My daughter-in-law Mina recently sent me a copy of Jonathan Raban’s article in the Wall Street Journal “All the Presidents’ Literature” (WSJ 1/10-11/2009), in which Raban suggests that Obama is that rare politician who seems to formulate his thinking and actions by reading and writing. As E. M. Forster wrote, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Raban mocks those critics of  Obama’s literary achievement who should know better since Dreams from My Father has been received, he claims,  by “the literary profession as if it were the Comstock Lode: He wrote it himself! Every sentence has its own graceful cadence! He could as easily be novelist as a politician!” But the fault of those who interpret Obama does not extend to the president himself:

In politics, “realism” is usually just another term for pragmatism, or Realpolitik. But Dreams From My Father suggests that for Obama the word is rooted less in a political than in a literary tradition, where it has a far richer meaning. It signifies the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear; a proper humility in the face of the multiplex character of human society; and, most of all, a belief in the power of the writer’s imagination to comprehend and ultimately reconcile the manifold contradictions in his teeming world. It’s not much to go on, but, so far, naming his cabinet and organizing his inauguration, incorporating into the narrative characters and voices quite different from his own (like Hillary Clinton’s or Rick Warren’s), Obama has demonstrated an impressive consistency between his instincts as a writer and his performance as president-elect. He reminds us that novelists, no less than apprentice politicians, are in the business of community organizing.

Joan Didion seems mindful of Raban’s concern in the December 18th New York Review of Books where she avoids exclamatory support herself by claiming that Obama’s dreams, his ability to give us what we seem to want, have pushed many, pushed many of those who support him, into an irony-free zone:

Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate’s behalf by their children. Again and again we were told that this was a generational thing, we couldn’t understand. In a flash, we were back in high school, and we couldn’t sit with the popular kids, we didn’t get it. The Style section of The New York Times, on the Sunday after the election, mentioned the Obama T-shirt that “makes irony look old.”

Irony was now out.

Naiveté, translated into “hope,” was now in.

Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.

Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism. . .

While the media has been sensitive to the thought that they were drinking Obama’s “Kool-Aid,” the phrase Didion uses and a fear I heard expressed more than once during CNN commentary, I’m appreciative — finally! — that we now have a president of the United States who will make science a cornerstone of our government and who in Dreams from My Father, which I’ll be teaching this semester in my English 1 class, can write the following about his African father whom he only knew for one month:

There was so much to tell in that single month, so much explaining to do; and yet when I reach back into my memory for the words of my father, the small interactions or conversations we might have had, they seem irretrievably lost. Perhaps they’re imprinted too deeply, his voice the seed of all sorts of tangled arguments that I carry on with myself, as impenetrable now as the pattern of my genes, so that all I can perceive is the worn-out shell. My wife offers a simpler explanation — that boys and their father don’t always have much to say to each other unless and until they trust — and this may come closer to the mark, for I often felt mute before him, and he never pushed me to speak (Dreams 66).

This will fit nicely with my class’s exploration of identity formation, which tends to founder in distrust as Michelle Obama suggests, like Sherman Alexie’s character Victor Joseph in Smoke Signals, until understanding and forgiveness lead to something like trust between father and son even when the father is no longer present.

On the topic of mother-daughter and father-daughter relations, Dreams is so far mute, but we’ll now have the opportunity to watch these develop during Obama’s presidency. Should Obama be president for eight years, Melia will be 18, Sasha 16 when he leaves office.