A macabre coincidence wanted my reading of the essay country of blood of Paul Auster is interrupted, at the end of January, by two killings in California.
Eleven people were killed in a ballroom in Monterey Park, a city in the Los Angeles area, on a Saturday evening. Then, the following Monday, carnage on farms near San Francisco. Seven dead.
These large-scale shootings always give rise, explains the novelist in his book, to a sinister “ritual”.
They produce “a bloodbath of such magnitude and horror that all of American society comes to a halt as cameras swoop down to capture images of devastated people shaking with tears, journalists explore the circumstances of the crime in detail […] and that writers in op-eds and TV commentators flood their audiences with their opinions”.
In fact, in January, this ritual unfolded exactly as Paul Auster described it.
If he was able to predict what was going to happen, it is because the same causes produce the same effects. And because they do not change, these causes.
They are also at the heart of this book, whose concept is simple: Paul Auster seeks to understand why his country is the most violent in the Western world.
His quest begins in a very personal way. He tells us about his own relationship to firearms, among other things by recounting the death of his paternal grandfather.
He also explains that his father could have encouraged him “to practice shooting as one of the fundamental imperatives of manhood”. Because firearms are part of the DNA of his country.
Thus, Paul Auster quickly passes from the intimate to the universal.
Necessarily.
Weapons (and cars) are the pillars of American national mythology, underlines the writer, who says he is convinced that “the country’s colonial prehistory”, which took place “in a climate of incessant armed conflict”, sheds light the present about it.
It evokes the bloody war aimed at preserving slavery, but also that carried out against the natives.
Paul Auster then explores the role played by the propaganda machine which instrumentalized the second amendment to the American Constitution, the one which protects the right of citizens to possess a firearm.
Of course, he cites the National Rifle Association, which in the 1970s and 1980s became a pressure group based on “the founding belief that weapons are above all an instrument of self-defense”.
He finally agrees that any truly substantive change to gun control, under the current political circumstances, would be blocked by Republicans in Congress.
The findings of the book are overwhelming. And it is all the sadder that it is supported by dozens of photos taken on the sites of shootings, after the dramas.
These sites, often forgotten, the photographer Spencer Ostrander transforms them into “tombstones of our collective sorrow”, writes Paul Auster.
This kind of work is necessary, of course. He makes the correct diagnosis and does so convincingly. And it reads in one go, Paul Auster being after all one of the most brilliant American writers of his generation.
country of blood is therefore illuminating and useful… but it is also terribly depressing.
Extract
“To understand how we got here, we have to abstract ourselves from the present and project ourselves back to the very beginning, before the invention of the United States, when America was a sparsely populated collection of scattered white colonies. in thirteen outposts of the British Empire, very far from each other. Our colonial prehistory lasted one hundred and eighty years, and most of this chaotic formative time passed in a climate of incessant armed conflict. »
Who is Paul Auster?
American novelist born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, he began publishing novels in the 1980s and several of his works have been very successful, especially in French. He is notably the author of the New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts And The Hidden Chamber) and, more recently, 4 3 2 1. A few days ago, we learned that he had cancer.
Blood Country – A History of Gun Violence in the United States
Paul Auster (with photos by Spencer Ostrander)
South Acts
208 pages