Books received
Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019). K Chess. Tin House Books.
Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) by K Chess tells the story of outsiders in America, those with minority and immigrant status. In our own 21st century America, the outsider is made to feel unwelcome. Trumpian chants for a border wall might as well be chants of hate for outsiders. Border wall chants confirm that our democratic government has been co-opted by a bigoted agenda to create lasting edifices of division. All those chanting for a wall would do well to study the result of widespread xenophobia in our country's history or in the history of world nations. Hint: stepping away from international leadership roles usually weakens economies and allows strongmen to rise.
The Other New York City
The main conceit of Famous Men Who Never Lived is that an impending nuclear attack triggers the removal of the citizens of a parallel New York City to the New York City with which we are familiar. 155,000 parallel New Yorkers are selected to travel through a trans-dimensional gate as a cultural remnant. The randomization of the remnant means that families are split, husbands from wives and mothers from children. But the dimensional travelers are relegated to a life as the other in their new NYC lives. An ABD literature scholar in his New York City, Vikram works nights as a security man in the new New York City. A skilled surgeon in her New York City, Hel, distraught from the loss of her son and lacking evidence of a medical degree to continue her practice, takes up drinking and does nothing.
The plight of these trans-dimensional travelers works on two levels. First, it demonstrates that immigrants to America with advanced education, training, and professional experience find themselves unable to get jobs using their professional training because of their outsider status: language barriers, a lack of connections, and racism all work against them. Second, immigrants in America get the jobs that no one else will take.
Professionals in Limbo
The second level of meaning that resonates with the fictional removal of people to an unwelcoming society is with an ever-increasing sea of professional talent trying to land a position in an ever-shrinking pool of opportunities. In the US, professors are janitors. Surgeons are dishwashers. The intelligentsia are drunks. All an education means is that Wal-Mart’s minimum wage doesn’t stretch quite as far after making a student loan payment, yellow happy face stickers be damned.
The Trauma of the Past Lives in the Present
K Chess's novel addresses the juxtaposition of living in an age past postmodernism, an age filled with breakthroughs in science and technology, yet stuck in the trauma caused by social injustice associated with the pre-civil rights era in America.
Famous Men Who Never Lived repudiates the old excitement of living in a new century marked by futurity, with new perspectives, with ever-advancing technology, longer lifespans, more opportunities for education, and more hi-tech jobs. Now we know that a new century and new technology has no bearing on whether our society will embrace different cultural expressions or accept minorities and outsiders. With the coming of new decades and new centuries, America has maintained generational racism and the systematic discrimination and over-policing of non-whites and lower classes. The Trump anti-human, anti-administration has been particularly galling for anyone invested in the aims of social equality movements.
Don't Finish the Wall
In a time of people chanting for more walls and less laws to protect the least of these in our nation, it's no surprise that our contemporary narratives, like K Chess's Famous Men Who Never Lived, reflect dislocation and the non-identity of immigrants. Vikram and the other travelers love to talk about what items they should have brought with them from their lost world. The items they carry are so important because the trans-dimensional citizens are blocked from establishing new identities in their new New York City. Similarly, today many Americans feel that their country has been held hostage by a slim majority unified by the myth of the criminal immigrant. The myth disregards the fact that most immigrants are hardworking, law-abiding citizens looking for opportunities to support their families. People that hold onto the myth don't bother to track crime rates across natural-born American citizens--rates that are always higher than the rates of immigrants. Notwithstanding, believers in the myth of the criminal immigrant often lump minorities into a larger caste of undesirables. The myths escalate vitriol and further dislocate immigrant and minority identities.
Pyronauts
Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's metafictional The Grasshopper Lies Heavy within The Man in the High Castle, Chess’s Vikram holds his copy of Pyronauts dear. The author achieved nothing in the New York City that relegates Vikram to a life working night security. I had hoped that Vikram would go on a search for the author and find him doing a similar nothing job--maybe providing muscle for a night club or, funnier, running the day shift security hours at the same building as Vikram.But Pyronauts is the one item of cultural significance that grounds Vikram to his former identity. What are pyronauts? They are those that set fire to things, that destroy the archive. So, then, it is ironic that the item Vikram holds dear is a story about those that destroy artifacts. The immigrants from a different New York City experience a complete cultural dislocation. The entire archive, the background to their lives, is gone as if incinerated in a fire. Though their New York City appears the same as the new one they find at the other side of the trans-dimensional gate, in the new city, they have no history, and with no history, no future.
Immigrants and Surveillance
In K Chess's New York, the new immigrants are subject to regular surveillance. They wonder how long it will be before they are rounded up and ghettoized or executed. Indeed, Hel experiences discrimination from the American justice system, a hallmark for undesirables in America. After coming to the aid of a woman—never mind that she was stalking said woman--the police arrest Hel and charge her for possession of a lethal knife. The initial attacker is, of course, not charged, commenting on the irrationality of America's fears about immigrants. Though studies show that immigrants are far more peace abiding than natural-born American citizens, many Fox News-watching conservatives persist in supporting a false narrative that connects immigrants and minorities to crime, including drug-related crime, rape, robbery, and murder.
Famous Men Who Should Have Never Lived
The title of the book presents an important question: could our world have improved had men and women that never lived or died too soon had the chance to influence it? Maybe someone might have cured cancer or learned how to stop aging at the cellular level but that person never had the chance.
Of course, it's hard not to think about the title in the opposite direction. How much better of a world would we live in if we could strike the Adolf Hitlers, Josef Stalins, Benito Mussolinis, Pol Pots, and Idi Amins out of space and time? Both wishing that someone great had lived and someone not so great had not lived isn't all that helpful. Most importantly because it defies a Hegelian view of historical materialism that considers history as an unavoidable product, stemming from our collective past.
What does this mean? It means that even if you could go back in time and round up history's great tyrants, someone would step in their place and, carried by the unrelenting force of history, do all the same stuff. Who knows, maybe if Hitler was replaced, his replacement might have studied Russian history and decided not to commit any troops to the eastern front, giving Germany the troops required to repel the US invasion force. Or maybe Hitler's replacement would have been less anti-Semitic and, instead of running off once-in-a-generation minds like Einstein, could have appealed to Einstein's love of country and gained his aid for work on the German superweapon. Without question, history could have easily taken a turn in the 1940s and we could all be speaking German right about now. Of course, I'm treading on old ground here. This is exactly the premise of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.
Walls? No One Can Cross the Divide Between Rich and Poor
But K. Chess's use of her title, Famous Men Who Never Lived, is alarming in a different way. She forces us to look at those in our society to which we have given 2nd class citizen status. 21st-century America doesn't just want a wall at the Mexican border, it wants uncrossable social and economic walls between our current haves and have-nots. In a country marked by an excess of wealth, immigrants, minorities, and the down and out are left without a hand up. How many of white America's undesirables might have had some great breakthrough to offer us had they been given the opportunity to put their genius to work?
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