I’ve been writing a long review of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days in the context of his earlier fiction. It’s been fascinating to spend a bunch of time with his work. I very much enjoyed The Hours when it first came out, at which time I read it completely uncritically. This time around, I felt more ambivalent, but still thought it held together a good deal better than his other books, partly because he figured out the perfect way to put another writer in charge of the weight mortality acquires in his own text. (It’s part of my thesis that Cunningham has a general problem with this topic; though suicides and the untimely deaths of young people figure prominently in all his books, somehow they always feel like the deaths of others.)

One reason I wanted to write about the new novel was that I’d heard it was set in three different time periods, including the far future, with Walt Whitman presiding over the text much as Virginia Woolf does over The Hours. That last impression wasn’t quite accurate; Whitman the character gets only a cameo part, but his words are ubiquitous, sound bite length snippets from “Song of Myself” getting quoted at every turn. Cunningham does set the three-part novel first in Whitman’s New York, then in our post 9/11 city, and finally in a Manhattan and heartland America that has outlasted us by a hundred years or so, long enough for intelligent aliens to have taken up nannying; a synthetic man named Simon (a hybrid of cells and circuitry) serves as the final section’s point of view character.

A couple of things particularly interest me about this. One is that Cunningham’s structure appears meant to address the all-pervading but mostly subliminal cultural fear over the viability of the human experiment (that foreboding I’ve referred to elsewhere with Tom Engelhardt’s phrase, “futurelessness”). One of Whitman’s characteristic rhetorical moves is to reach out through the body of the poem explicitly to touch the future reader; so by adopting the good g(r)ay poet as his book’s patron saint, and then projecting the novel’s timeframe deep into the not-yet, Cunningham apparently seeks to reassure us: yes, Virginia, there will be a twenty-second century. At the same time, the specific Whitman quotes we are offered emphasize the side of Walt that I think of as his most Buddhist, the one that asserts the identity of all with everything. If one knew nothing of Whitman apart from Cunningham’s novel, one might think our poet-father completely ignored history—whereas he was, of course, deeply concerned with the politics of his day and what he believed they portended for the future of humanity as a whole. (He had such stellar hopes for American democracy; to contemplate the vicious thing our country has become in light of those expectations is almost literally nauseating—I ask myself how much was it his mistake: were we headed down this dismal path already? Could he, should he have guessed where we’d end up? Thoreau’s crabby worldview has worn well by comparison—and yet I find in Whitman’s enthusiasm an important reminder that there was once potential now irrevocably squandered.)

Michael Cunningham is a nice liberal; I won’t be nasty enough to say so directly in my review, but it strikes me he was the perfect novelist for the Clinton era (which is, of course, when The Hours was published). By that I mean that he smokes but doesn’t inhale. His mind knows what matters, but the real impact of actual consequences somehow eludes him. He’s a multiculturalist, and of course openly gay, and writes about gay characters (though not very much in the new book)—but he’s emphatically not queer, meaning that sex for him is never a weapon of overthrow; meaning that it wouldn’t even occur to him to do what Monique Wittig insisted the “minority” artist must: turn his or her “minor” point of view into a universal. Private life, interiors—these are what he’s comfortable dealing with. He always writes, when you get down to it, about improvised and metaphorical family; the fact of the improvisation—e.g. a half African-American kid being raised by a white single mother with co-parenting provided by a six foot three transvestite (in his 1995 novel Flesh and Blood)—hints at a radical streak, but the stress on family as the only nexus of connection belies that edginess.

And so the fact that he’s felt pushed to acknowledge history isn’t trivial. But look at how he goes about it. Not only does he edit bits from “Song of Myself” in such a way as to make Whitman seem to support his own dubious contention that history itself is nothing but metaphysics (the “procreant urge” the same in every age no matter what it’s got to work on), but he turns his vision of the future into a carnival of echoes from decades-old (and older) speculative fiction. The sardonic Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale, the William Gibson who somehow sneaks a utopian edge into his dystopias, but above all the Samuel Delaney of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand—all of these surface (the last with startling directness in the seemingly borrowed trope of lizard-aliens with whom homo sapiens interbreeds) in Specimen Days, along with traces of Frankenstein in the cyborg Simon’s quest for the man who “fathered” him. The effect, as I will argue, diverges deliberately from the impact of the works that it draws on (or parodies?). Rather than trying to let imagination run ahead to meet the possibility of something new under the sun, it makes use of those earlier innovations to reinforce the view that innovation is pointless. In daily life as in literary forms, we’re only repeating what others have been through. So why agonize? As the character Alice says in A Home at the End of the World, “People have believed the world was ending since the day the world began….It hasn’t, and it hasn’t changed much either.”

A few years ago, “The End of History”–the title of an undeservedly influential essay by the right-wing pundit Francis Fukuyama—was also a broad theme of conservative policy discourse. Under the leadership of the American hegemon, capitalism had done such a fantastic job that there could be no further reason for people to get together and try to shake things up. Given the past few dramatic years, nobody quite dares say this anymore, but I think Specimen Days (which to its credit has no truck with paranoia about danger from the outside—its extraterrestrial aliens are noble, its suicide bombers all “pure products of America”) offers one measure of the extent to which even U.S. liberals may be unwilling to admit that history is very, very real, and is not reducible to families, nor to individuals who pack up their “furtive and quirky passions” and light out for the territory.

If Cunningham’s novel—which, despite all these complaints, I read rapidly and happily enough—performed no other significant service, I would be extremely grateful that it gave me a nudge to read the work whose title it partly borrows, Whitman’s Specimen Days in America. A compendium of brief memoirs, nature notes, reminiscences of his time spent with convalescing or dying soldiers in the makeshift hospitals of the Civil War, and cruisy encounters with cops, ferrymen and the like, the book was, its author boasted, “an off-hand gossippy letter,” “without any definite purpose that can be told in a statement”–the “most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book every printed.” I recommend it to everyone for its precision of observation, its intimate, offhand tone, its insights into Whitman’s political thought—and, yes, its “specimen” quality, its service as a yardstick helping us to measure where and what “America” was not much more than a hundred years ago, set beside what it’s become. I’ve said that I think Whitman may well have been politically over-optimistic. But even supposing the following was written with rose-tinted spectacles in place, how can one account for the immense discrepancy between the “democratic” army Whitman described and today’s imperial “boots on the ground?”:

I have said somewhere that the three Presidentiads preceding 1861 show’d how the weakness and wickedness of rulers are just as eligible here in America under republican, as in Europe under dynastic influences. But what can I say of that prompt and splendid wrestling with secession slavery, the arch-enemy personified, the instant he unmistakably show’d his face? The volcanic upheaval of the nation, after that firing on the flag at Charleston, proved for certain something which had been previously in great doubt, and at once substantially settled the question of disunion. In my judgment it will remain as the grandest and most encouraging spectacle yet vouchsafed in any age, old or new, to political progress and democracy.
—Walt Whitman, Specimen Days in America (The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 35)

Running Tab

6/20/05: “I swear, if the American equivalents of the Downing Street memos were to leak (as they will sooner or later), there would be stories all over the world, while our papers would be saying: No news there; we knew it all along. So how have the various memos defied a mainstream media consensus and over these weeks risen, almost despite themselves, into the news, made their way into Congress, onto television, into consciousness?
“Well, for one thing, the political Internet simply wouldn’t stop yammering about them.”—Tom Engelhardt, post dated 6/20/05 on Tomdispatch.com