Timothy Schaffert on the Literary Parallels for the House GOP Clusterf*ck

Novelist Timothy Schaffert joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how the concept of farce relates to today’s GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Schaffert describes the lack of self-awareness in both fictional and real-life characters, including politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, and analyzes how it renders them comical, absurd, and maddening to watch. He talks about what observers can learn from those behaviors, and also reads from his forthcoming book, The Titanic Survivors Book Club.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: What does it mean for a work of fiction or a play or a movie to be farce?

Timothy Schaffert: Well, I might be tempted to put my work in the category of farce. I think that our concept of farce is that it’s broad, that it’s slapstick, that it’s belly laughs and the targets are quite apparent. And historically, if you think of a Jean Cocteau play in the middle of the 20th century, there’s subtlety. And I think even directors and directing actors will indicate that when playing farce, you should play it straight — that there’s an element of subtlety and grace, and that the situations need to present themselves as absurd. I’m definitely skirting around with irony and comedy but also romance and tragedy. But I do mean for it to land with some level of humor and, at times, absurdism. 

WT: One of the things that you said there that chimed for me was that it’s very important that the characters in a farce who are acting absurdly do not know that they are in a farce and believe that they are acting completely rationally. I think that applies to the politicians that we’ll be discussing today as well.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Yeah, for sure, like a total lack of self-awareness. So when I think of farce I think of the French and the term itself is derived from the French word for “stuffing.” And Wikipedia tells me it is used to refer to the improvisations of actors during medieval religious dramas. And Merriam-Webster defines farce as “A light dramatic composition marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot,” and also, “An empty or patently ridiculous act, proceeding, or a situation.” Why does this describe the political circus in which we live? Anyway… So what recent GOP house exploits fit these definitions?

WT: This is what’s known as a softball question, Timothy.

TS: I think it might be worthwhile to think about the distinction between “farcical” and “farce.” It does often seem like there’s a highly performative aspect to these shenanigans, but they do play to the cheap seats to a certain degree, even as they’re also playing to their underwriters. But I don’t think they intend for us to see it as farce. It would be very interesting if, at some point, somebody just outed themselves as being the joke or trying to satirize politics, and that actually is a performance. But I think that so much of it is that they’re playing to their constituents.

WT: I keep thinking back to — I don’t know if you guys have seen this — but early in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career, before she was a politician, she followed, was it — Timothy Hogue? A victim from the Parkland shooting, who became, himself, political. And she followed him around the Capitol filming him and commenting on it. And it seemed [like such an] outrageously cruel thing for an adult to do that it seemed like farce, but it also was, in and of itself, a cruel thing to do. And she never once considered that perhaps this would be inappropriate, and that, to me, is what we’re talking about here. I mean, farcical characters don’t have to be funny. They’re often quite nasty. They’re just nasty in a way that we find funny.

VVG: Yeah, I think that kid’s name is David Hogg that you’re thinking of. I think he and his sister… I’m not sure if she ended up having run-ins with MTG. Again, a total lack of self awareness, which seems to play into this. I feel like this was way back when I was in graduate school…  I was briefly in “Billionaires for Bush,” which was this group where, I think I put on my high school prom dress and a string of fake pearls and got a plastic champagne flute, and kind of gussied myself up a little and stood outside the [local] Republican convention, waving and greeting people who were coming in with great enthusiasm. This is all making me wish that… Maybe we should be infiltrating the Republican Party, actually. And taking it that way and seeing if there’s a way to subvert it from the inside, which certainly sounds more fun than anything we’re doing now.

WT: Timothy, do you have any favorite farcical GOP characters that you’d like to follow? Or do you try to ignore them entirely?

TS: Well, you know, the funny thing is that you really can’t go onto Twitter without being assaulted by all kinds of amateur Marjorie Taylor Greenes — people who recognize the success that they’ve had through these quips, and through this coldness, and through this general absurdity, and how often a tweet can then go viral as a result of its outlandishness. So there’s a whole lot of people auditioning for that kind of role. And so on any given day, you read something and you think, “Well this has to be a joke.” I mean, “This has to be a performance.” And we’re to recognize it as such. But sometimes it’s difficult to really discern that. But I think that you’d have to be completely mad in some of these instances not to realize that you’re just being provocative,  and that you’re in competition for all these other voices that would also be outlandish. 

I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have anybody that I particularly follow with glee. My preference is to shut it all out. But my husband keeps me informed every now and again: “Did you hear what she said this time?” It’s like, well, no, I’d rather not. 

WT: I did look up the Nebraska — since you live in Nebraska — the Nebraska State House representatives, of which there are only three, I thought there would be more, but I guess there’s not that many people in your state and — sorry — but none of them really stood out to me as provocateurs of the type that we’re talking about. Unless I’m missing something.

TS: No, they tend to be of an old school, more practical-based conservativism. We also currently have a governor that insists that he was chosen by God. Sometimes the thing about reading the news is that it feels like it’s already history. You feel like you are examining an era just because it feels so pre-interpreted to a certain degree. And because it all has precedent, too, in world history.

WT: Well, we do have a quote in here that we have to mention from Marx about history repeating, happening first as strategy and then later on as farce. We’ll get to that part in a little bit but, speaking of new style representatives, there’s Matt Gaetz in 2021, who was accused of sex trafficking and having sex with a minor, which I think he was acquitted of —although I don’t know exactly how convincingly — and I looked at his Wikipedia page, which reads like some sort of play by Molière. But here’s a tiny quote from it. “Gaetz was reportedly joined by a marijuana entrepreneur and hand surgeon Jason Pirozzolo, who allegedly paid trip accommodations, traveling expenses, and escort services. Investigators were reportedly exploring whether the escorts were sexually trafficked for Gaetz, and whether Gaetz accepted paid escorts in exchange for political access or legislative favors for Pirozzolo, who at the time chaired the board of the Medical Marijuana Physicians Association.” 

What is going on?! That just seems so patently like… this is a ridiculous person! And yet, this year, he managed to vote out the Speaker of the House and get an ally, Mike Johnson, to be in charge. So how does a ridiculous person like that get power in this way?

TS: And some of that was by design, you know, they made sure that it would only take one vote to knock someone out. And so there’s a kind of overarching commitment to dismantling the government that I think is core to their being, to a certain degree. So perhaps that’s part of the mission and the philosophy, this circus act that just tumbles forward. And there’s been Donald Trump as a TV personality, and he brought that reality show sensibility into the White House and people have eaten it up, and so there’s a certain delight that even the media gets. They take a hit when these figures aren’t headlining; when they’re not doing something outrageous. You know, they really want people to keep returning to their font information that does often seem like a spotlight on these ridiculous antics.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Timothy Schaffert by Michael Lionstar.

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GUEST:

The Titanic Survivors Book Club • The Perfume Thief • The Swan Gondola • The Coffins of Little Hope • Devils in the Sugar Shop • The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God • The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

Others:

The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season One, Episode Three: “The Power of Facebook: How Big is Too Big?” • “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season Three, Episode Nine: “All the President’s Henchmen: Susan Choi and Garrett Graff on the Citizens of the Swamp” • Tartuffe by Molière • Beetlejuice • Airplane! • Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco • “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” by Karl Marx • Hamlet by William Shakespeare • Jean Cocteau