SOCIAL UTOPIA: HANNAH ARENDT AND MARY McCARTHY'S THE OASIS

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Nicholas Spencer is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published articles on twentieth-century American literature in Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature Angelaki and other places. He is currently writing a book on the politics of space in twentieth-century American fiction. Notes 1 In an interview with Elisabeth Niebuhr, McCarthy states that even if her fiction “may have autobiographical elements in it that I'm conscious of, it has been conceived as a fiction, even a thing like The Oasis, that was supposed to have all these real people in it. The whole story is a complete fiction. Nothing of the kind ever happened; after all, it happens in the future” (8). The fictionality of The Oasis that McCarthy describes invites a theoretical analysis that differs from a perception of the novel as satirical autobiography. 2 McCarthy uses the economism of domesticity to expose the insubstantiality of Mac's theoretical opposition to Joe. Mac opposes Joe's hunting trip but realizes that the only sound basis of such an opposition would involve his taking “the last step” toward animal rights and vegetarianism (89). Unwilling to take this step, Mac cannot find any convincing reason to distinguish himself from Joe. 3 Wendy Martin argues that in McCarthy's fiction “marriage and friendship are constructs which barely conceal the predatory nature of social life” (194). The conflict between Katy and Preston exemplifies the “Hobbesian power struggle” that Martin describes. Arendt claims that “the nature of household rule” is characterized by a greater degree of inequality than is evident in political rule (Human 27). In Katy and Preston's case, the equality of the public domain is absent and social struggle becomes a public spectacle of household characteristics. 4 Arendt claims that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor brings terror because he applies compassion en masse to the social population. In “America the Beautiful,” McCarthy also refers to the Grand Inquisitor, “who, desiring to make the Kingdom of God incarnate on earth, inaugurated the kingdom of the devil” (205). McCarthy makes this reference to illustrate the idea that mass consumerism might be designed to bring material benefit but actually creates homogeneity and meaninglessness. Since Arendt posits that the evils of mass society are linked to the pursuit of the social question, both writers' references to the Grand Inquisitor make essentially the same point. 5 As Margaret Canovan notes, Arendt's critique of the social question does not mean that she was hostile toward “authentic compassion” (170). As with so much of Arendt's discussion of the social, the problem involves the extension of a legitimate principle beyond the realm in which it is meaningful. For Canovan, Arendt only becomes critical of compassion “when it moves out of the sphere of direct, face-to-face personal relationships and becomes entangled with politics” (170). 6 Canovan explains why Arendt was critical of Marx's attempt to reduce politics to work: Work is a matter of transforming material in order to make something: domination, violence and the sacrifice of the means to the end are inherent in the activity of fabrication. When this model is applied to politics, which is concerned with dealings between plural persons, it is other people who become the material to be dealt with violently and sacrificed to the end that is to be achieved (73). 7 As Brightman argues, Arendt and McCarthy both abhorred the conformity and vulgarity that characterized midcentury American social life (Between viii). One of McCarthy's letters typifies the reasons why both writers were critical of mass society. Speaking of the political success of Richard Nixon, McCarthy is concerned that the “advertising techniques” and “reflexes” of “mass-conditioning” have extended from the social to the political sphere (Between 9, 10). As a result, the illusion of choice that is evident in consumer activity has eradicated the authentic “differences” of democratic politics. 8 The correspondence between Arendt and McCarthy shows evidence of these differing viewpoints. While McCarthy contrasts the “weird new civilization” and its “age of groupiness” with the beauty of Nabokov's Pale Fire (Brightman, Between 133), Arendt sees in Nabokov's novel the “vulgarity” that she dislikes in social discourse (136). For Arendt, the “grotesque posturing and arrogant acrobatics” of novels like Pale Fire and Günter Grass's The Tin Drum typify a despicable “genre of the displaced person” (140). Arendt's comments are consistent with her description of the novel as “the only entirely social art form” (Human 39). This difference of opinion suggests that McCarthy, more than Arendt, regarded fiction as a counterweight to the social realm that they both criticized.