It is said of mountain roads, that each bend reveals a new spectacle. In Michiko Kakutani’s The Great Wave, the Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic and author painstakingly circumvents countless bends of history to reveal the precarious state of our world.
Michiko Kakutani | Photo Credit: Getty images
The third millennium of the 21st century seems to be drowning in the waves of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity; acronymised as VUCA. Kakutani deftly manoeuvres this VUCA-verse as a keen observer and archivist of public and political events of the last few years. She suggests how on the brink of a crisis, the need for transformation becomes inevitable. “Times of turmoil can [provide] an opening for a reboot for reassessing our priorities and operating principles,” she writes in the introduction. The Great Wave is informed by a deeply human ability to resist and disrupt, especially when pushed to the limit of endurance. The book not only documents these hinge moments that lead to cultural resets, but also how these resets are enabled by ordinary “outsiders”, who breach cloistered fields to restructure the powers that be.
Participants at a demonstration against the right-wing hold a banner with the slogan ‘Hunt Nazis! Anti-fascism remains manual labour’, in Hamburg. | Photo Credit: AP
Wide-ranging scope
The scope of the book is wide-ranging, and its message is simple. The coincidence of multiple crises in our world have led to a permacrisis. Kakutani draws from Hannah Arendt and suggests that the effects of political emergencies are extended to our personal lives, as our access to reality and truth is curtailed by disinformation and propaganda. In a world of deep fakes, right-wing populism has emerged as a demoniac counter to the spirit of democracy. Kakutani suggests how ad infinitum, a moment of socio-economic unrest lays fertile ground for fringe groups and movements to hijack a dissatisfied mass conscience. She likens this pattern to the rise of the Bolveshiks after the Great War in Russia, and Nazism in 1930s Germany.
Through multiple leaps across time and geographical borders, the book presents a stunning history of the modern world.
An archive of time
The Great Wave benefits from Kakutani’s densely populated library of a mind. She writes with an unmatched precision about events and realities that most of us may already know, but the task is not merely repetitive archiving. She actively quotes scholars and cites references from other works to supplement her observations. This achieves a hypnotic effect in the book, while registering the cyclical patterns of authoritarianism, revolution and revival across time and space. As a primer on not only contemporary political history, but also cultural commentary supplemented by tireless research, this is a timely book.
One of the most resilient motivations of the book is to impress upon a reality that India has recently (to much jubilation) experienced: “Accountability remains vital to the rule of law.” We seem to be living in “an increasingly fragmented and fractious world in which opinions are replacing facts, and a tribal craving to belong trumps knowledge and reason,” Kakutani writes. An antidote to such a world, then, is rigorous, uncompromising demand for accountability from our leaders, as well as each other.
An interesting segment in the book is when the author uncovers the history of Republican radicalisation in the U.S. We have all witnessed how the Trump years have wreaked havoc on American civil society — with consequences on a global level. But Kakutani peels the layers of the spectacle to reveal what actually led to the deterioration of democracy in the U.S. She suggests that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, social unrest due to increased inequality and unemployment “helped fuel the anger driving the rise of right-wing populism in the following decade.” But as a response to this change, a resistance emerged too.
Demonstrators hold protest signs as they stand in Zucotti Park near the financial district of New York, seeking answers to the 2008 bank bailouts, foreclosures and high unemployment. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Kakutani writes about the end of the Trump years: “Trump’s assault on democracy and his efforts to undo half a century of progress on civil rights represented such an existential crisis that the usually fractious Democrats came together...” This is also Kakutani’s hope for all other dissenters, to find their collective power and resist those who foment partisanship and violence between communities.
A man wearing a T-shirt showing Viktor Orban and Donald Trump, attends a ‘peace march’ in support of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his party in Budapest, Hungary. | Photo Credit: AP
Universal chaos
Beyond the functions and mutinies of time, we are all seemingly forced to repeat history. From Adolf Hitler to Viktor Orbán — Hungary’s autocratic prime minister — there seem to be parallels that are observed vis-a-vis autocracy. Kakutani quotes Zack Beauchamp of Vox, who wrote this about Orbán: “Orbán’s political model has frequently employed a demagogic two-step... Stand up a feared or marginalised group as an enemy, then use the supposed need to combat this group’s influence to justify punitive policies that also happen to expand his regime’s power.”
Relatives show each other hand-hearts as they board an evacuation train to Western Ukraine, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, at a railway station in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine. | Photo Credit: Reuters
There seems to be a chilling sameness to demagoguery across the world, revealing the great Hobbesian truths about our natural tendencies for violence and exploitation of the Other. But the world — as Kakutani frequently reminds us — operates on fine balances. If there is mindless violence, there is also powerful resistance against it. That life grows bigger around a moment of crisis. She celebrates the Ukrainian people’s resistance against the Russian invasion, and how the powers of the West also rallied against Russia. She champions the new age Gen Z writers and artists, whose works, she suggests, embody “a fluency in multiple cultural vocabularies and traditions.” Which she also suggests is the key to a holistic cultural reset.
However, for all its range of ideas, The Great Wave is curiously silent on one: The genocide in Gaza.
Reviving democracy
In its final analysis, The Great Wave attests to how only championing democratic principles can assure our sustenance in a chaotic world of inequality and difference. Kakutani writes, “One of the most enduring lessons of the last decade is that democracy remains a fragile and precious thing, that it cannot be secured by one election or vote, but requires tireless, ongoing efforts.”
For Indian readers, The Great Wave is an introduction to the fortitude of the people to effect change, and perhaps to learn from them.
The Great Wave; Michiko Kakutani, William Collins, ₹499.
The writer is a Delhi-based literary reviewer. On X @karteakk.
Published - September 06, 2024 09:02 am IST
