A friend suggested that I read Rachel Kushner because she is just the opposite of me. But because every difference is an opposite in that one characteristic is the negation of all the other ones, so that black is the opposite of white but purple is also the negation of all the others in the spectrum put together. Here is another example. Various ethnic groups who came to the United States have various characteristics, but which of these groups is the opposite of all the others? Jews had been a pariah group for two thousand years. The Irish had come to a British Protestant country, which was what they had left and had been disdained there for a very long time. But the only group that can be considered as the opposite of all the others is that African Americans had been involuntary immigrants while the others (except for some indentured servants or ex-criminals) had not and that this is such a deep cleavage that it can be considered opposite, a term based on a judgment of substance rather than a simple logical negation. So “opposite” means more than different; it means a special quality which makes the two parties very different from one another so that the two parties are essentially different. I wanted to know what was important enough a difference to be considered a deep chasm between the two of us. I am familiar with Conservatives as being the opposite of being Liberal and Romantics the opposite of being Classical, so what was the difference between me and Rachel Kushner? My friend said that she was a nihilist and I was not and I wanted to consult the multiple ways in which the two differed so that the summary judgment of nihilism was worth invoking.
Kushner, by and large, is a memoirist rather than what I am, which is an essayist. A memoirist provides the personal history of an episode or a theme in a life rather than an autobiography, which covers the crucial features of the evolution of a self, as would be created in St. Augustine, Jean Jacques Rousseau or Bosswell’s Life of Johnson. So they are more story like, and Kushner is very good at telling what it is to visit an East Jerusalem refugee camp or a road race down Baja California, while an essayist tries to arrange that the prose will develop a theme dramatically rather than as might be the case in a journal article or a treatise. Sometimes her lapidary style sweves towards criticism as in an evaluation of Jeff Koons who seems to satirize the advertisements of the rich by overinflating the significance of buying a certain whiskey, but, in Kushner’s mind, really does elevate the consumers of the rich as being smug and condescending. I very much think that the same is to be said of Andy Warhol, who is often taken as having parodied the commercialization of art by manufacturing the same mundane expressions of famous photos and soup labels just by altering the color but in fact can be treated as just the commercialization of art that is then treated as if it were art rather than commercialization. Beyond a point, who can tell which is which?
Another way in which Kushner and I are different is that she doesn’t care for Nineteenth Century novels and I do. That is pretty deep in that I follow F. R. Leavis in thinking that the literature of the period provided a moral order while Kushner’s tastes go in the way of Cormic McCarthy, who seems to me too concerned with shot em ups and that the difference in literary tastes does go towards the overall idea of nihilism versus its opposite as being part of well ordered life, people engaged in their careers and their marriages rather than in adventure or risk or otherwise edgy engagements. Kushner’s people are also like that. His people are in graduate school or into auto mechanics or both while people like me have sedate lives on a straight academic track, a successful life one where there are no real adventures except for travel and courtship and managing the raising of children. Maybe nihilists are just people that are somewhat marginal to mainstream America rather than people with a quest to be different or independent or who have a very peculiar outlook. It can’t just be that because a lot of people have peculiar points of view that give them independent personalities even if their ordinary lives are conventional. Having a thought, any thought, even if it is not original, can still make you free because you have thought of it.
Here is another try at finding the way Kushner is the opposite of me. She is preoccupied with automobiles. He knows a lot of them; he works on them; he buys and sells them; he appreciates the different atmosphere to be associated with different cars and models. She even courts death through her hobby that is more an obsession, banged up at a road race and people at that racing tour dying at one year or another from car crashes that are accidental only in the sense that which untoward event will be the one that kills you. On the other hand, I think that a car is just a way to get from one place to another and I stopped driving because it was too dangerous and unnerving, so bad a driver was I. That is an opposition but it is not the key one because so many other people are some kind of spectrum between those engaged and those not engaged with cars and because there are any number of other characteristics which place people, such as if they barbeque or not, or have plastic on their living room couches, that don’t define a person even if collections of characteristics can identify a social class or life style.
Car culture may not make a person a nihilist, but a preoccupation with death can be a defining characteristic. People who are nihilists think about and court and even chase death. They think that there is no value in life because life inevitably ends in death and there is nothing that can be done about it, even in redeeming death. So I am not a nihilist because I do think that there are reasons worth living and that “values”, such as being nice to people while they remain alive, is worth doing even if, inevitably, everyone will die. But there are people preoccupied by death even if they are not nihilists. I am thinking of Franco Fascists who are said to have worshipped death in that they were willing to encounter death for their political cause even if they put the point in a rather flamboyant way that was very different than, let us say, American soldiers who might say that any moment might be your last.
But before consigning Kushner to being a nihilist, one must remember that she had a husband and a grown child, she and her son part of car culture without becoming or any longer courting death. Moreover, she might not be willing to take on that title as close enough to her identity. She seems very much alive and appreciative of art and literature. Maybe “nihilism” is such a bad word that people are unwilling to assume that unpleasant word, as was the case fifty years ago when people would shun and still might shun the word of being an atheist because that is a term so harsh that people prefer to think themselves just as non-believers or secularists when what they mean is that there is sufficient reason to think there is no God, a view more frequent in the present than was the case in the past. So Rachel Kushner is not a nihilist, even though my friend thinks she is, but what term would my friend negotiate with her as being the correct one?
The thing about an ideology, some “ism”, like nihilism or liberalism, is that it is a choice in that it has been crafted by the believer so that it suits the person’s identity, the belief not just a set of beliefs, like a creed, but an expression of personality. So Liberals like to think they are kind hearted souls, while conservatives are harsh, and so they pick and choose which of the beliefs embody that sense. So I sculpt away from my own Liberalism the idea of climate change or Feminism and reject identity politics because various ethnic groups such as Blacks and Hispanics are subjected to discriminatiomn and so should be regarded as ethnic groups, having histories with other ethnic groups, rather than simply self-regarding. It is also the case that ideologies are different from social classes, which describe situations that are given rather than created, even if they are also created so that their ideologies are aligned with their situations, or at least hoped would be the case with Karl Marx, the working class coming to know that it was working class.
Rachel Kushner does craft her identity. She had been to college and after that she had worked at Fillmore East as a bartender and so hung with the big music groups at the time, drinking and puking with them. She liked that kind of excitement and she thought some of these occasions for hearing and wedding music as great and memorable events. Objectively, she might be considered to have been a nihilist whether she liked that title or not if it had been offered to her. But she decided to move on, to move from San Francisco to New York City, to be a novelist rather than just a fellow traveler among the risk taking group enthusiasts with which she frequented. She saw herself as independent, a bit aloof from what other people were doing, which is the case with most people, each of them thinking that being a garment worker was a way to make a living while more than that, being themselves while holding down a job that took up most of their lives. Everyone is independent in that way even if few may be particularly eloquent at getting to the heart of their leverage in life or finding some name or ideology that makes them to be observers of their own lives. Kushner is very successful at portraying herself at being distinctive in her created nature as well as just doing something that most people do even if most of them are not as flamboyant about it as she was. Kushner and I weren't opposites so much as just being different and maybe even very different.