October 2020

Favorites of the month: Caste: The Origins of our Discontents and Normal People

If you can read only one of the books reviewed here this year, please let it be Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. Lauded as “an instant American classic,” Caste delivers an arresting and immersive investigation into the reasons why people are compelled to classify, distinguish, and separate individuals into groups of arbitrarily scaled worth. Encompassing the vast array of physical markers that support hierarchical assignment and separation (i.e., race, religion, surname, etc.), the book offers “caste” as a transcendent blueprint for understanding the subconscious code, the silent infrastructure, of our divisions. “Looking at caste,” Wilkerson tells us, “is like holding [a] country’s X-ray up to the light.” It reveals the broken bone that we thought we’d healed; the insidious cancer we thought we’d beaten.

Early on in Caste, Wilkerson explains that “the human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures,” predating even the idea of race itself. As such, we can see examples of caste in almost any place, at almost any time in history. Focusing on the caste systems of India, Nazi Germany, and the United States, Wilkerson ratifies the universality and predictability of caste, drawing out the eight “ancient principles” or “pillars” which mark every man-made system of hierarchical division. Regardless of origin or belief, Wilkerson writes, all caste systems (1) Manipulate and exploit “divine will,” using legend and scripture to justify human ranking; (2) Rely on genetic heritability, meaning membership in a given group is inherited and unalterable; (3) Construct endogamous firewalls between groups, thereby precluding legitimate family connection and any “sense of shared destiny”; (4) Hinge on the belief in the “purity” of the dominant caste and vilify the castes below it as “unclean”; (5) Trap members of the lower castes in nets of subservience based on their perceived and socially codified “inferiority”; (6) Collectively dehumanize members of the lower castes, stripping them of their individuality while rendering them “a single mass of undifferentiated bodies”; (7) Use terror as an instrument of enforcement and cruelty as a means of control; and, (8) Frame members of the upper caste as “inherently superior” — and thereby inherently deserving — of their privileged station.

For each of the eight pillars of caste and their corresponding “tentacles” (i.e., status threat, unconscious bias, scapegoating, psychological intrusion, etc.), Wilkerson’s analysis is unapologetically exhaustive and honest, and the effects can be painful. For Wilkerson’s investigations into India and Nazi Germany, there is some comforting distance, which leaves the American reader feeling horrified, yes, but not necessarily personally culpable. The Indian caste system goes back thousands of years, predating any European conception of race. Its organization of individuals by surname may seem to the American reader nonsensical, almost dystopian, as if imagined by an alien planet or an inconceivable future. For different reasons, Nazi Germany’s caste system feels equally foreign and inexplicable. “How could people believe such gross illogic? How could people execute such horrific, monstrous deeds?” we ask ourselves as we assign the conditions which precipitated the Third Reich as somehow alchemically specific to Germany and thus unrepeatable (or even impossible) in any other context. 

However, as she unveils the American caste system, Wilkerson forces us to look right at the x-ray of our national soul, delivering a diagnosis that will dumbfound and sadden. Taking us back to colonial Virginia, she identifies the exact conception of our caste system, at which point African workers were consigned to a separate, unequal, and altogether “unhuman” rank of people based on the color of their skin. For more than a quarter of a millennium, slavery stood as one of the country’s most predominant institutions, so much so that it threatened national deconstruction, triggering the deadliest war ever fought on American soil. Wilkerson explains that, after the war, slighted members of the dominant caste worked to restore their sovereignty through a “reconstituted caste system,” devising “a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly.” Cunning, adaptable, and well-resourced, this system has never truly died. Like a chameleon, it has camouflaged itself under the deceptive cloak of a “post-racist society,” shape-shifting from the “cross-burning, epithet spewing” racism of the past into the subconscious and structurally abstruse racism of the present.

Yet even as she discredits the notion that caste is a “solved” or vanquished chapter of our nation’s history, Wilkerson demonstrates incredible empathy for the reader. She understands why we might feel compelled to create distance between the past and the present — how the very act of acknowledging a racist present, a present to which each and every one of us is beholden, could make us feel guilty or ashamed. Throughout Caste, Wilkerson anticipates this guilt and this shame. She reminds us that we do not have any control over the circumstances of our birth, nor can we be held “personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago.” Nevertheless, we are responsible for “what good or ill we do to people alive with us today.” America, she metaphorizes, is like an old house, battered by countless storms and floods, festering with centuries worth of mildew and mold that will not go away, no matter how hard we try to turn a blind eye. We did not design this house. We did not erect its walls or lay down its studs. We did not install its rickety pillars or uneven joists. But we are the old house’s heirs; we are its current occupants. We are the ones responsible for fixing it now.

If this fixing is to be effective, Wilkerson writes, it must be intrinsically empathetic and intrinsically free of shame. As opposed to trying to generate distance between a categorically racist “them” and a nobly unbiased “us,” Wilkerson suggests that we reframe racism as a scaled continuum — as a graded spectrum that infects each of us to varying degrees, depending on our own levels of exposure. And as opposed to responding to caste with loud-voiced pity or self-focused shame, she suggests that we listen humbly, cultivating a “radical kind of empathy” so as to understand people’s “experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel.” “If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us,” she writes,   

“It could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote. Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.”

I hope that we can all have the courage to be that radical bridge, that air-shifting flap, that Wilkerson so beautifully imagines. Just think about what a better world we could have; just think about what a better home our “old house” could be.

When it came out in 2018, Sally Rooney’s Normal People rocked the world as what was then-described as “the first great millennial love story.” For a year, it remained the most critically praised book in the United Kingdom. It won the British Book Award and the Costa Book Award and was longlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Together with her debut novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), it has catapulted Rooney to full-fledged stardom, positioning her as the definitive “voice” of her generation and, some say, the Jane Austen of our time.

In reading Normal People, it is not hard to see why Rooney has received such praise. The book is an electric page-turner, centering on the lives of two teenagers — Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan — who share an unlikely but irresistible connection. Though they hail from the same small town of Carricklea, Ireland, the characters of Connell and Marianne could not be more different. One-part jock, one-part closeted genius, Connell is the king of his and Marianne’s high school; within the confines of their provincial hometown, he is beloved by all and “always gets what he wants.” By contrast, Marianne is the school pariah, vituperated as “ugly” and incomprehensibly “self-absorbed.” As a misunderstood rich girl, she exists in the world but not of it, moving around as “a protective film, floating like mercury.” Later, at Trinity College Dublin, the dynamic between Connell and Marianne consummately flip-flops. While Connell flails, finding himself unable to rely on the characteristics and structures that once made him so “golden,” Marianne blossoms into a “glamorous” and “formidable” queen bee who is adored by all.

The way Rooney explores how these shifting dynamics and corresponding power struggles affect Connell and Marianne’s relationship is absolutely brilliant. At times, Normal People feels so real that it’s almost invasive — as if Rooney has somehow sifted through our memories to usurp and retro-reflect our own experiences and heartbreak. Much of this relatability stems from the accessibility of Rooney’s prose, which comes off as fresh, witty, sharp, and yet undeniably gentle. As the so-heralded “Salinger of the Snapchat generation,” she has such an authentically millennial sensibility, though she manages to balance this temporally specific discernment with transcendent layering and introspection, seamlessly interweaving Facebook-era dialogue with disquisitions on Emma and The Communist Manifesto.

Yet for all of its resonance, there were so many facets of Normal People — particularly around Connell and Marianne’s relationship — that I personally found very difficult to understand. Critics have praised both Normal People and its popular Hulu adaptation as “a love story to cherish,” but to frame Connell and Marianne’s romance as even remotely aspirational is to ignore its troubling, almost pathological dysfunction. For one, Connell and Marianne do not talk to each other. Ever. Time and time again, they prove that they are more than willing to surrender their relationship to arbitrary social structures or in exchange for personal invulnerability, sometimes almost willfully misinterpreting the other in order to feel “protected” within the known parameters of their own shame. With this, Normal People becomes not so much a love story as a treatise on shame — specifically, on how shame can adulterate, cheapen, and destroy love. With Marianne, her shame is clearly developed and understood. Tragically, she is a victim of domestic abuse and feels that, as a result, she is inherently “a bad person, corrupted, [and] wrong.” As she questions what is wrong with her (“I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people”), she acquiesces to the worst kinds of relationships, expectations, and treatment, all of which she assumes she “deserves” as punishment for “the evil part of herself.” With Connell, shame is there, perhaps in equal measure, but it is harder to grasp. Though he comes from a loving family, he is deeply insecure about his socioeconomic status and convinces himself that he “doesn’t belong in [Marianne’s] world.” While he fits the bill of the archetypal “nice guy” and professedly loves Marianne, he consistently proves that he willing to betray “any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.”   

What results from Marianne’s and Connell’s shame is not a “will-they-won’t-they” love story, as the book is so often marketed, but rather a gratuitous cycle of self-oriented longing, transient gratification, and masochistic pain. At times, Connell and Marianne’s breakups feel random and indecipherable, with their shame offered as what can appear like a narratively convenient explanation. At other times, their reunions feel massively out-of-step with the deep shame they purportedly feel. The book’s ending is perhaps the most illustrative example of Rooney’s somewhat contradictory depiction of shame. Critics have used words like “sweet,” “redemptive,” and “hopeful” to describe the final scene of Normal People, but to me it came across as rushed and incredibly painful, reflecting not the “egalitarian” reciprocity of first love but rather the relentlessness of shame – the ruthless way it makes its victims feel permanently unlovable and intrinsically unworthy of others’ energy and time. 

Stemming from this perceived egalitarianism, many critics have lauded the book as a neo-capitalist romance, drawing from Rooney’s own identification as a Marxist and her “belief that without constraints we can actually love each other.” “The book’s characters have different things at different times: money, social capital, looks,” writes Annalisa Quinn for The Atlantic in her 2019 review, and “the novel suggests the possibility of a setup in which these advantages are shared and redistributed according to need.” Yet, in my view, Rooney’s so-called “Marxism of the heart” is fundamentally problematic. Connell and Marianne’s relationship may indeed be a Marxist “utopia,” but it is a utopia that confuses an equal distribution of love and respect with an equal distribution of power. There is equity, yes, but only insofar as Connell and Marianne have equal power to hurt and “reign over” one another. Throughout Normal People, Rooney herself acknowledges this false equivalency between love and power: “There’s always been something inside [Marianne] that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.” Later, Rooney exposes the “shy” Connell as one of these men, describing how his desire for power has polluted his love for Marianne:

“What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colors, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this old over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.”

Certainly, if Normal People is a “Marxist love story,” then it should be read as a warning — and not a presumed advertisement — for Marxist philosophy. Marxism hinges on the belief that people can envision and build their own “ideal” future, independent of any political aid, mediation, or interference; it imagines a world in which production is based solely on meeting collective need, discarding any notion or desire for individualistic profit. As written, however, Connell and Marianne’s romance is intrinsically individualistic and transactional – they make decisions not for the betterment of society (or even each other), but for their own gratification and advancement. Rooney gives them the freedom to make the right decisions for themselves and other people, but they consistently choose wrong. When Connell is with his college girlfriend, Helen, for example, he feels like “an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air.” He “thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy.” Yet even though Helen is ostensibly the better choice for Connell, he sabotages their relationship, indulging in an ongoing series of inappropriate transgressions with Marianne that stretch and ultimately break Helen’s trust.

In my opinion, if anything is to be seen as purely and productively “Marxist,” the benefits of equality must exist in harmony — not in mutual exclusion or alternation. In Normal People, the so-called “equilibrium” experienced by Connell and Marianne is too spaced out, too disjointed, for it to be ever praised as “utopian” or even exemplary. While exquisitely written, theirs is a love story that we should learn and hopefully grow from — not aspire to.