All I could do today

There are some days, as a writer, when the business of making fictions seems a wholly inapt response to real life. You lose a loved one, a relationship ends or, more and more often, you look at the news and you respond with a horrified groan. You know you won’t work today. There’s a whole subgenre of pieces, starting with September the 11th, where an appropriately heavyweight novelist tells us how, for a day or so, the pages went blank, the urge to create was stilled. By the end of the article, of course, they are back at their desk and raring to go. Because what better response to these times of dread and frenzy than the words carefully chosen, the imagination used to enter another mind? I’m sure that tomorrow I’ll think that. Tomorrow, but not today.

Today we woke up to learn that, in the absolute best scenario, America has elected a man with no qualms about pretending to be a racist to win power. A man with the ethics of a pick-up artist and the moral sophistication of an angry cokehead is now the leader of the world’s only superpower. A majority of the American electorate looked at the crudeness of his worldview, his poison broth of fear and hatred, racial hostility and disdain for women, and saw, not just something they could live with, but something they liked. Writing comic literary fiction feels an ill-judged response to this. Any response that isn’t a squeak of fear feels, at this stage, obscene.

Tomorrow I will work myself up to the correct response. Writing fiction, I will argue, is about finding the right voice. Fiction, I’ll persuade myself, is superior to polemic because it allows for doubt, for a multiplicity of voices. Against the droning voice of certainty, of ego, we wave our flags for nuance, for scepticism of absolutes, for the patient exploration of imagined lives. I’ll tell myself this tomorrow and a lot of it will be true. Tomorrow, I’ll get back to it. I’ll bang on about the civilising tendency of literature, as if a dash through Middlemarch could have swung this the other way. Today though, I’ll worry that every writer, at heart, is filled with a Trumpish urge. The urge to cancel out other voices, to exalt ourselves and dominate, to drone above the subdued sound of others.

Donald Trump’s voice. It’s a curious voice, an interesting voice, or would be if it weren’t so frightening. Something happens to Trump’s voice after the first bellicose ramblings, the weaponised jokes. There are moments, as he monologues, when he seems in danger of overhearing himself. Watch him discuss Citizen Kane, say, or notice the childish hankering for a kitschy form of beauty and Trump becomes Tony Soprano, he becomes Caliban, the brutish man who is smart enough to see there is something better, forever out of reach. You can see this in his love of his daughter, a love he lacks the language to describe outside of his rapists’ lingo of tits and ass. At times you can see the pathos of Trump, as he hovers on the verge of an awful self-knowledge. Defeat might have been good for this version of Trump. It would certainly have been good for the rest of us. Victory has closed off Trump’s chance of finding redemption, but I think we can forgive ourselves for not shedding too many tears about that.

It is customary, at this stage, to move to a redemptive conclusion. I could defend the need to keep creating stories and reading them. I wouldn’t be lying- I think this. And tomorrow I’ll believe fully in the need for fiction, for comedy, the need for us to find laughter in these dark times. Those of us who organise will continue to organise, those who have opinions will continue to voice them, those of us who can enliven our little circle of influence will carry on trying to do that. We’ll carry on and we’ll survive, if we can, and the next four years will pass. We’ll write and we’ll read and we’ll listen and we won’t let that droning voice become a monologue. Today though, I’m averse to redemption. We should get drunk now and fuck someone dear to us, we should try and read something beautiful, we should draw cocks on pictures of his orange hateful face and we should try not to do any harm to ourselves. And tomorrow we’ll start again.