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.
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