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I recently read A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, Peter Dimock’s first novel. Like his second novel, George Anderson, it is deceptively short, and its brevity, if anything, contributes to its unsettling nature. Each takes the form of an epistolary novel, and in each the narrator attempts to invoke a framework through which to interrogate American Empire. In George Anderson, the method is a cyclical meditation based on a Jesuit method; in A Short Rhetoric, he orients his letter around pillars of rhetoric (Invention, Arrangement, Style, Delivery).
This interrogation advances as systemic critique as well as a personal one. The structures of empire and privilege produced Jarlath Lanham’s family, with his father’s prestigious military career supporting their intergenerational wealth and ensuring its continuance. Jarlath, long estranged, is reaching out to his now-adult nephews, not just to tell them of his father’s war crimes and handling of family affairs (the facts of which, he notes, have long been established), but to ask them to consider what all of these things might have done to them. Empire, he seems to say, is not just something that America does to the rest of the world; it is something that infiltrates us. It does something to us as its beneficiaries, and perhaps it does more and worse to those close to the people who create its policies.
The language Dimock’s narrators use is simultaneously impressionistic, meditative, and incisive. He never loses sight of his goal: “some ordinary speech, along with adequate funds, for another history.” Dimock takes seriously the importance of language, using as illustration the official documents of American foreign policy. A Short Rhetoric takes directly from The Pentagon Papers, associating Jarlath’s father with the “Sustained Reprisal” policy undertaken in Vietnam. In George Anderson, he includes the entire 35 page memo from the Office of Legal Counsel that both defines torture and states that the United States’ “enhanced interrogation” techniques did not constitute torture.
In an interview on George Anderson, Dimock puts it simply: “Words either matter or they don’t.” By centering these texts in his work, he’s showing how these dry, legal documents speak to incredible power and evil, drawing the through line to what happens on the backs of these documents. In some ways, these words matter more than the incendiary language of the firebrand. They certainly matter more if you’re in a country of interest to American foreign policy. But they may also matter more to us, as readers and non-readers of these words. In the same interview, Dimock says, “not reading the document for what it is is itself an ongoing war crime that makes all Americans complicit in internationally illegal acts”.
There is a part of George Anderson where the narrator, Theo Fales, recounts a moment where he saw Donald Rumsfeld in a hotel lobby, and is reflecting on why he didn’t conduct a citizen’s arrest against him. In other contexts, such a statement might come off as a joke, but in the novel it is deadly serious. These works are explorations of the narrative cycles produce complicity, how that complicity changes us, and the feedback loop that creates. But they also contain an entreaty. Both narrators seem to say: I am much like you. In some ways, I may even be worse. But I am trying to find a way out, to tell a different story, hear a different song. I believe it can be done.
- bcc: 4/17/2021
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