Reading Capitalist Realism

Things As They Were or Are: On Russell Banks’s Global Realisms

p h i l l i p e . w e g n e r On Russell Banks’s Global Realisms Things as They Were or Are When in the summer of 2009 I first read Rule of the Bone: A Novel (1995), written by Russell Banks, one of the most important radical American novelists working today, a small scene relatively late in the action stood out for me. Rule of the Bone offers a brilliant updating for our era of globalization of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.1 The novel relates the story of a shiftless fourteen-yearold , Chapman “Chappie” Dorset, and his struggles to make his way among the broken lives and “throwaway” populations inhabiting the vicinity of his home in the small town of Au Sable Forks, New York, located in the northeastern section of the state’s six-million-acre “Forever Wild” Adirondack Park.2 In the scene of interest here, Chappie , now renamed Bone, and his adult companion I-­ Man—­ an illegal immigrant whom Bone first encounters in Plattsburgh squatting in the wreckage of a school bus that plays a prominent role in Banks’s previous novel, The Sweet Hereafter (1991)—attempt to board a flight bound for I-Man’s home of Jamaica. (While in Jamaica, Bone encounters his estranged father, and I-Man is ultimately killed.) At the ticket counter an unexpected complication arises: She scooped up the money and counted out the bills and gave I-Man the change and started punching a bunch of keys on her computer. Let me see your passports please, she said and me and I-Man looked at each other and both of us raised our eyebrows the same way. Like, Passports? He was an illegal alien and I was a homeless youngster missing and presumed dead, practically a milk carton kid and it suddenly looked like the truth was about to come out.3 While I-Man does produce a passport (although Bone observes it would “show he’d only been allowed in for picking apples in New York and 9 0 p h i l l i p e . w e g n e r cutting cane in Florida and couldn’t go home until the company said so”), Bone notes that he possesses no more than a “phony ID I’d once bought off a kid at the mall that said I was eighteen but except for Art the tattoo guy no one believed whenever I tried to use it” (248). However, at that moment the ticket agent’s attention is drawn to “I-Man’s Jah-stick,” which, she tartly informs him, will not be allowed to accompany him on the aircraft. As she reaches for it, Bone warns her, “The stick’s alive, man. Nobody can touch it but him” (249). Sure enough, when she grabs it, she is “bitten” and yells out in pain. (With this, Banks does not shift registers into magical realism, as we soon learn that I-Man has inserted an all-but-invisible needle in the stick that he flicks when anyone touches it.) As she reacts in surprise and confusion, the scene comes to a close: “I-Man took his Jah-stick then and his passport and his bag and boom box and I grabbed up my pack and ID and our tickets and boarding passes and we split from there without another word. We found our gate and went through the x-ray machine and sat down to wait for the boarding announcements” (249–250). What struck me on my initial reading of this scene was a palpable sense of its unreality, of the unlikeliness of this simple subterfuge being sufficient for the pair, and especially this pair, to con their way onto an international flight. To be more precise, the scene became for me what Aristotle identifies in his Poetics as an improbable possibility , an event that may in some extraordinary circumstances occur in our world, but whose presence in a work of fiction strains the limits of a reader’s credibility. Aristotle first introduces this concept in the penultimate paragraph of section 24—“Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities”—and develops his claims in more detail in the subsequent section.4 Aristotle opens section 25 by noting, “The poet being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three ­ objects—­ things as they were or are, things as they are...