Many thanks for Aaron Schneider and Amy Mitchell, today I’ve got out a longish short story (at 10K words, Wikipedia suggests a “novelette,” and why not be oh-so-precious about it) called The Clinical Trial at The Temz Review. At one level, it’s a kind of disturbing, surrealist mystery about an experimental drug. At another, it’s an allegory for the double-consciousness of white nationalism.
I thought I’d write a little background note unpacking this one a little. If you liked the story, this might be of interest. If you didn’t read the story but like decontextualized commentary with spoilers, this is definitely for you. If you hate my politics, you might skip both.
This piece started a couple years ago just as an exercise in form after having read Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Southern Reach might be called an extended piece of surrealist mystery in the sci-fi genre, kind of doing for sci-fi what Paul Auster did for the whodunit, where the mystery is never really solved, but did-anyone-dun-it, why-would-it-be-dun, and who-are-we-in-light-of-the-ambiguity-surrounding-the-dunning-of-it take center stage. Anyways, I found that the form of Southern Reach permitted this beautiful and impressionistic piece meditating on some deep themes, and thought the form seemed so accessible, why not try my hand.
My setting was a drug trial. Once upon a recession I worked four jobs in twelve months and came out sick with all of them, and sat through an orientation for a clinical drug trial, just considering the potential. Filled out the forms, came very close to participating. The scene remains very clear, troubling, exploitative in my mind.
I had a character. An ugly fellow, resentful. Feels he’s better than where he is. Feels he’s better than who he’s surrounded by. Feels he’s better than the hand life has dealt him and his failures are all external. The drug isn’t what he thinks it is. Goes through a monstrous transformation. Becomes something a little more reflective of the inner ugliness.
It didn’t sing. I sent it out exactly twice without much enthusiasm. Parked it. Worked on other projects. It slept a long while.
A year later, men carried torches through the streets of Charleston shouting Jews will not replace us. A Muslim ban was tweaked inch by inch through the courts until it had cobbled a figleaf of diversity. A synagogue shot up in Pittsburgh, a Mosque shot up in Quebec City. By the thousands, brown people people died in Puerto Rico, or were turned into orphans at the US border, and the administration denied and exacerbated it. Black people were murdered on camera without legal consequence and sectors of the media spoke of the black community’s response as though they were describing ISIS. Politicians openly embraced white nationalism as an acceptable label.
It felt like more than a series of tragedies — it felt, at scale, like a shift in consciousness. And I realized that there was this little detail in my story that I’d tried to downplay – the exploitation of that room I’d found myself in was heavily racialized. That I’d perhaps been the only white guy there. It seemed to either beg more direct exploration or to be ignored, and at first, I’d chosen to ignore it.
I was reading, at the same moment, Robert Terrill’s text Double Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, which turned me down the rabbit hole to WEB Dubois and black existentialism a little more broadly. Double consciousness (roughly) was Dubois’ term for a psychological phenomenon in which the racial minority sees him or herself both as they self-identify, and simultaneously as the majority sees them (Terrill, if you’re curious, applied this to Obama in the sense that he was always implicitly trying to fold his critic’s arguments into his own, both to signal his awareness of and to deconstruct them).
I had this idea, fed by some of what was being said about the Obama years and their aftermath, that the rise in white nationalism in America had a distinctive flavor of its own kind of double consciousness. That the majority, just as it is starting to lose its centrality/objectivity, feels for the first time the gaze of the minority on them, and that they become aware of how they are seen. Which is monstrously. That this was a traumatic moment for them.
There are, of course, two ways to respond to that sensation. One is to take it seriously and work towards a better society and etc. etc. And the other is to identify with that monstrosity. To lean into it, to embody it more fully. Which is what we saw in Charleston.
There’s other complementary themes at work here, too – the extent to which both the white nationalist and the people he resents are manipulated by some other authority for their own profit. The extent to which our sense of identity and culture is informed by an obviously racialized intellectual canon.
But that monstrous inversion of double consciousness became the biggest thematic undertone for what this character is going through. It starts subtle, and towards the end gets heavier (incorporating a direct reading, eventually, from Ellison’s Invisible Man). Whether it’s too heavy-handed or not, I suspect, might come down to the reader – I’ve got both perspectives arguing in my head on that.