Or, "Edward Kennedy Saved from Drowning"
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Gore Vidal once declared, in a famous bit of nastiness, that the "three saddest words in the English language" are "Joyce Carol Oates." And for all the Senator's grandson could have some real sad-sack moments himself, there is something witheringly apt in the put-down. The underlying idea of Black Water -- Oates' 1992 novella about the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 involving Senator Ted Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (and the only Oates novel I have thus far in life attempted) -- does seem faintly philistine. Romans à clef about well-known political scandals are not likely to have much of a shelf-life (though they say some of Vidal's writings, in fairness, may not have aged much better).
What's more: knowing that you hold in your hands a novel about Chappaquiddick -- and that this is already therefore rather sensationalized and suspect ground for a serious writer to tread -- you long for something clever, something interesting to emerge from the book-- something that isn't already painfully obvious about the whole ghastly episode, and the journalistic clichés that surrounded it -- especially when the story is being told by an allegedly accomplished novelist.
What do we find instead? On page one of Black Water is an overturned car filling with marsh water -- and sentences like the following: "Am I going to die -- like this?" Helpfully slanted for us, of course, in breathless, soundless italics.
The situation starts to look up from there, however. The novella gains considerably in emotional power as it proceeds. And we have to acknowledge in fairness that part of the audible groan we emit at the start of the novel comes from the fact that this book has already been remembered and marketed to us as Oates' "Chappaquiddick novel." Whereas if we were reading this on the novel's 1992 release, only vaguely sensing the resonances with the Kopechne story, and piecing together for the first time that they were intended, we might feel a few more jolts of dopamine. (This difference between present experience of history and its later recollection will prove to be something of a theme, by the way -- but more on that below.)
In truth, by the end of this short and racing read, I found myself appreciating the novel -- and what Oates was trying to say by it.
I was first moved to read the book in part by seeing the Chappaquiddick movie that came out last year. And also, to be frank, because the book seemed brief and undemanding enough to be plane-ride material. In the past week I have taken three cross-country jet trips in only twice as many days, and I am beginning to develop a sixth sense for the precise size, shape, and tenor of novel that will last me for no more than exactly one Boston-to-L.A. flight (I undershot the mark slightly with Oates' book, I confess, which goes by very quickly). And it was on another one of these trans-continental airline flights that I caught the 2017 Chappaquiddick and was prompted to read a bit further into the lore surrounding the incident.
The film is competent, engaging -- and refreshingly unambitious. It doesn't try to make the car accident and Kennedy's notorious decision to leave the scene -- possibly resulting directly in the needless death of his passenger -- into a larger commentary on American history. It is a depiction of a private crisis of moral integrity and cowardice that refrains from grand pronouncements on the American Dream as admirably as it avoids lurid innuendo that would exceed the known facts of the case. Ted Kennedy in the film is simply the name of one of the characters going through this experience, not a symbol or a monument. It is plainly a movie made by and for a generation for whom the Kennedy star has dimmed, rather than for those who saw Ted as the last repository of the world-historic hopes that were made to hinge (however implausibly) on his glamorous family.
Oates' book, by contrast, is very much in the "strange death of liberal America" genre. One interesting twist, however, is that Oates updates the action and places it contemporaneously in the George H.W. Bush years. In the book's overt thematic content, however, there is little to surprise one here.
The protagonist and Kopechne stand-in is Kelly Kelleher -- a bright-eyed late '80s liberal who admires the unnamed Senator for his defense of social programs, wrote her senior thesis on him at Brown, and volunteers her spare time at a literacy program in Roxbury. She is the privileged offspring of an Andover and Amherst-educated father, and she lives in a condo, incredibly, on Beacon Hill (at 26?).
For all her well-heeled idealism and faith in Democratic politics, however, Kelly is just jaded enough for some mildly self-critical reflection on her own white savior complex as a volunteer, and to share a knowing exchange with a friend and fellow campaign-worker, who remarks of "The Senator" in one scene -- "Don't forget, he voted to give aid to the contras."
Some of the best stuff in the novel involves Kelly's conflicts with her Republican father, whose favored country club political candidate opposes the whole edifice of American liberalism, with the single exception of legalized abortion -- which he thinks might just be advisable for keeping the populations of racial minorities and welfare recipients in check. "He believes in genocide, for Christ's sake!" the young Kelly cries out in response to this, in disbelief. Yet I'm sure you too have met the man's type. (Though I'm afraid, if you move among an older generation of religious liberals schooled on the "population bomb" and deep ecology, the one you met might easily have been a Democrat).
It is always interesting to see observers in the George H.W. Bush years who had already identified views on race and civil rights as the most fundamental and enduring political cleavage in the United States. Joseph Heller in one short story described the George H.W. Bush campaign mobilization as an "antiblack hate campaign." We think of this as surprising, coming from the early nineties. Hasn't the hate campaigning become so much more overt and unmistakable since then? We think the division over race and civil rights was obscured in previous decades by "culture war" brouhahas and so-called "social issues." But Oates has intriguingly recognized that abortion -- like many of these sub-controversies -- is the sort of thing that can cut both ways. Beneath it, racism is what endures in American politics.
In William Labov's absolutely fascinating book Dialect Diversity in America -- he suggests that there are increasingly only two ways to speak -- let alone to vote -- in the United States, and that the two dialects spoken in America increasingly track onto the two partisan affiliations -- more now than they track onto region. And finally, he concludes, both dialect and partisanship also both increasingly serve to signal little more than one's stance toward this fundamental ideological division of American life: the split over racial equality.
Kelly Kelleher likewise describes the fundamental Republican political position as follows: "no doubt [...] all of conservative America believed [the achievement of racial justice and equality] was hopeless and thus save your own white skin." If people might have protested that as an unfair charge in 1992, it seems at least that a great deal of corroborating evidence has been heaped in its favor since. (Though for Kelly, as for too many a white liberal before and since, the question of racial equality seems to be reduced to whether federal policy can help people sufficiently to overcome the legacy of racism, rather than framing the question as whether or not federal policy can reverse and undo the many decades of knowing contributions it has itself made to the creation of abysmal gaps of wealth and social advantage between whites and black communities.)
For the humanitarian Kellys of the world, American life has betrayed its promise. Racism won out. There had been the possibility of a genuine liberal transformation in earlier decades, perhaps, but it had been killed by degrees -- the murder of the other Kennedy brothers, with the tainted moral legacy of Ted's actions at Chappaquiddick -- the last of the brothers -- setting its seal upon the process. When The Senator kicks Kelly in his frantic efforts to escape the flooding vehicle in which they are both trapped, leaving only his shoe behind, it is an all-too-obvious metaphor for the failure of liberal politics, the collapse of an older generation's Great Society project, the replacement of idealism and service with corruption and unrestrained power.
This is what feels so dated about Oates' novel. Most of us really don't view the Kennedys this way, anymore. We are not conscious of the promises they failed to fulfill, because from the perspective of later history, we know only of the things they did. We know enough of Robert Kennedy's career prior to his '68 bid for office to know he was really not a particularly consistent or admirable proponent of liberal values. We know that Johnson was ultimately a far more generous-hearted and committed champion of civil rights than his predecessor in office, even as he escalated U.S. atrocities in Vietnam (because the world and its people are, after all, complicated). We remember few of Ted Kennedy's stirring words in defense of liberalism because many did not issue into successful action -- such is the cruel and unjust nature of history's verdicts.
If the Chappaquiddick incident has any resonance with our contemporary concerns -- if there is a reason it would appear in a film in 2017, of all times -- it is because it is another story of powerful and privileged people hurting those around them -- even while not "meaning to" -- and escaping the consequences for it (something that is very much on our minds in this cultural moment). It does not stir us as a chapter in the tarnishing of the moral legacy of the Kennedy Camelot, with which few of us today really identify one way or the other.
We can certainly look back with Joyce Carol Oates and perceive the tragedy in the fact that American history in the 20th century unfolded the way it did -- the gutting of Great Society social programs, the revival of the death penalty and the growth of a punitive state that discriminatorily targets Black communities, the appalling repeated success of electoral appeals made on the basis of racial fear and white resentment (all themes in Oates' book). But the sense of lost alternatives is harder to recover. We don't have the impression anymore that things would have gone so differently if Robert Kennedy had been elected president -- because he wasn't, and they didn't, and why should they have, if he was?
This, however, is precisely one of the themes of Oates' book -- and ultimately the most interesting point it makes. This is what saves Black Water from being purely a product of its late 20th century era, with nothing more to communicate to us today.
The book is ultimately a study of the nature of tragedy -- both personal and political -- and the contrast between how tragedy is perceived by those who live through it -- and how it will seem to generations to come. The reason we no longer identify with the Kennedy legend is because it did not unfold in the way people hoped. The things that actually did unfold -- Watergate, Reagan, Bush, neoliberalism, Clinton and the "New Democrats" and "New Labour" and welfare reform and Thatcher and TINA and the "Effective Death Penalty" and NAFTA -- were simply the things we learned growing up as "history." They were the fait accompli of the past. They could not be mourned, they were simply there, as our inheritance, and had to be treated and overcome as such.
Yet Oates asks us to remember that for the people living through the second half of the 20th century, it didn't seem like it had to be this way. Kelly describes her utter horror, for instance, at the Bush election and the defeat of the Dukakis campaign, for whom she volunteered. She does not believe a Bush victory could ever happen, that the American people would be taken in by those conservative politics of resentment -- that "antiblack hate campaign" that Heller described. Yet still, Oates writes, "the votes came in [...] the landslide was a fact, and the unthinkable became, simply, history, as so much that seems unthinkable becomes, simply, history, thus thinkable."
Looking back, it amazes us that anyone would ever be so anguished and surprised by the Dukakis defeat, or by the decades of Republican dominance in American politics. We are so familiar with them as part of recent history and current reality. So too, we are amazed by the feelings that were attached to the Adlai Stevenson campaigns, and his defeat by Eisenhower. Kelly herself is surprised to learn from The Senator and the other older liberals in her circle what cherished hopes had been pinned on Stevenson (this comes up in Roth's Portnoy's Complaint as well).
We tend to think, why were they so worried then? Surely Eisenhower was at least better than Nixon. And surely Nixon was better than Reagan -- didn't he at least favor environmental regulation and a guaranteed minimum income? And wasn't George H.W. Bush better than his war-mongering son? Why were people so upset about the first of them? And wasn't George W. Bush better than the current occupant of the Oval Office -- hasn't just about everybody ever been better than him?
The chilling conclusion is of course that those of us who lived through the 2016 election -- one of politics' ultimate "unthinkables" that became thinkable -- will experience the same fate at the hands of posterity. The tragedy will not be appreciated -- will not be felt -- the way it was by us. Because we actually thought -- actually expected -- there would be a different outcome. No one in any future generation will be surprised, the way we were. They may perceive the awfulness of this administration. They may grasp intellectually why we would have wished Trump had never taken offie. But they won't know how it felt to have been alive and politically conscious the day the results were announced, when we still thought -- like Kelly facing the Dukakis defeat -- like Kelly realizing she is going to drown in that car -- this won't actually happen -- this can't actually be happening!
This is the emotional power of the way in which Oates brings to life the Chappaquiddick incident. She recovers the feeling that this is not simply a "story," not a newspaper account of what is already done and in the past, but something the participants of which -- moment to moment -- still think they might be able to avert. Kelly drowning in the car is still imagining the way she will describe the accident to friends once she escapes. She is like the actor accidentally trapped by a stage prop and about to be burned to death in the Stephen Crane story "Manacled," and imagining how he will get the prop right next time, how he will not make the same mistake with the handcuffs next time, how there will surely be a next time...
In Jospehine Hart's novel Damage, the protagonist remarks early on that he has "sometimes looked at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew." But of course, they didn't. They didn't know what was coming. Because it didn't need to come, and might not have.
This is also what Imre Kertész wishes us to understand about the ultimate horror of the 20th century, in his novel of the Holocaust Fatelessness. This is why, indeed, the novel is called "fatelessness." Because the Holocaust wasn't fated. It unfolded over time. This is what the main character struggles to explain to those who did not live through the camps and who are incapable of understanding the reality of his experience. It did not occur as a historical fact. It happened as a series of moments, each one of which might have come out differently. Each one of which was experienced as the outcome -- not of necessity -- but of chance.
And just as Oates has restored to Kelly's personal tragedy -- that is, to Mary Jo Kopechne's death in Chappaquiddick -- a sense of contingency, has deprived it of its false sense of inevitability -- so too Oates seeks to do the same to our sense of the tragedy of American history. For the people who lived through it, it didn't seem like it had to come out this way.
Those of us who are living through the Trump era may well have reason to be grateful to Oates for having tried to remind future generations of this fact. She is saving us -- as well as Mary Jo Kopechne -- as well even as Ted Kennedy -- from that "condescension of posterity" that will treat our lives as completed narratives, finished tales, rather than as open books in whose blank pages we still intend to leave a mark.
Oates acknowledges that the historical memory for noble words that are not able -- due to the constraints of history and politics -- to translate themselves into reality -- is very short. In the judgment scales of the future, they will weigh very little. As remarks The Senator late in the book, "you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times [...] and so damned little in the world has changed because of them."
Ultimately, we are not saved in the eyes of history by the strength and virtue of our intentions. If we imagine we are saved by the fact that we spoke out against Trump in our time, we are forgetting that we will inevitably be associated with his era and its legacy, in spite of ourselves. Our words will be forgotten. The facts of our time will be remembered. As The Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian argues, history as an arbiter is astonishingly ruthless. In many cases, survival or annihilation, victory or defeat, are the final arbiters -- beyond morality, beyond who was in fact right or wrong.
The fact that we voted the right way, the fact that we said the right things -- who will remember this? Even Trump, even 2016, even these years of our lives that we think really are unthinkable, really are impossible -- these will become assimilated to history, will be accepted as facts. Children will learn them as things that happened, and with which -- for better or worse -- they now have to deal.
To those children of the future, I hope that there will be a Joyce Carol Oates for your time. Even if some of the writing is uninspired. Even if we smirk at the crack that her name is the saddest three words in the language. She did something highly valuable nonetheless, in this short novel. She insisted, she reminded us, that history's victims did not accept their fates as fate. They wrestled against them, they fought back -- and they deserve to be honored for this.
I hope one of you, in decades to come, will think back to us with similar pity -- and perhaps treat us with the same kind of reverence. As Brecht says in "To those Born Later" -- "Think of us/With forbearance."
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