Epistemologies of State, Epistemologies of Text

A review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012.

Richard J. Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1952) provides the classic framework for any scholarly discussion of conspiracy and paranoia in the United States. In his essay, Hofstadter reminds us of the self-assured heroism implicit in the conspiratorial mindset—how the paranoiac understands conspiracy solely in “apocalyptic terms,” and how he “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds . . . manning the barricades of civilization” (29-30). Scholarship on conspiracy is thus an exceptionally tone-sensitive genre. Write too modestly and the argument will fail to catch; write too strongly and you risk enacting the same paranoia you seek to gauge. Restraint can make for unconvincing prose, but even worse, discernibly paranoid criticism can end up, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has remarked, “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). In The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (2012), Timothy Melley manages these demands deftly.
 
The conspiracy theorist, as Hofstadter notes, aims toward the reduction of global systems into sinister, coherent plots managed by a handful of individuals “not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history” (32). Melley, however, is more interested in explicating discursive processes than in pinning major cultural and political developments on a few persons or sources; he defines “the covert sphere” as “a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state” (5). Melley contends that the US government’s efforts to silence or censor journalism after WWII implicitly authorized only select, speculative media—postmodern fiction, in large part—to probe the covert action of the state. This, however, would begin a vicious feedback loop. While writers such as Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Tim O’Brien, Joan Didion, and E.L Doctorow would deploy “postmodern epistemological skepticism” to critique state secrecy (10), so too would the Cold War US state erect comparable “epistemological barriers to knowing the work of the state” (105). By investing his prose in this intricate, two-way relationship between state and text—rather than proposing a model of cultural and social development engineered only from highest government offices—Melley effectively evades the self-aggrandizing, me-against-the-world stereotype of thinkers involved in conspiracy theories. Claims that could easily come off as conspiratorial—for instance, that “geopolitical melodramas” such as Fox’s 24 underlie the twenty-first century discourse on national security (219)—are rendered reasonable and compelling. Readers hardly suspect the author as paranoid himself.
 
Melley’s text seamlessly weaves together decades of American studies scholarship on the Cold War and its sociological and aesthetic repercussions. In the context of current scholarship, one might think of The Covert Sphere as a companion to and even an expansion of Daniel Grausam’s On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), which investigates what exactly the fictional narrative can and cannot articulate in the context of mutually assured destruction. Comparatively, one can think of The Covert Sphere as an institutional parallel to Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993), an analysis of the ways that theorists (as opposed to novelists) offer a cult of personality and power over knowledge in response to a world that could, at any given moment, erupt into nuclear warfare. Melley’s work follows another acclaimed historicization of fiction in the Cold War era, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), which chronicles the advent of American MFA programs in the mid- to late-twentieth century. While McGurl speaks mainly to the ways in which the Cold War allowed universities to both philosophically and financially seize on “the linked values of fictionality and creativity” and thus mark their investment in “vivacious American individualism” (McGurl 265), Melley sketches the overarching, epistemological structures that govern such transactions. Indeed, one of the most admirable features of Melley’s prose is how infrequently it slips into dull taxonomies (an implicit danger for authors who try to extract national-scale principles of knowledge from literary texts). While Melley might simply have offered a theory of the Cold War narrative by pointing to a number of texts that exemplify his claim, he instead cultivates his concepts by way of close readings that comingle and comprise his greater theses. For example, case studies on brainwashing as a cultural fascination following the Korean War, Didion’s journalistic fictions, and the use of false documents in the Rosenberg trial all culminate in convincing articulations of grander cultural processes that bear on knowledge in both public and governmental domains.
 
Melley’s work finds use beyond literary and historicist contexts in women’s and gender studies: he argues that the conditions of knowledge prompted by the Cold War state depend on a feminization of national discourse through the stereotypically female mode of speculation. By licensing postmodern fiction and film as speculative mediums, the paternalistic Cold War state sought to domesticate the public and public channels of information. This would place civilians in a categorically feminine “position of unknowing, ‘safe’ from the rough-and-tumble realm of ‘real’ political struggle” (Melley 68). In one of Melley’s more astute observations, he notes that contemporary video games such as Call of Duty seize on the corresponding opportunity to “re-masculinize” the young American male through the first-person shooter (25-26). Melley’s work thus stands at the intersection of American studies, media studies, literary criticism, and critical theory, adept at disciplinary and interdisciplinary efforts alike.
 
Although Melley’s project—mapping how “the Cold War security state transformed the conditions of social knowledge in a way that would later become a topic of central interest in postmodern narrative”—requires him to borrow plentifully from the canonical theorists of postmodernism, he sees the conceptual revision of postmodernism as a task beyond the scope of his book (73). Yet, because Melley takes such care to avoid shattering our fundamental understandings of culture and politics, he ends up shying away from the major discursive shift that his work is capable of fulfilling. Melley explicitly states his aversion to reconciling deviating views of postmodernism; rather than “offer[ing] a new general theory,” he instead chooses to “concentrate on what seems largely settled about postmodernism” (36). But so little actually is. The elements of postmodernism Melley calls upon most confidently—reflexivity, skepticism, fragmentation, and the distortion of reality and history—are all debatably more modernist than postmodern (if not simply old hat). Further, the works from which Melley derives these concepts often hinge methodologically on the anecdote or case study. Indeed, the theorist of postmodernism often risks missing the forest for the Bonaventure Hotel. How easy it is, for instance, to take Baudrillard’s reading of Disneyland in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) as emblematic of the sociocultural totality.
 
Yet, by undertaking a historical and international-scale analysis of the cultural and political repercussions of (supposedly) postmodern concepts, Melley has the opportunity to reconsider postmodernism with a sense of legitimacy and durability few writers achieve. As Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden have noted, before the culture wars of the 1990s, scholars tended to treat the dominant elements of postmodernism as invariably pliable, dictated by the epistemological plasticity of poststructuralist thinking (292). Additionally, for some scholars, the recent “temporal and spatial expansions” of modernist studies into the late twentieth century threaten the possibility of a distinct postmodernism (Mao and Walkowitz 737). Melley’s work could undercut both threats; together, the historical bedrock and cultural span of his analysis have the potential to reorient postmodernism as a definite and definable period and concept. Even so, readers hoping for a new theoretical take on postmodernism might find themselves justifiably underwhelmed by The Covert Sphere.
 
Melley’s work does, however, mount an implicit challenge to a contemporary understanding of one major mode of postmodern literature: American metafiction. In David Foster Wallace’s emphatic call to revive and augment realism in American fiction writing, metafiction emblematizes a turn away from the dilemmas of intrapersonal engagement and toward irony and self-celebration. Neil Schmitz’s 1974 contention that the primary ambition of metafiction is to spotlight the writer’s own “conception of literature, his sense of himself as a writer and as a human being” foreshadows Wallace’s conception explicitly (212). A major argument of Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1997) can be summed up accordingly: by making narrative content out of the inner-structures of fiction writing, metafiction turns its back on the human dilemmas (and, perhaps, corresponding political outcomes) better explored in a realist aesthetic. “[I]f Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it,” writes Wallace (34). Since the turn of the century, authors of more recent literatures have taken less than kindly to the mode. Zadie Smith speaks for the field when she describes metafiction as “relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules, and dismissed, by our most prominent public critics, as a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart” (74).
 
Reading American metafiction in one such postmodernity module, Melley arrives at a set of political imperatives not typically allied with reflexive narrative, and even absolves metafiction from the charge that it lacks humanistic conviction. For Melley, the incessant reflexivity evinced by metafictionists such as Coover, Atwood (in The Handmaiden’s Tale, especially), and Barth serves to mirror and critique the distorted epistemological conditions perpetuated by the Cold War state in its efforts to veil covert actions and obscure trails of accountability. While Melley’s analysis of Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning makes for an obvious case given President Nixon’s role as narrator, his brief segue into Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968) more impressively enlivens the political valences of a reflexive fiction we could otherwise consider solely self-involved. While readers require little assistance understanding “Lost in the Funhouse” as rumination on the art of fiction writing, Melley makes a creative move in interpreting the narrative’s experimental and often dysfunctional structure as the product of a Cold War epistemology fortified by national policy. Tracing the narrator’s aversion to causal explanation and linear narrative progress, Melley draws a striking similarity between the conditions of knowledge maintained by the narrator and those maintained by Cold War America. Through a narratologically-oriented reading, Melley theorizes a binding relationship between the story’s WWII setting and the divergence the story makes from the typical narrative arc (exemplified in “Lost in the Funhouse” by Freytag’s Pyramid). What “may seem a strikingly ahistorical and playful metafiction,” Melley claims, “thus turns out to be substantially influenced by the problem of Cold War public knowledge” (170). In this sense, the metafictionist designs a sort of training ground in the processes of reading and interpretation for recognizing the epistemological exploitations of the covert state. Barth’s story makes visible American metafiction’s commitment to enacting and exposing the state’s subtle manipulations of the public’s capacity for knowledge. With this reading in mind, many of American fiction’s greatest narcissists turn out to be undercover activists, dedicated to exposing the regulation of discursive possibility. And while Melley refrains from casting the repercussions of his interpretation as such, The Covert Sphere, as it spotlights the political values of “Lost in the Funhouse,” effectually challenges one of the most deeply ingrained understandings of American metafiction.
 
Given Melley’s major contention that “Cold War secrecy has made it difficult to know what is true or to narrate events as history,” his work risks an obvious (and perhaps tiresome) contradiction (28). If during the Cold War and after, “the truth-value of fiction sometimes trumps that of narrative history,” then Melley’s own attempt at historicization should be considered vulnerable to the same Cold War epistemology that renders historicization suspect (144). Melley, however, anticipates this challenge, especially in his interpretation of the 2002, 2004, and 2007 Bourne films. Calling attention to the faith that the film series places in restoring “the wounded public sphere in light of publicity,” Melley realizes how such efforts can have “the paradoxical effect of inviting its viewers to dismiss covert action as an exaggeration that can, in any given case, be corrected by the restoration of the democratic public sphere” (174). Indeed, no monograph (nor any other medium, for that matter) can undo decades of epistemological regulation by simply shining a light on those procedures. Any diachronic analysis on Melley’s topics that claims historiography as an unproblematic, remedial effort shows only naiveté. This is a lesson well learned from Alan Nadel, who argues in Containment Culture that the postmodern period has encouraged us “to regard our historical narratives as consumer choices” (294-95). Following this point, Melley’s admitted vulnerability to the Cold War’s historiographical paradox becomes a marker of mature scholarship. The Covert Sphere reminds us that no theory of history or culture can announce itself from beyond the strictures of a given discourse or historical context.
 
Taking into account the fact that literary critics now find themselves in an era of methodological proliferation, Melley’s brazen reflexivity makes for a timely example. As scholars over the last decade have tried to move past a hermeneutics of suspicion through methods such as “surface reading” (Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus), “distant reading” (Franco Moretti), and “neophenomenology” (Rita Felski), Melley’s admission that his work remains directed by the same structures it hopes eventually to shake off reminds us how difficult it is to repudiate a discourse without simultaneously reinforcing its parameters. In this way, Melley’s self-conscious historiography harkens back to the work of Guy Debord, who once contended that structuralism cannot effectively refute the work of the state because it is, in form, critique “underwritten by the state” itself (142). Might the same be said of recent disavowals of suspicious reading? By casting suspicion as the major methodological antagonist, have scholars only bolstered suspicion as literary and cultural studies’ dominant disposition? By encouraging such questions, Melley gives his readers a principle for the evaluation of any seemingly radical injunction into the historiographical, literary, or critical discourses of the present.
 
Thus, the necessary imperative Melley leaves us with—while solidifying that “we have institutionalized undemocratic means of preserving our democracy” (222)—is to ask which methods of critique, if any, lie outside the purview of the covert sphere. Which tools have been sanctioned by the very political, institutional, or canonical forces we seek to probe or repudiate? While these questions remain to be settled (and cannot be settled by any one scholar or individual discipline), Melley does an important service by initiating such self-assessment and, perhaps more importantly, by offering an exemplar of how to proceed without lapsing into paranoia.