his than I thought. This is disappointing. Still, perhaps there may be differences which make my own theory a least a little original.

In my theory, a story is a piece of rhetoric: that is, it is an exercise in persuasion seeking to convince the audience of the truth of some simple statement or proposition. This rhetorical objective guides the whole endeavour. Often, although not always, this proposition is one the audience wants to believe and so wants to be persuaded of. In my own theory this proposition, what Egri calls a premise and McKee calls a controlling idea, I call a thesis. A story is an argument. Not only does a story present a thesis it also simultaneously or alternately presents an antithesis, a statement that contradicts or is incompatible with the thesis. A story argues for both thesis and antithesis at the same time and this is what creates conflict. (These two terms, thesis and antithesis are also used by Levi-Strauss and Hegel, but I am using them in a different way.) To persuade the audience of the truth of the thesis, the antithesis should ideally be presented as strongly as possible; however, even though the antithesis should always be presented more strongly than the thesis, at the end the thesis always wins. One can distinguish between the thesis and antithesis by the way a story ends.

Some examples can illustrate this theory. The thesis of Star Wars is “Good always triumphs over Evil”; the antithesis is “Evil sometimes triumphs over Good”. For much of Star Wars it seems more likely that Evil will defeat Good rather than the inverse, because the forces of Evil are so much more powerful than the forces of Good. The fact that Good still triumphs serves as proof that the thesis must be true. In Sleepless in Seattle, the thesis is “True love overcomes all obstacles” and the antithesis is “Sometimes the obstacles are too great”. The absolute truth of the thesis is demonstrated by the fact that the two lovers get together even though they live on opposite coasts of the US. The thesis of Romeo and Juliet is “Sometimes the obstacles to true love are too great” and the antithesis is “True love conquers all”: it is the opposite of Sleepless in Seattle and most romantic comedies in this respect. Romeo and Juliet is dedicated to an existential rather than universal proposition and this is partly what makes it a tragedy. (I think, by the way, that Egri’s summation of this play, quoted above, is wrong, that he was fooled into thinking that the antithesis was the thesis because the love story is presented so powerfully.) In Pulp Fiction, the antithesis is “It’s cool to be a gangster” and the thesis is “Being a gangster gets you killed”. The gangsters seem so cool, the antithesis is again presented so strongly, it is easy to forget that the story (told non-linearly) in ‘real-time’ ends with Vincent Vega’s death and Marcellus Wallace’s buggering, and in ‘film-time’ with Jules deciding to retire from the gangster life because he has received what he thinks is a sign from God that if he doesn’t he will perish. It can be compared to Trainspotting. The rebellious teen lifestyle of heroin addiction is presented as so cool it is easy to forget that at the end Renton “chooses life”.

The theory has limitations. It applies well to films, plays and short stories but applies less well to novels such as Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow which are too sprawling to be boiled down into two simple competing statements; insofar as a story has unity, however, it should ideally have both a strong grounding thesis and antithesis. A second problem with the theory is that it risks becoming overly simplistic. Star Wars, Crusaders of the Lost Arc and The Lord of the Rings could all be said to be concerned with persuading an audience that “Good always triumphs over evil” but this would be to overlook the significant differences between the three films. Thirdly, this theory is principally concerned with narrative unity and says little about narrative structure. Traditional theories of narrative structure, such as the time-tested wisdom that stories can usually be divided into three acts, may be considered a complement to this theory rather than a rival to it, do not impinge upon it, because the theory itself says nothing about structure.

As I said in the introduction, when looking back into Robert McKee’s work, I found this theory, which I thought my own, more derivative of this section in his book than I realised. I don’t know if McKee’s concepts 'controlling idea' and 'counter-idea' originated with him or not because McKee doesn’t cite his sources. What McKee seems to do is mash up a number of established theories, such as Vogler’s and Todorov’s as well as Egri’s. Even though I agree with this part of McKee’s theory, I disagree with so much of the rest of the book that I would hesitate to cite him as a major influence.

An Analysis of West Side Story

We can summarise West Side Story by utilising Syd Field’s theory of narrative structure. This film, a musical, begins by presenting a poor neighbourhood of New York in which two rival male gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, compete for territory and dominance. After the two gangs are warned by Lt. Schrank to stop fighting, the leader of the Jets, Riff, proposes to the other Jets that a ‘rumble’ should be set up between the two gangs to settle things once and for all. This is the inciting incident. Riff persuades his friend and co-founder of the Jets Tony (who has left the gang to  pursue respectable employment at a drugstore) to go with him to a dance that evening at which he will arrange the rumble. At the dance, Tony meets Maria, a sister of the Sharks’ leader Bernado, and they fall in love. This marks plot point 1. Tony later that evening sees and declares his love for Maria while she stands on a balcony. At midnight, the Jets and Sharks meet at the drugstore; Tony appears and persuades both sides that the rumble should simply be a bare-knuckle fight between one member of each gang. The next afternoon Tony and Maria meet and imagine marrying. Maria finds out about the rumble and persuades Tony to try to stop it. That night Tony arrives at the scene of the rumble and attempts to prevent it; in the ensuing commotion Bernado kills Riff with a switchblade and then Tony kills Bernardo. This marks plot point 2 and is the climax of the story. In the aftermath, Tony visits Maria, they reconcile and consummate their marriage. They arrange to meet at a bus-stop to leave New York. Maria’s intended fiancé Chino is looking for Tony to kill him in revenge and so Tony takes refuge in the basement of the drug-store. Maria is detained by Lt. Schrank and sends her friend Anita to the drugstore to tell Tony this. At the drugstore, Anita is abused by Jets and so decides to lie to them, telling them that Chino has killed Maria. When Tony is informed of this, he takes to the streets distraught calling for Chino to come kill him. He sees Maria, they fall into each others’ arms briefly – and then Chino appears and shoots Tony. The film ends with Maria denouncing both gangs, saying that it is hate that has killed Tony.

West Side Story is an adaption of Romeo and Juliet – one similarity among many is that both are comedies until the climax of each and then both turn into tragedies. However, it is important to focus on the significant differences between the two stories. In Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets are more or less identical but, in West Side Story, the Sharks and the Jets represent two quite different social groups, both marginal. The Sharks are Puerto Rican immigrants; in the song “America”, the Puerto Rican girls sing of their desire to be part of America, to integrate into American society, while the boys sing of American racism against Puerto Ricans, rejecting American society and asserting the priority of their Puerto Rican identities. This is perhaps the most important song in the film. The Jets are presented more ambiguously. They are all American-born and sometimes seem to represent ‘mainstream’ American society (it is significant that Lt. Schrank, an establishment figure, is much more prejudiced against the Sharks than against the Jets). More often though, the Jets appear to embody another excluded grouping – juvenile delinquents. The song “Gee, Officer Krupke” that the Jets sing while waiting outside the drugstore for the Sharks to arrive parodically highlights the failure of various discourses (legal, psychological and sociological) to explain away the problem of juvenile delinquency and thus integrate juvenile delinquents into mainstream American society. The song implies that the Jets’ juvenile delinquency is a deliberate decision, another conscious rejection of mainstream American society.

With this said, we can assert that the antithesis presented in West Side Story is, “The different social groupings that make up America can be integrated through love” and the thesis is “It is impossible to integrate the diverse groups that make up America.” Neither the Jets nor the Sharks actually want to integrate. This societal focus is what most differentiates West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet. The thesis may seem pessimistic but perhaps the function of tragedies is to lance boils, present the worst possible outcome to provide audiences with a kind of catharsis.

If the thesis and antithesis point to an underlying unity in West Side Story, can this method of analysis also yield an underlying structure? A story, as Kurt Vonnegut argues, has a shape; ideally it is characterised by ever mounting conflict, tension or jeopardy. As West Side Story switches between its antithesis, the love story, and its thesis, the story of turf warfare between two gangs, it argues for each ever more strongly. After Tony is invited to the dance, he sings of a premonition that something good, something miraculous, is going to happen to him soon; Maria too, before the dance, says, “Tonight is the real beginning of my life as a young lady of America”. After meeting, their story is one of ever greater commitment to their forbidden love: for instance, a little after the half-way mark, they unofficially marry and in the last act they sleep together. Contrapuntally, the idea of irreconcilable differences between the Jets and Sharks is gradually intensified. At the beginning of the film, they could just be two rival gangs but, as the story develops, we realise that they have two entirely different ways of understanding their group identities. What Daniel and Gulino call ‘the dramatic question’, “Can love bring together the disparate groups that make up America?” is posed at plot point 1, when Tony and Maria first see each other, and is answered in the negative at plot point 2 when Tony kills Bernado. Although the dramatic question has been answered, arguably the jeopardy continues to build right up until the finish of the film.

It is significant that when during the third act Tony and Maria reconcile and plan to elope, they sing “Somewhere there’s a place for us” suggesting that, in reality, there is no place for them at all. Pessimistically, the film is arguing that the US is composed entirely of distinct irreconcilable ethnic groups and that the unifying transcendental concept “America” is a chimera.

West Side Story is a useful film to analyse because it shows up the limitations of some other narrative theories. Levi Strass, as I understand him, argues that stories are ahistorical and universal but the central idea in West Side Story, the need to integrate different social groups into a multicultural pluralistic society, is not something I imagine an issue among primitive pre-urban peoples. Likewise, it is extremely difficult to apply the template of the monomyth (associated with Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler) to West Side Story because West Side Story involves two protagonists, no quest and ends tragically. For a narrative theory to be satisfactory it should cover all successful stories, including West Side Story, not just a few. And seeing stories as exercises in persuasion is a helpful start.

Identity Politics

Arguably the most famous broadcaster and TV presenter in New Zealand is a chap called Mike Hosking. Hosking is white, male, middle-aged, affluent and a National Party supporter; on his TV show I have sometimes heard him describe himself as 'normal'. This is of course how a dominant group conceals itself in plain sight. Ideology is most of the time invisible, transparent, 'natural'. People usually don't question it or even see it because the rule of rich white heterosexual men is taken for granted, viewed as 'just the way things are'. It is in reaction against this hegemony of the mainstream that identity politics developed, as people sought to pitch themselves bodily against the tyranny of the 'normal' by vocally proclaiming their divergences from it, by saying "I'm black", "I'm Maori", "I'm Jewish", "I'm gay", "I'm a woman" and so on. Identity is a weapon; the personal is the political. In this post I want to discuss identity politics a little, show some ways it is problematic and talk again about some alternative ways of looking at identity.

I myself am white, male, heterosexual and not currently homeless. I'm not quite middle-aged yet. Yet I am very different from Hosking in all other ways, especially in my politics. I don't believe that anyone at all is 'normal' and find his use of this adjective to describe himself offensive. In the previous post "On Jewishness" (which this post follows on from) I described myself as a Pakeha New Zealander: 'Pakeha' is the Maori word for a non-Maori. My employment of the word Pakeha is admittedly a slight appropriation of Maori culture, an appropriation that I want to make however because it makes me feel more connected to the country I was born in and call home. Also in the previous post I described myself as a 'Gentile' but I wish now that I had used the word 'Goyim'. 'Goyim' is the Hebrew or Yiddish word for a non-Jew and using the Jewish word would have shown that I was treating the people I am talking about with some respect. I feel sometimes a little guilty for being white and privileged, and sometimes feel a little rootless, a little like I lack a community. I also often feel a strong sense of empathy with others who are different from me and it seems to me precisely this capacity to empathise and identity with others, with those suffering or oppressed or marginalised, with those different from oneself, that is the essence of Leftish Liberal politics – and which Identity Politics makes problematic.

We can approach the problem of identity politics through some example. In an episode of The Daily Show I remember a little, Jessica Williams began a piece in identity politics mode, in the role of outraged black woman railing against white idiocy or oppression, and then somehow segued into a gushing paean to the Harry Potter books. It was fantastic. I know from an interview she did with Stephen Colbert more recently that Williams's love of JK Rowling's books is sincere. Both times, though, I thought it odd because I couldn't remember any black characters at all in the Harry Potter series. Today I did a little cursory research and found an article on the web which argued that, although none of the main characters are black, approximately seven per cent of the students at Hogwarts are of African descent – about the same percentage as in the population of the UK. There is indeed some ethnic diversity among the magic folk; Harry acquires a Chinese girlfriend called Cho Chang in one book. Nevertheless – wouldn't one expect a proud African-American woman to choose and identify with children's fiction written by African-Americans and concerning African-Americans? Why Harry Potter? Evidently the Harry Potter series speaks to something deeper.

I read somewhere that JK Rowling came up with the idea for the Harry Potter series on a train in Edinburgh, the idea of a boy in modern Britain who's a wizard but doesn't know it until his eleventh birthday. He doesn't know because the wizarding world is kept hidden. In Rowling's world, the world she created, there are two types of people – magical folk, on the one hand, and Muggles on the other. Muggles have no idea that the wizarding world exists, it is concealed from them. Furthermore, magical people are superior, cooler, than Muggles. The wizards and witches are a secret society – like the Freemasons, the Jews during much of the twentieth century (and I think the nineteenth) or the homosexuals before decriminalisation. If I were a Muggle in Rowling's world, a Muggle who had stumbled on the fact of this society's existence, I might well feel threatened, feel that I had uncovered a terrifying conspiracy – but what looks like a conspiracy from the outside feels like a community from the inside. In Hogwarts, regardless of ethnic background, the students are alike in being wizards and witches first and black, white or Chinese second. By engaging with these books, the young reader becomes a de-facto wizard himself, entering Hogwarts along with Harry.

Although the magical people do not seek to rule the world, this division between a kind of elite and a population oblivious to it could be seen as reactionary. Yet the fundamental conflict presented by Rowling in the book is actually an argument for Liberalism. On one side we have the Pure-Bloods and, on the other side, we have the Muggle-born and Half-Bloods. The Pure-Bloods are (often) evil – rightwing, fascist, even eugenic. It is the Muggle-Born and Half-Bloods who are good. Even though Rowling's world is founded on a distinction between Muggles and magical people, the deeper impulse that motivates the good characters is to erase or at least undermine this distinction, to create a world in which anyone can become a wizard, in which the line between magical folk and Muggles is blurred. The message of the book is fundamentally inclusive. Children reading it feel they too can be part of this wizarding community.  It is a leftwing work and may perhaps have been a formative influence on the vast number of kids, such as Jessica, who read it when little, perhaps even inspiring them to identify with and fight for liberal causes when they grew up.

It is interesting to observe, by the way, that none of wizards and witches in the Harry Potter series ever 'comes out' as a magical person publicly to the wider Muggle world or even ever wants to come out.

Another book that hints at this deeper longing for inclusion is The Sellout by Paul Beatty. My brother and sister-in-law bought this novel for me early this year, a lucky accident because I had been feeling vaguely guilty at the time for not having read enough books by African-American authors. The Sellout is very muchly a satire on identity politics and political correctness, a disquisition on what it means to be black in modern America, but behind all the persistent and bludgeoning circlings around contemporary representations of blackness, behind its depictions of the lingering effects of historical racism, its hints at present-day racism, a subtle and comic subversiveness is at work in the novel, a lampooning and inverting of stereotypes, an undermining of all the racial descriptor 'black' suggests and signifies. To give some examples, the novel's black narrator likes the Beatles as well as Hip Hop, loves surfing (which seems to me to go against the black stereotype) and bonded with his on-again off-again black girlfriend Marpessa when young over their shared love of Franz Kafka. Some reviewers of The Sellout argue that it critiques and satirises the popular wisdom that America has become a "a post-racial world", shows this commonplace up as a con, but this utopian ideal does in fact exist in the pages of The Sellout, if only as a kind of yearning or inchoate presentiment, a premonition of a future in which Martin Luther King's dream of a country "in which people are judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character" has been realised. In The Sellout the post-racial world is almost upon us. The reader of the Harry Potter books is vicariously admitted into a community of wizards and witches in which race is irrelevant and likewise the narrator of The Sellout (and Beatty himself) is seeking membership in a community in which race is also, or should be, irrelevant – the community of great authors. And Beatty was perhaps granted this wish when The Sellout won the Booker Prize in 2016.

Both Williams and Beatty want to be seen as black yes, but also as more than just black.

The problem with identity politics is that it is founded on a kind of essentialism, on exclusiveness, on an 'us' and a 'them' – blacks and whites, gays and straights, Jews and Gentiles, Maori and Pakeha, Muslims and Christians, Wizards and Muggles. In the previous post I discussed three ways of defining Jewishness without resorting to essentialism. The first, inspired by Judith Butler, is that Jewishness is performative. The second is that Jewishness is a concept constructed or constituted by various discourses, such as the discourse surrounding the Holocaust, an approach inspired by Michel Foucault. The third, inspired by Family Guy, is that Jewishness is a matter of identification, of choice. On a clip from The Daily Show that I saw recently Trevor Noah suggested a fourth way to define race or ethnicity; in this piece he teasingly chastised Jordan Klepper, suggesting in effect that Klepper, who is white, shouldn't try to speak for the black community because he "hadn't lived the black experience". This seems another good way of talking about race while avoiding essentialism. One feature of the black experience is, for instance, the fact that black people in the US are stopped randomly by the police far more often while driving than white people are. Because black people have more melanin in their skin than white people, it is assumed they are more likely to be criminal. Again a discourse, in this case a discourse about race and crime, has constituted a particular kind of subject – the black criminal.

In 2013, having first become 'ill' in 2007, I was diagnosed schizophrenic and in 2014 I was put under the Mental Health Act, which means I am legally compelled to receive treatment. I have talked about this all before of course. If I wanted, I could fight for the cause of schizophrenics everywhere by saying something like, "We're here, we're nuts, get used to it", by indulging in identity politics. The reason I don't do this, choose not to identify as 'schizophrenic', is because I don't want to tacitly accept a discourse about mental illness that I basically disagree with, a discourse which proposes that I was born schizophrenic (even though I didn't have my first episode until I was twenty-seven), that I'll never recover and so need to take drugs for the rest of my life. I would argue that I have recovered. Nevertheless, even though this label was something I didn't choose but which someone else chose for me, my diagnosis is part of the situation I live with. This doesn't mean I have to talk about it. In many aspects of my life, I am a 'closet schizophrenic' in the sense that it doesn't seem relevant to mention my diagnosis to others; unlike black people, who can be recognised as black at a glance, schizophrenics, like Jews and homosexuals, have to 'come out'. A couple of months ago, after receiving a bad grade for an essay I had written (an essay called "The Reputed Death of the Author" that I have included in this blog) and after attending a truly horrible lecture about gender and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, I felt it incumbent on me to 'come out' to my lecturer and sent her an email explaining my situation. In the email, I took care to say that I was 'diagnosed schizophrenic' rather than say that I was 'schizophrenic' but still... It is difficult to find the intersection between identity politics and mental 'illness' but there is one.

My own preferred approach to the issue of identity is the one I presented in the post "Situational Ethics". In that post I said, "All souls are the same; it is bodies and situations that differ." Discourses about race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality and mental 'illness' also form part of a person's situation. No, we don't live in a "post-racial world", but it is still possible for individuals to understand and empathise with others with different backgrounds and life-experiences, if we put in the necessary effort, if we look past superficial appearances and try to understand others' situations. If we try to put ourselves in another's place. Empathy is hard work. It requires deep and wide knowledge of other people and it involves also considerable generosity of spirit. I would argue that a politics based on empathy is better, or at least a necessary supplement, to a politics based on identity.

I feel that a person's life has meaning and a shape. In the last couple of days, inspired by my last post, I have thought about my own life and in particular the psychotic episode that I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010 that I have described before. Something I didn't clarify in that last post is that, although I said that all the people with whom I believed I could communicate telepathically were Jewish, these people all could fairly have been described as closet or latent Jews – and most of these people in real life probably aren't Jewish at all. Only Jon was openly Jewish and, although this may seem disloyal to say still it is true, in real life Jon quite evidently has an ambivalent relationship with his own Jewishness. To put it one way, for a summer I briefly joined a Jewish conspiracy. To put it another way, for a summer I was a student at Hogwarts. I could clarify further but I will leave it to the reader to decipher my sometimes badly written posts, saying only that something that featured strongly during my first episode in 2007 was the feeling that I lacked a community. Yesterday I saw some excerpts from a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, something that felt symbolic because Jewishness and homosexuality were my twin obsessions years ago. On the one hand we had Chomsky, the Jew who is prepared to criticise Israel, willing to call it 'colonialist' and 'racist', and who hates capitalism; on the other hand, we had Foucault, the homosexual who rejected identity politics because he thought identity was constructed by others. Chomsky believes that there is such a thing as human nature and Foucault didn't but both are, were, good men. And then there's me, not somewhere in-between but something else.