To preface: this is one I want to put in shape for someone to publish who might pay me for it or at least get it a broader readership, but I got a little sidetracked and am not sure now how to proceed. Any comments or suggestions at this stage would be appreciated!
A Making: Terkel, Robinson, and Obama on the Art of Democracy
There has been perhaps no greater American storyteller of the 20th century than Studs Terkel, who gave life to the stories of other people by listening to them, asking them questions, and recording what they said. In every one of his many books comprising these oral histories, the reader finds solace, fire, inspiration, and reason, the habits and neighborhoods of ordinary days transformed by a great and playful respect. The history of a nation which can seem trite and pompous in the textbooks is threaded through with a beautiful tracery of individual lives, comprehended in a chain of living characters who speak to us in their own words.
In the early 21st century, perhaps no story has been so heralded as the fulfilment of the promise of America as the election of Barack Obama to the office of the Presidency of the United States. Perhaps no one figure is so at risk of being lost sight of as a human being like any other, overshadowed by the burdensome magnitude of his symbolic significance. His campaign gave the words grassroots, hope, and change new cachet in the lexicon of television news and kept him a step ahead of his competitors’ and detractors’ use of the new media. In winning the race, he effectively won the Nobel Prize as well on the strength of those same promises, those echoed from his speeches and those etched in his skin color and the bones of his face.
Studs passed away a few days before Obama’s election in 2008, but by an unexpected reversal, the President has, over the past couple of years, played his old role of the listener with some of the people he most admires. And to gain some insight into how Obama has sought to understand the country that elected him and attempted to shape his legacy, as the soaring rhetoric of his speeches came up against the steady inaction of Washington leadership, perhaps the place to begin is by listening in to a conversation, rather than a speech, in which Obama interviews one of the country’s greatest living writers, Marilynne Robinson.
For the full text and audio of the conversation, see these New York Times pages: part one and two. (The liberal UK Guardian offers a summary.) Read it all if you can make the time! You’ll see a link, too, if you care to follow mine, to Robinson’s essay Fear, which in turn might be put in an illuminating conversation with this other Fear by another master of form, Lydia Davis, in her case the flash-quick short story. Surely you have time to read those! To think wistfully of Kierkegaard’s work that begins in Fear and Trembling...but that really is another story... And then read Robinson’s novels: Housekeeping... Gilead… Home, which I’m still working on, and Lila, which I’m glad I still have to look forward to, and whatever else she may have written since then, by the time you, whoever you are, read this…
Only once you’ve read at least that much would I venture to say you should bother to listen any more to what I have to say about it. Now, I should say for the record, as if it weren’t already plain, I am a huge admirer of all these three I’m trying to write about, Studs Terkel, Barack Obama, and Marilynne Robinson, and it would be hard for me to pretend to be unbiased, even if I were more inclined to it, methodologically. I write about them in some way out of the desire to be part of the conversation, too. Somewhere, and I’ll look it up when I feel like procrastinating some more, my other writer role model Philip Pullman speaks on his sense of the parity he felt drawing him to language as his material for art, the encouraging and a little daunting knowledge that given the gift of speech and having pen and paper he was having all the tools before him that any writer he looked up to ever had. In putting pen to paper, I am in the conversation, as much as they are in conversation with one another by touching on the same themes, and in putting it somewhere you can read it, I hope to have drawn you into the conversation as well.
Now, there is something concrete about Obama and Robinson’s actually meeting and speaking to one another, of course. It becomes more impossible to overlook the importance of real meetings like this the more our meetings are mediated and fragmented. From the vantage of a mediated world, though, we can see that every meeting, to say nothing of talking to a president, is a careful arrangement. The more Obama says how glad he is just to have a conversation, the more evident the artfulness of his measuredness, and the more the reader is alert to the intention it bespeaks: to value real conversation, to get to define what that is.
So with Robinson, moving the art a step further: the meditative epistolary second person steeped in love and imagination, eschewing mawkishness head-on with the consideration of anger, irritation, disappointment, false humility--mosquitoes and poison ivy in the garden of the world--and elaborating an immersive inner suspense with slight but insistent hinting at graver specific troubles to be thought through or lightly touched upon: John Brown, segregation, talking with the Lord. In her conversation with the President when he interviewed her in October 2015, none of this is directly confronted in specifics from the book, but rather in general terms there is a seeking of common ground and then investigation of the points of contention, amounting to differences of interpretation, differing emphases. The notion of civic virtue, a belief in the human beings around you and, in a large country, also distant from you; the relation of this belief and these habits of virtue to time and care given to reading and writing, cultivating the inner life, as opposed to the frenetic and unforgiving media demanding consumption, presumably to be discussed with others or through social media, as an important badge on the self as presented to others; the bearing this has on hope for the democracy, for the sense of history, of this place as an amazing experiment, not a given, an empire. In this connection, the President rightly pointed out the galvanizing effect of the mistrust of people in government deeply rooted in the Revolutionary phase of our making, in our founding documents, and rightly or not, he ascribed the expansion of this fear in this moment to the pace of change in technology and economy, the demand for a global vision when there is a sense of precariousness close to home; Marilynne Robinson’s essay or lecture--this was her first distinction--on fear was his point of entry to the conversation, setting up his preferred trajectory of arcing towards justice.
Looking at how much he says in the transcript, including about his own intentions and those of his team in doing the interview, there seems to be an ars poetica democratic at play in the piece, a partial swansong by this lame duck who has always been a virtuoso of this art of democracy. He reflects fondly on his good fortune campaigning as an unknown in Iowa, finding comfort in the older generation’s values that reminded him of his maternal grandparents, encountering Robinson’s books and establishing their ongoing conversations, and he clearly understands that his audience for this piece will be small and self-selecting in all likelihood--teachers, older people, religious liberals--to whom he appeals indirectly for trust in the Democratic establishment, not just democracy in the abstract, and perhaps even outlines a project or two for his post-presidential existence, revolving around their shared concern for the effects of the inundation of politicized media and the need for other kinds of reading and conversation conducive to virtue, and the faith in one’s neighbors, and the judicious disagreement with people in power.
A little inconsistency here was evident--the President rues the fragmentation of the national audience on the one hand, yet he is more adept than anyone at playing to the grassroots in a multiplicity of ways, and he does seem to acknowledge that it is due to his expertise in getting his message through deviously, and thanks to the fear-mongering media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton, previously, that he was elected in the first place.
On Robinson’s side, as much as she wants to stress the importance of goodwill towards men, she runs the risk of ignoring the crucial role distrust of government has always played, on the one hand, and the foundational doctrine of sin, of a fallen mankind, she seems to have come to terms with somehow, on the other. Her astonishing attention to the media, reading the press for a couple of hours every morning, alongside theological writings of Calvin and Edwards, must somehow account for this considerable eccentricity in her views. There was also the mysterious bracketing of Coeur d’Alene in the transcript--I’ll have to listen to the audio to see if she said Sandpoint originally.
In passing, I read another interesting interview while waiting for Steph to get done her tutoring session and have dinner the other night, this one in the Believer, wonderful magazine, with Miranda July. She praised Lydia Davis, spoke of her start with audio recordings and spoken word alongside her punk rock group, with whom she’d had a break-up, her work in film which has garnered her mainstream fame, and her husband and child, surprising to hear about given the queer world he inhabits so joyfully in the stories Keri gave me to read of hers--and here is the important thing, she speaks of a boss and a worker voice within her, and how by starting multiple projects concurrently, she can feel rebellious working on one and not on the other, yet still be extremely productive all along, thwarting herself and yet fulfilling her pursuit of freedom. Something like this. I sent Keri the article.
Robinson, for her part, wrote the first sentence in Gilead waiting for her sons for a meal one Christmastime, surprised by the character who spoke through her and yet allowing him to determine the whole rest of the book by who he was--an old pastor with a young son.
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