Nausea

by va

From time to time, we are confronted with events that confirm dark suspicions we have entertained as at a distance, but never grasped as true or necessary. No, there is no Santa Claus. Yes, the man in prison with whom your mother has been corresponding for the last fifteen years is your father. Of course there is an internet tradition that has escaped your notice. Today, I had a similar anti-revelation when I read the first paragraph of "Sarah Palin Is Coming to Town," Stanley Fish's review of Going Rogue.

When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.

He gushed over it. He repeated and relished its cultural resentments. At the end, he spoke in its voice. I confess I anticipated the possibility that Fish would review Going Rogue, as he has fashioned himself in his Times blog into a more loquacious Ann Althouse, but I hoped it wouldn't be quite like this. But now, there it is, indelibly posted on Stanley Fish's blog forever, daring me to believe that there is any point in going on, that there is any amount of success and eminence you can achieve that can't be hopelessly shat away. I make my living, such as it is, reading books and teaching other people how to read them, so I take Fish's embarrassing review as a personal affront. But it's more than personal; it's existential. Not only is Fish's review an object lesson is just how inane it is possible for a person to be and still mean it, it implicates all human endeavor in its inanity. It says: the only context in which it makes sense for you to be reading this is in a rocking chair, slowly rocking, on the front porch of civilization, rocking slowly as the sun sets, rocking slower, and ever slower, until you and everything there is expires.

Does Fish find Going Rogue "compelling and well done?"

"I found it compelling and well done," he says. By this he means he found its artfulness "satisfying." "The book has an architectonic structure," he verbally says. Let us be charitable and assume he means the book "has a structure." It is structured, he says, around John McCain's fateful phone call, asking Palin to be his running mate as she wanders the Alaska State Fair, in the very moment Palin is praying to baby Jesus in italics: "Please Lord, just for an hour, anything but politics." Sarah Palin hates politics, and she tells us so, many times throughout her book. But anyway, the phone call. We hear about it in the first pages of the book, then the narrative veers back into Palin's early history, and then--get this--the narrative catches up to the same phone call some two hundred pages later. If that's not architectonically compelling to you, citizen, if that's not structurally well done, well, you just don't know what Stanley Fish thinks good art is made of.

Does Fish characterize the narrative voice as that of "the little girl who thought she could fly?"

"It is the voice of a politician, of the little girl who thought she could fly, tried it, scraped her knees, dusted herself off and 'kept walking.'" It is true, Palin tells a story about her four-year-old self, who thought, Hey! Look at all these people, mindlessly conforming to gravity. Here, for my first demonstration of going rogue, I shall defy conventional physics and become airborne! It ends badly. This will turn out to be the story of her life.

Does Fish believe any of this?

Going Rogue basically came pre-debunked. People have been chronicling Palin's lies since she was shoved by McCain's gnarled gray fingers onto the national stage. Her best asset is her ability to persuade you as you watch her speak that your eyes must be lying, that you must not believe them, and that therefore, having no subjective purchase on what you're looking at, she must be for real. So it is absolutely pertinent for Fish to ask, and he does, "Do I believe any of this?" His answer: "It doesn’t matter." Of course not. Nothing matters.