In her exquisitely prickly novel, The Vulnerables, published last year, the American author Sigrid Nunez writes: “If it is true that an inability to deal with the future is a sign of mental disturbance, I don’t know anyone who is not now disturbed; who has not been disturbed for some time.” She was talking about how the past decade has swept away political and moral certainties, leaving many existentially high and dry, bewildered by events that seem to stack up before us, obscuring the view of what lies ahead.
Now, another American writer from the same generation, the once fearless, and feared, former chief New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani has published a book that tries to give a shape to this disturbance in an effort to clear a way for dealing with the future.
“It’s difficult to convey just how strange life in the third millennium has become,” Kakutani writes. “It often feels like a preposterous mash-up of political satire, disaster movie, reality show, and horror film tropes all at once.” One of the more suffocating features of our time is the way in which popular culture relays our predicaments back to us, parodying and dramatising, but also thickening and deepening the befuddlement.
We should be pleased then when an accomplished cultural critic steps in to give some perspective, a form, so that we might make sense of it all. Kakutani offers us an image – Katsushika Hokusai’s celebrated 19th-century print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The image is formally perfect: clear lines beckon the viewer up to the crest of the huge wave, before the eye drops down to the tiny human figures below – the vulnerables. It is an exercise in visual vertigo; we ride the rollercoaster and experience the drop while being held by the print’s crystalline blue beauty. The Great Wave is also one of the world’s best-known and most reproduced images, appearing everywhere: on book covers on climate change and the history of east-west relations; on tea towels, mugs and surfboards. It even has its own Lego set.
As an organising principle for a thesis, Hokusai’s image has the twin virtues of clarity and familiarity. It’s also a cliché and so, perhaps, an odd choice if what you want to convey is depth and originality.
Kakutani works the image hard. Carried atop the wave in her book are: the rise of populism, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, nationalism and authoritarianism, the threatening of democracy; technology, the internet, artificial intelligence, the robot monsters and their unaccountable masters; Covid, viral conspiracy theories, infectious loneliness; the 2008 financial crash, its agonisingly prolonged fallout, new global wealth and old local poverty; the climate catastrophe, heat, drought, mass migration, real waves crashing over real bodies. All of which, as we know wearily well by this point, is an awful lot.
We live in an era of “radical disruption” is Kakutani’s first claim, and can hardly be disputed. Her second is that, historically, periods of profound disturbance open the door to the figure of the outsider – the change-makers, the disrupters, opportunists, mavericks, menaces and potential messiahs. Outsiders can be “bad actors”: Trump, Elon Musk, the nobodies becoming somebodies thanks to the decentralising pull of historical forces and the information revolution (think Steve Bannon and Jordan Peterson).
The same centrifugal currents bring “good” outsiders, she claims: immigrants, such as the Jewish film-makers who made Hollywood, or figures like the co-founder of Moderna, Noubar Afeyan born in Lebanon to Armenian parents; resisters and radicals, creatives, the inventors and political risk-takers, the writers from the margins who have transformed the American literary canon, the hopers and the dreamers; the list is long and eclectic. Nobody can predict the results of outsider action, which is why the technology revolution did not turn out to be quite as zen as Steve Jobs once imagined.
I first struggled to understand exactly why periods of great change are necessarily good for outsiders: Kakutani proceeds by patterns and associations rather than arguments. The thesis makes more sense once you appreciate that this is not a book about global disruption, but about a contemporary America currently knocked off its axis. In this story, history – and hope – must keep on coming, however huge the catastrophe. The current generation of Americans may well be the first to look forward to considerably lower living standards than their parents, and the first to be born under the shadow of planetary extinction, but one senses that for Kakutani it is still a place where, as Tocqueville observed, “Everything is in constant motion, and every movement seems an improvement.” Not being able to imagine the future may be driving some Americans mad, but in this book at least the future will still, somehow, be American.
Some today doubt that the future will be American and, as recent events have unfurled, many more have reason to worry for the future of the US itself. The “constant motion” and innovation that Tocqueville admired was made possible by a political system of checks and balances and was originally established with the express aim of guarding against absolute power. Once these are put into question, the risk is that innovation gives way to perpetual motion, and the kind of chaotic political instability that makes tyranny possible. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant “presumptive immunity” to “official” acts executed in the role of president, quickly followed by Judge Aileen Cannon’s stunning decision to declare the classified documents case against former President Trump “unconstitutional”, suggests that some are willing to open that door. As the attempted assassination of Trump so chillingly illustrates, once the business of politics is given over to ideology, conspiracy theories, and cynicism, what remains is violence.
With an uncertain future in mind, what is possibly most significant about The Great Wave is its strangely haunting sense of emptiness. The characters are all there, the chorus is assembled. Kakutani tells us that modern-day America has charted its latest social upheavals through its outsider figures at least since Samantha the back-combed witch in the 1960s sitcom Bewitched twitched her nose and gave notice that patriarchy’s slippers-by-the-fire days were numbered. The turn of the century gave us The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad, portraying a new generation of brilliantly articulate outlaws, whose authors revolutionised TV drama and exposed the bitter ends of the American dream.
The vision here remains that of a US of outsiders and creators, of restless creativity, refusal, and of resilience in the face of danger. But for all that motion and innovation, an air of exhaustion permeates Kakutani’s calmly measured prose. This is a well-researched book, yet the more its author reaches out for explanatory theories or metaphors, the more one gets the sense of a world that actually is slipping away.
Paradigms “shift”, as per Thomas Kuhn’s well-worn thesis; we exist in a “hinge moment” (physicist Freeman Dyson’s term); and the Overton window, which describes the space that permits new and progressive ideas to gain public acceptance, is opened, closed and smashed. These explanatory abstractions create their own kind of wave, but the wave itself does not quite land. It’s as though Kakutani’s America is running out of ways of explaining itself.
In the epilogue, Kakutani skilfully gathers her images together. The last wave of her book belongs to Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a verse adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes:
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
It’s no coincidence that these are Joe Biden’s favourite lines of Heaney, and that he quotes (and sometimes misquotes) them repeatedly to the point that they now – rather like Biden’s version of American democracy, and indeed the president himself – can sound a little tired.
The mood of the lines is undoubtedly upbeat: sometimes (and the peace in Northern Ireland that is the context of the play bears this out) the right wave can rise at the right time; things move and improve. Yet hope and history do not, and never will, rhyme, which is partly Heaney’s point. The Cure at Troy is not about riding the wave of history, but accepting your wounds and weaknesses and moving on. In the play, Philoctetes, abandoned on an island to drag his rotting snake-bitten foot around, stops nursing his wounds and recognising his vulnerability, prepares to limp into the future: “I leave/Half-ready to believe/That a crippled trust might walk/And the half-true rhyme is love.” (Tocqueville also once said that what really made America great was its “ability to repair its faults”.)
Finishing The Great Wave during this most profound of presidential election years, I was left wondering whether what was conspicuous for being left untouched was America’s grief. The old tropes – outlaws, resilience, owning the future – have lost their pull. This is one reason why it is so disturbing to try to imagine the future. Another must be that America has yet to deal with its faults and wounds, both past and recent – and so find the half-true rhyme that will work for whatever happens next.
Lyndsey Stonebridge is the author of “We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience” (Jonathan Cape)
The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
Michiko Kakutani
HarperCollins, 256pp, £16.99
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[See also: Taiwan at the edge of chaos]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk