A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

Three years ago, the Bundeswehr initiated an unlikely experimental program at the University of Tübingen. “Project Cassandra,” which was exactly the codename you would want a secretive military program to be named, was led by an enigmatic professor named Jürgen Wertheimer, which is exactly what you would want his name to be. They developed a program capable of sifting through metadata and applying an algorithm to ascertain where future conflict would occur. They were unusually successful, foreseeing turmoil in Algeria, Kosovo, and Nigeria that political scientists had missed, all the more impressive because Wertheimer is a literature professor. Philip Oltermann explained in The Guardian that the Bundeswehr believes writers possess a “sensory talent” in identifying “social trends, moods and especially conflicts that politicians prefer to remain undiscussed until they break out into the open.” If writers hear subsonic vibrations just below the crust, then by reading an aggregate of them there might be a way to predict the future. “Writers represent reality in such a way that their readers can instantly visualize a world and recognize themselves inside it,” Wertheimer told Oltermann, after the former had traded in tweed for cammo.

Well, that’s one alt-ac career path. Ignoring the rumors that the CIA and the NSA have long recruited translators at those dreary annual meetings of the MLA held in frigid Boston or Chicago, there is an enigmatic, furtive allure to Project Cassandra, not to mention a practicality, because Wertheimer’s central conceit is obviously correct. George Orwell predicted telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and now we willingly give our privacy away in the blackness of our Androids. Aldous Huxley claimed in Brave New World that our future would be anesthetized bliss, and now our dopamine rushes are supplied by pawing at the screens of those same Androids. Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, and now Texas. Oltermann mentions John Brunner’s 1968 Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel, Stand on Zanzibar, which envisions the 2010 ascendancy of the Chinese economy and the United State’s response as led by “President Obomi.” I’ve long suspected that literature provides intimations of where we’re headed, and though that wasn’t my purpose when I set out digesting novels this year (my purpose was just to read) by this November I felt like I had been listening to a chorus of Sibyls.

Syllabi remain my operative mode for comprehending reality. Making lists, dividing the year into units, divining some overall theme to things, whether teaching or planning my weekend, is how I exist. Just like an engineer looks at the universe and sees a computer, I examine my own life and I see a college class. So, in January, when setting out to decide what I’d read this year, I made a syllabus of sorts, though I wouldn’t know the title of the class until the end of the term. Rather than just perusing my local library stacks, the unvaccinated version of me from last New Year used The Millions’ “Most Anticipated” lists for 2020 and 2021 and compiled a few dozen titles that sounded interesting. I’d inadvertently gathered what Wertheimer would consider a statistical sample set.

Everything in this essay came from thatBy the nature of this list, all of these books were newly published, though presumably most of them  were written before the pandemic. Much to my own embarrassment none of these titles was in translation, and the majority were by Americans with a few Brits thrown in. Because of my parochialism, and 12 months later I feel as if I’ve divined the unforged smithy of our national soul, for each of the novels provided a glimpse of living in the last days of empire, like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant, if this pachyderm was instead our rapidly fraying social contract. Our age is one of pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, economic collapse, and nascent fascism, and our writers have responded by crafting subverted Great American Novels, writing tomes of collapse, be it national, spiritual, personal. Each book taxonomizes the passing of anything that even remotely looked like it could be described naively as the “American Dream.”