Literature Has No Yesterday:
The Political, Present-Tense Power of Popular Story
I wrote this not long after finishing Grafton's last novel Y is for Yesterday. With her recent death, I started thinking about this piece again.
During a scene from best-selling author Sue Grafton’s latest installment of her Kinsey Millhone series, Y Is for Yesterday (2017), a couple––two supporting characters tied up in the novel’s main mystery––start to argue when the girlfriend brings up the sexual assault she experienced in high school. The two are plotting a blackmail scheme in hopes of securing some much-needed wedding funds at the expense of a former classmates who participated in the assault. But when the boyfriend begins to question the scheme, the girlfriend reacts sharply.
“‘You’re not the one who was sexually abused,’” she counters when the boyfriend suggests reluctance. “‘Everybody in my support group thinks I should hose the guy but good.’”
For those unfamiliar with the beloved world of Kinsey Millhone, the fiercely independent private investigator chases down bad guys (and enjoys pickle-and-peanut butter sandwiches) in southern California during the 1980s. Yesterday takes place in 1989. But the assault issue at the heart of Grafton’s book resonates with the cultural conversations of 2017.
After his girlfriend reminds him of her sexual assault, the Yesterday boyfriend gripes, “‘Would you give it a rest? The first date we ever had, you told me this story.’” She eventually tells him, “‘You’re denigrating my experience. Minimizing the impact. Guys are famous for putting women down.’”
While power-abuse acts occurring along the intersections of gender and sex are as old as the concept of power itself, it is only in recent decades that American culture (and Western culture, more broadly) has begun to combat it through specifically naming such violations. If they do not exist in common language, such crimes cannot be verbalized by victims. For example, the idea of sexual harassment became something women (and some men) could identify and prosecute after the term gained prominence in the mid-1970s.
We could argue over whether or not the Grafton character would have articulated sentiments like this in 1989––if the social reality of that era would have openly acknowledged and discussed matters of sexual consent, abuse, and assault. But reading Grafton’s novel in 2017, amid Harvey Weinstein’s downfall and the subsequent #MeToo campaign, the more-or-less “woke” language of the assaulted girlfriend stands out. Despite the character herself being rather pugnacious and a little obnoxious, she elicits sympathy and admiration in her ability to label the crime as such. Her agency effectively represents American culture as a whole as it navigates the sexual-assault politics that have been simmering in the years since the novel’s 1989 timeline. The pot has finally been brought to boil, and we see this in the girlfriend’s 2017 sense of awareness––we can’t read this fictional 1989 as yesterday because it operates as a reflection of today.
I’m not particularly interested in quibbling over Grafton’s historical accuracy. Instead, I’m attracted to the ways in which Yesterday further demonstrates how fiction––specifically popular fiction––enables us to work through and understand the present. Acknowledging this makes clear that we can only ever know the past through our contemporary moment. What Yesterday and other works of in popular culture set in previous eras underscore is the impossibility of yesterday.
Of course, this is not a new idea. History, literature and other humanities scholars regularly debate the ability to escape presentism when evaluating the past. The notion threads itself into the quotidian as well, when, for instance, we sort through memories, imposing new narratives to earlier life experiences given our current circumstances. But we too easily overlook or dismiss how popular media participates in reshaping history––or, at least, our ideas of history.
Look no farther than Prairie Fires, Caroline’s Fraser’s fascinating new book that explores Laura Ingalls Wilder’s biography to show how the Little House books––books whose publication dates span 1932 to 1971––helped shape American-pioneer mythology. Indeed, Little House on the Prairie and the similar children’s novel Caddie Woodlawn, both published in 1935, arguably say more about American society’s antipathy toward the federal government amid the Great Depression than they say about 1860s frontier life.
Or, queue up early ’80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things. The massively popular Netflix series traffics in pop-culture signifiers of the Reagan-era, waxing nostalgic on a supposedly more innocent time––that innocent time being deemed pre-teen and pre-Internet. Stranger Things resonates with so many because it functions as retreat from our present moment, and in doing so makes commentary on today’s social-media driven, constantly connected landscape. In other words, the Stranger Things world is stranger, weird, and wonderful as a result of the show’s real monster: the specter of today.
But the impossibility to ever truthfully write or recreate or recapture yesterday reminds us of the power of art and invention. It reminds us that art––especially popular art––frames how we experience reality. If yesterday is a story forever being rewritten, then today and tomorrow forever hold creative possibility.
Paige Gray is a visiting assistant professor in the English Department of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She specializes in children’s/YA literature and media.
The Political, Present-Tense Power of Popular Story
I wrote this not long after finishing Grafton's last novel Y is for Yesterday. With her recent death, I started thinking about this piece again.
During a scene from best-selling author Sue Grafton’s latest installment of her Kinsey Millhone series, Y Is for Yesterday (2017), a couple––two supporting characters tied up in the novel’s main mystery––start to argue when the girlfriend brings up the sexual assault she experienced in high school. The two are plotting a blackmail scheme in hopes of securing some much-needed wedding funds at the expense of a former classmates who participated in the assault. But when the boyfriend begins to question the scheme, the girlfriend reacts sharply.
“‘You’re not the one who was sexually abused,’” she counters when the boyfriend suggests reluctance. “‘Everybody in my support group thinks I should hose the guy but good.’”
For those unfamiliar with the beloved world of Kinsey Millhone, the fiercely independent private investigator chases down bad guys (and enjoys pickle-and-peanut butter sandwiches) in southern California during the 1980s. Yesterday takes place in 1989. But the assault issue at the heart of Grafton’s book resonates with the cultural conversations of 2017.
After his girlfriend reminds him of her sexual assault, the Yesterday boyfriend gripes, “‘Would you give it a rest? The first date we ever had, you told me this story.’” She eventually tells him, “‘You’re denigrating my experience. Minimizing the impact. Guys are famous for putting women down.’”
While power-abuse acts occurring along the intersections of gender and sex are as old as the concept of power itself, it is only in recent decades that American culture (and Western culture, more broadly) has begun to combat it through specifically naming such violations. If they do not exist in common language, such crimes cannot be verbalized by victims. For example, the idea of sexual harassment became something women (and some men) could identify and prosecute after the term gained prominence in the mid-1970s.
We could argue over whether or not the Grafton character would have articulated sentiments like this in 1989––if the social reality of that era would have openly acknowledged and discussed matters of sexual consent, abuse, and assault. But reading Grafton’s novel in 2017, amid Harvey Weinstein’s downfall and the subsequent #MeToo campaign, the more-or-less “woke” language of the assaulted girlfriend stands out. Despite the character herself being rather pugnacious and a little obnoxious, she elicits sympathy and admiration in her ability to label the crime as such. Her agency effectively represents American culture as a whole as it navigates the sexual-assault politics that have been simmering in the years since the novel’s 1989 timeline. The pot has finally been brought to boil, and we see this in the girlfriend’s 2017 sense of awareness––we can’t read this fictional 1989 as yesterday because it operates as a reflection of today.
I’m not particularly interested in quibbling over Grafton’s historical accuracy. Instead, I’m attracted to the ways in which Yesterday further demonstrates how fiction––specifically popular fiction––enables us to work through and understand the present. Acknowledging this makes clear that we can only ever know the past through our contemporary moment. What Yesterday and other works of in popular culture set in previous eras underscore is the impossibility of yesterday.
Of course, this is not a new idea. History, literature and other humanities scholars regularly debate the ability to escape presentism when evaluating the past. The notion threads itself into the quotidian as well, when, for instance, we sort through memories, imposing new narratives to earlier life experiences given our current circumstances. But we too easily overlook or dismiss how popular media participates in reshaping history––or, at least, our ideas of history.
Look no farther than Prairie Fires, Caroline’s Fraser’s fascinating new book that explores Laura Ingalls Wilder’s biography to show how the Little House books––books whose publication dates span 1932 to 1971––helped shape American-pioneer mythology. Indeed, Little House on the Prairie and the similar children’s novel Caddie Woodlawn, both published in 1935, arguably say more about American society’s antipathy toward the federal government amid the Great Depression than they say about 1860s frontier life.
Or, queue up early ’80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things. The massively popular Netflix series traffics in pop-culture signifiers of the Reagan-era, waxing nostalgic on a supposedly more innocent time––that innocent time being deemed pre-teen and pre-Internet. Stranger Things resonates with so many because it functions as retreat from our present moment, and in doing so makes commentary on today’s social-media driven, constantly connected landscape. In other words, the Stranger Things world is stranger, weird, and wonderful as a result of the show’s real monster: the specter of today.
But the impossibility to ever truthfully write or recreate or recapture yesterday reminds us of the power of art and invention. It reminds us that art––especially popular art––frames how we experience reality. If yesterday is a story forever being rewritten, then today and tomorrow forever hold creative possibility.
Paige Gray is a visiting assistant professor in the English Department of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She specializes in children’s/YA literature and media.
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Camp Quidd-Lit: Summer Camp Combines Literature, Sports (May 2015)
The John Green Papers at the University of Southern Mississippi (Feb. 2015)
Harvard President Speaks Humanities at Inaugural Lecture (March 2016)
Teaching Humanities at West Point (March 2016)
Kids' Storm Art Shown on Katrina Anniversary (June 2015)
Camp Quidd-Lit: Summer Camp Combines Literature, Sports (May 2015)
The John Green Papers at the University of Southern Mississippi (Feb. 2015)
