We recently spoke with author Samuel Ligon about his new Slant book, Miller Cane. This is part two of the two-part interview. You can read part one here .
What is the role of humor in addressing our cultural and political ills?
I was writing a book about American fraud and American violence, as exemplified by my protagonist’s experience with mass shootings—which would become leaden, unbearable, if we merely went from one shooting to the next. So for me humor worked in two ways: as a means to consider the violence without turning away; and as a way to reconsider some of our national myths, and through doing that, to laugh at ourselves. Absurdity is often a great way to approach something that might otherwise be unapproachable. And our mythology is another kind of fraud, made up of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Barnum knew that a con could only work if the mark was complicit. His genius was to create the most absurd exhibits, the most ridiculous, often horrible cons—the hymn-singing slave Joice Heth exhibited on tour in 1835 as the 161-year-old former wet nurse to George Washington, a myth of the father of our country nurtured by a slave, an incredible metaphor (though Washington’s own slaveholding was no myth). Or Barnum’s Fiji mermaid, the head of a monkey sewn onto a fish, an alleged grotesque freak of nature to be gawked at by a gullible audience—except that Barnum made sure the audience knew his hoaxes were hoaxes by challenging his own exhibits in newspaper reports under a pseudonym, telling his audience plainly that these were hoaxes. And the audience came to feel superior by recognizing the hoaxes. They could not be fooled. But they would pay to prove that they could not be fooled. Genius. A type of American fraud that has to be funny. Otherwise it would be heartbreaking, like the profound corruption and graft we’re witnessing in our current administration.
The mass shootings are not so easy to make funny or absurd. Except for the fraud apparatus that attaches itself to them, with con artists descending on the shooting sites to rip off the survivors, which is also not funny—but if I could put something absurd next to the horror, maybe we could look at it more directly, and realize that these shootings are another kind of con. They don’t have to happen the way they do. Most Americans don’t want assault weapons to be so easily available. And yet, in our current absurd moment, assault weapons only become more available. Which feels like a sickness in our culture and democracy.
Miller Cane plays with the theme of heroes and villains, and how the line between the two can sometimes blur. Is Miller Cane a hero?
Miller is a patriot, even though he’s heartbroken by his nation’s past and present. I think many Americans today are heartbroken by how our ideals have been twisted or abandoned, though we’ve never lived up to our ideals. We embraced the idea that all men are created equal even as we were a nation practicing slavery and pushing native people further and further into the interior. But that does not mean these ideals don’t have value, which the rest of the world recognized. Freedom of speech is a liberator. As is the separation of church and state. But some of these bedrock principles are eroding, apparently losing value. We have a fundamentalist court, the majority of which believes in originalism, as if no time has passed since the constitution was written and ratified, a rejection of history unfolding, a rejection of cultural, technological, political, and legal evolution, which is preposterous. We have fundamentalists on the left and right, who cling to their fundamentalist orthodoxies, and if you’re not with them, you’re against them, with no oxygen left for contradiction and complexity in how we view ourselves and our neighbors.
I don’t think Miller would call himself a patriot. But I think he is one. And because he’s heartbroken about what’s happened to his country, he’s making our history as absurd as the present moment. He knows that the heroes and villains are often indistinguishable from each other. And that the villainy does not necessarily erase some of the heroic ideals. He understands that people are complex, full of contradiction, that Jefferson can write and believe that all men are created equal at the same time that he holds slaves and fails to recognize women or people without means as equals. Gigantic contradictions. But it doesn’t change the value of the ideal, which most of us believe today— that all people are created with equal, inalienable rights. Right now it seems that too many of us only see in black and white, good and bad, pious and blasphemous, friend and enemy. Miller Cane is interested in complexities and contradictions. As is fiction.
What makes Miller Cane “a true and exact history”?
That subtitle for Miller Cane, “A True & Exact History,” was used frequently in 17th, 18th, and 19thcentury books to convey a kind of authority, often based on first-person observation and experience, including a book called A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados, written by my great, great, great, etc., uncle, Richard Ligon, while imprisoned for debt in the Upper Bench prison, Southwark London, published in 1657. The first line begins “Having been censured by some for my weakness and Indiscretion,” and so on and so forth, until it continues: “I found myself a stranger in my own Country, and therefore resolved to lay hold on the first opportunity that might convey me to any other part of the World, how far distant soever, rather than abide here.” The book is based on his experience from 1647-1653 on Barbados, and is about the sugar industry, his purchase of a share in a sugar plantation, and the acceleration of plantation slavery. Ligon wrote that book once back in London, doing time for debt. So much of what he writes feels important to my novel. The idea of a man becoming a stranger to his country— that’s Miller. The exploitation Ligon becomes involved with is something Miller participates in as well, exploiting survivors of horrible violence. I like the history in the subtitle, since my novel is concerned with history. And I like that this weird, often troubling history is written by an ancestor.
More recently, A True & Exact History (2018) is a poetic erasure of Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados by Sonia Farmer. From Farmer’s website: “[T]hese unbound poetic fragments scattered among a shifting landscape simultaneously re-create and resist narrative as a device of cohesive history, ultimately calling into question what it means to write ‘a true and exact history’ of anything.”
I love the question Farmer raises. I chose the subtitle for its irony, the preposterous notion that any history could be true or exact, rather than an investigation and interpretation of the past by a specific human being from a specific moment in time. As a historian (Miller might say an historian. And he might not. Or he might sometimes. Perhaps as a joke), but as an historian, Miller knows that good histories are a struggle to get to something true, which will inevitably fail, which does not mean the effort shouldn’t be made, but merely that every historian is merely human. This brings to mind the recent argument that since nothing can be purely objective, reporting should be entirely subjective, which seems to underestimate the value of trying to be objective in reporting or in writing history—regardless of the inevitable failure of such an endeavor. The goal is to get as close as one can to the truth, whatever that might mean. For Miller, sometimes the only way to get to truth is through a lie.
