Living in the Blank White Spaces

Fiction’s Prophecy #1

18 July, 2024

This is my first substack post. Fiction has always guided my understanding of our intertwined political and environmental challenges. I plan to write monthly posts that link a specific passage from a work of fiction to contemporary questions, debates, and crises.

LIVING IN THE BLANK WHITE SPACES

There is a passage in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which we learn some (but not all) of the backstory through which the United States of America was transformed into the kingdom of Gilead. Offred, the narrator, recalls living under a veil of normalcy, in fact a shroud of denial, as a series of ominous but seemingly remote political events unfolded.

“Is that how we lived then?” Offred asks? “But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time . . . .  We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” She continues: “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you know it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or in the woods . . . . We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

It is not the details of events, but rather a deliberately induced climate of normalcy, that is a part of our own current national story. Any of these events, taken alone, could be transformative, but because of their incessant proliferation they dissolve into a blur of collective denial. To wit: an astonishing super-majority decision, by what was once the most sober and impartial of our national institutions, upends a foundational principle of our Constitution;  a president and his enabling wife profess confidence in a victory that is, increasingly and by all objective accounts, judged to be unattainable; a man who lies so prolifically that the lies disappear into a meaningless cloud of mendacity, continues to lie; a rock-solid case of document malfeasance against that man (a former president, no less) is thrown out of court; events once steeped in traditions of decorum are reduced to shouting matches, schoolyard taunts and bluster. Idealism is subsumed by venal subservience and cynicism, in the interest of . . . . what exactly? How do we, hovering numbly in the ‘blank white spaces at the edge of print,’ reckon with the hyper-object that is today’s political climate in crisis?

                  Earlier this year, the Democratic party’s blind loyalty to a visibly diminished man was characterized as ‘sleepwalking’ into a probable election defeat. But the denial taking place since the June 27th debate debacle is more deliberate and defiant, and less universal. Many of us who had been sleepwalking have wakened, and foresee a disaster that could, in a perfect storm, approach Gilead proportions. Sleepwalking might be benignly likened to ignoring; but the active ignoring of Biden’s shrinking circle has become ignorance of the first order, and it is dangerous.

                  The newly anointed Republican vice-presidential candidate is a fan of Victor Orban; he was lifted to a position of power through the patronage of Peter Thiel, who has opined that democracy is at odds with personal freedom. Aunt Lydia, a key character in Atwood’s novel who is charged with training and disciplining the handmaids, said this about freedom: “There is more than one kind of freedom. There is freedom from and freedom to.” On one side, freedom from tyranny, freedom from racial bias, freedom from poverty.  On the other side, freedom to buy favors; freedom to avoid consequences; freedom to assassinate a political rival. It is only this latter brand of “freedom” that is at odds with democracy.

Given the supreme court ruling on presidential immunity, we cannot help but remember Trump’s boast that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5^th Avenue and not lose any votes. Back in 2016, we laughed. But who’s laughing now?

As we languish in the gaps between the stories, our current political atmosphere swirls with clouds of denial and indecision on one side and clouds of lies and trickery on the other. Taken together they can seem paralyzing, but they need not be. We should all (re)read the dystopian novels of the 20^th century; many of them contain warnings for our time, barely cloaked in fiction. President Biden should step aside.