A Collage of Reading: Language, Politics, Place

 A few weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of the election, I was reading Laila Lalami's Conditional Citizens but - in the uncertainty of the moment - had to put the book down. At the very least, it made poor bedtime reading. In its place? I re-read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

There was something comforting about returning to that trilogy - the sense of returning to a world I already knew, the paths of which I'd walked many times before, and the arc of which made sense. And yet it was also interesting to return to that trilogy after probably three years away. There's more to write on that topic, but as I was reading: the politics of race and colonialism in the trilogy (the 'swarthy' men from the South); the uneven ways that the characters are realized; the place of social class (I don't think I fully compassed the relationship between Sam and Frodo in those terms; or really, between Sam on one side and Frodo, Merry, and Pippin on the other). But what stood out most of all - and remains one of my favorite parts of the books - is Tolkien's interest in the land, the deep traces that people and polities and power leave upon the land; and what it's like for later generations to make their lives amidst those traces. How do we make sense of who we are in relation to where we live? And how do we square the small contours of our lives - the Shire - amidst the broader currents of the world? A world that is grander both in spatial terms (the whole of Middle Earth) and in temporal terms (this imagination of Ages). Tolkien's interest in imagining the way that different groups of people make sense of the world (limited as those groups are) remains such a compelling part of that trilogy.

But to read the trilogy again is also to wonder at Tolkien's interest in words - his invention of language is such a central part of his creative process. Reading through Unfinished Tales, you encounter time and time again Tolkien's notes to himself about the etymologies of place names, the specific derivations of royal titles, and more. That discussion of language - perhaps strangely - brings me to the next set of books I pulled out from the library: two by Masha Gessen, her recent Surviving Autocracy and her earlier The Future is History.

Surviving Autocracy is many things, but one in particular stands out: It's a book about the relationship between politics and language. We see this in the title of the prologue: "What do we call it?" She tries to answer that question in the chapters that follow, calling it 'kakistocracy,' 'corruption,' 'aspirational autocracy,' or 'the government of destruction.' It's a book that struggles - that commits itself - to develop a shared language for understanding the world in which we live. This project of developing a shared language is, in turn, fundamental to Gessen's vision of politics:

Essential words... have to be rehabilitated before it's too late. The word 'politics,' or 'political,' is an example. It ought to refer to the vital project of negotiating how we live together as a city, a state, or a country; of working across difference; of acting collectively. Instead, it is used to denote emptiness: hollow procedure, inflated rhetoric, tactical positioning are dismissed as 'just politics.' (Surviving Autocracy, p. 98)

I'm only about 100 pages into The Future is History, which tells the story of how the Soviet state transformed into the mafia state of the present, but I can already see the through-line in Gessen's work: She's keenly attuned to this question of language. What happens when the world in which we live exceeds the language available to us? And what happens when the words we use - those that define a social contract - are no longer sufficient to make sense of the world in which we live?

For example, she narrates a series of cascading crises in the fall of 1993 (the debate about what exactly to call these events is visible on Wikipedia):

The 1991 coup was exposed the collapse of the Soviet social contract. That void had not been filled. Russian citizens still carried Soviet passports with a hammer and sickle on the cover, paid for food with Soviet rubles decorated with profiles of Lenin and the Soviet state seal, and could not even be sure of the name of their country. Was it Russia? The Russian Federation? The constitution still called it the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, but the constitution was a thing to be stomped on, and Yeltsin's most important supporters - the new journalists - thought he was not doing it with enough force. (The Future is History, p. 113)

How do we develop a language to make sense of the world? One of the the other things I find striking about Gessen's book is her observation that people in Russia in this moment of transition lacked the language for understanding itself: "The only stories Russia told itself about itself were created by Soviet ideologues. If a modern country has no sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can it know about itself? And what can its citizens know about themselves?" (TFiH, p. 3). This process of story-telling is linked to what she calls a few lines below "the intellectual tools of sense-making."

But because my reading has been and continues to be magpie-like, I picked up Hilton Als' essay about Joan Didion in the recent New York Review (Dec. 17, 2020). He opens with this glorious evocation of what Didion is able to do in making her non-fiction sound like fiction:

"Still, there's an energy to her writing - what she might call its 'shimmer' - that goes beyond a given piece's surface story, and that sheds an awful and beautiful light on a world we half see but don't want to see, one in which potential harm is a given and hope is a flimsy defense against dread. Didion's ethos is a way of seeing what's particular to the world that made her, and that ultimately reveals the writer to herself.

We are all from somewhere. It's the artist's job to question the values that went into the making of that somewhere." (Hilton Als, "An Awful and Beautiful Light")

I wonder if there's something shared there - what Gessen calls the project of sense-making is also a project of seeing oneself in a particular place. (Because geography.) And then the role of language in making that process possible, of creating the possibility for shared senses of place.