At the point where a project is well and truly headed for failure, that is the time to write the preface, because that is the point where the author is as confused, dubious and negative about the work as the people who need a preface. I’ve reached that point with In Country. It is a failure, but then so are most projects, and that is why it is easy for people to be critics, and hard for people to be writers, film makers, painters or architects. Because anyone can say “that is a failure,” while the effort involved in the failure itself is beyond most people.
In Country has been accused of being allegory. It is not. The story of Chryesie, Merc and Hampton is the story, in the end, of three little people and their problems. If anything, it is the reverse of allegory, it is not that the story is really “about” larger events played out in smaller terms, but, instead, that larger events are so overwhelming that the characters are like leaves blowing in the same autumn wind. They can’t help taking the shape of events, and they can’t help imposing their own bits of life and narrative on the events they have experienced, simply because they know no other way.
So what are the entry points to this novel? The first and most obvious is the story of how Iraq has been a morally corrupting force in America, how the war there has ceased to be even a war about oil, but, instead, a cataclysm where people are reduced to being looters and rioters in a place where law and order have long ago broken down, and even basic concepts of human decency and dignity are lost.
The second is that it is a meditation on memory, narrative and experience. Chryssie and Merc are, by the time of the opening of the novel, both Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder sufferers. They are both incapable of staying in the present for any length of time, but instead keep returning back to the moments which now define the shape of their unceasing now. They were not always this way, which is why the “Emerald City” section is as it is; Chryssie is not constantly shuttling through time and memory, because she has not yet been to the place that will rupture her hold on the present.
The other running theme of the book is the nature of neediness that comes from abuse. Before I decided to write about Chryssie’s abuse, it was clear that the character had been abused as a child. The author would have been false to the character to make it otherwise. For much of human history, we did not write openly about incest and molesting of young girls and boys, even though symbols like cherubs were everywhere in art. There has, correspondingly, been a flood of novels which make this a major point. It is not so here, it is merely a fact of Chryssie’s character and existence, and it would be a mistake to trace everything to that one traumatic moment, just as it would be a mistake to trace everything to the collapse of the WTC on 9/11. Chryssie does this in her mind, because she cannot help it. But this did not make her a cool professional, nor give her a literary touch to her words and thoughts. These come from other, deeper, experiences in her life.
These things are, then particulars of the characters, and they are only incidentally related to the facts of the larger backdrop: that our presence in Iraq is about looting the country for individual interests, and at this point only distantly related to getting the oil out of the country.
Chryssie’s descent into this evil, through her falling for Hampton after 9/11 and then following his instructions in Iraq, is not a parable for America in general, but an example of one American’s fall from grace, and struggle to regain it. Merc’s own ineffectuality in the face of facts which he recognizes, but cannot connect into the logical conclusions that are required are another example of how a professional and competent individual will take refuge in prejudice and personal narrative rather than accept the reality.
Hampton is just an All-American jerk, and I don’t pretend to even offer an explanation for why he is what he is, except perhaps Merc’s comment that most of the trouble that is made in the world is made by people who were sexually abused or physically abused as children..
The literary keys to the work are from the basic facts of the story: the work of Doctor Jonathan Shay, who has just received a richly deserved MacArthur grant, and thus the Iliad, and the apocalyptic literature of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For this I am indebted to Jesus’ General. Once this is said, anyone who wants to look for how it is done will find abundant material.
Lastly, it is important to thank Dr. Juan Cole for his blogging on Informed Comment, and his books which explore many of the same themes in la larger way. There is indeed a strain of what the British would call “Orientalism” in our involvement in Iraq, most particularly in how the United States acts, on one hand, as if the Middle East is filled with sick countries that we can heal, while at the same time taking on the trappings and moral values of what the West sees as “Oriental Despotism” and its cult of personality, dynastic politics and rule by arbitrary and capricious will. This isn’t to ascribe these traits in particular to dictatorships and kingdoms in the Middle East over other places, but instead to say that involvement in the Middle East is used to give permission for people in the self-described “West” to behave in ways that are antithetical to the rules and ideas which they self-professedly place their faith in.
As for the role of sex in the novel, well people are themselves, and they take their problems everywhere. If some sex scenes are described in detail, it is because it is the best way to show, rather than tell, people what is wrong with the American psyche at this moment in time.
It is unfortunate that this novel has no audience, and that I’m finishing it to finish it. But that is the nature of having an iron butt: never let a heckler or dissertation get the last word in. However, that no one cares about the problems of three little people is something that Casablanca got right all those years ago, and I think, this once, I would have been happier had, on the night I started writing this, instead of sitting down to write I had oinked out on Ben and Jerry’s chocolate something or other and watched the DVD’s of “The L Word” that a friend had lent me.
Sorry for the bother, but having come through 50,000 words, 40,000 of them posted, it seems silly not to write and edit the last 20,000 words that will join the two ends of the bridge.