Absolutely: the novel

 

Certain words are novels – and not just novels, but state of the nation novels, U.S.A. novels.

Absolutely, for instance. Exciting or excited.

Actually.

 

Absolutely that became fixed as a certain sound in my ear years ago. I was living in Santa Fe and, for a time, writing lyrics for a band. The singer would say, absolutely, a lot. The singer was a sweet woman, who couldn’t hold a tune – you could glue it to her tongue and she would still mess it up.

So we would go through the song and she would be asked if she heard it, and she would say: “absolutely”.

 

Like so much in the U.S.A, the word came out of some combo of tv, movies, music and coolhunting. And it ended up in business school.

 

One could probably track it through trendy novels. It begins as a sort of Britishy complement – in phrases like, say, absolutely stunning. It occurs in Less than Zero – a marker of the eighties if there ever was one – both as an affirmative and a complement. But only once as the former. Checking into seventies zeitgeist novels – In Alison Lurie, it occurs in the form of “absolutely sure” or “absolutely necessary” – holding on as a modifier, and not pushing aside the “sure” to star by itself.

 

Ann Beattie, whose signature method as a short story writer and novelist in the seventies was to keep as close as possible to the oral tics of the time, used absolutely the way Alice Lurie did. She only introduced absolutely, as a single word, after the eighties.

 

These are not definitive proofs of the origin of the bogus absolutely, but I’d like to coordinate its mission creep with the “morning in America” that was the Reagan era – an era in which the bogus made a comeback, from Wall Street to the shores of Nicaragua.

Of course, this mutation is not unrelated to other mutations abroad in the land – for instance, the systematic skinning of the working class, from their place in the popular arts to the dignity to their paychecks. “Sure”, the older Americanism,  was both the extended hand and a word to be spoken out of the side of the mouth by private dicks and mobsters. Sure was off the farm – as was the population, draining into Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cleveland, making steel in Youngstown and Pittsburg, waging labor war in Flint. Sure was familiar with numbers runners and the overflowing toilets in neighborhood taverns on Friday night. Sure had all beef hotdogs in its teeth and the ball game on the radio. Sure was Rabbit, especially when yes means no, as in “sure sure.” A doubling that allows Rabbit to hop away from his responsibilities in Rabbit Run.

 

Absolutely is Rabbit in his desuetude, Rabbit in Florida, Rabbit self-pitying in the strip club. Absolutely is the fated, that is, planned erosion of the manufacturing sector. Absolutely is the relentless rise of the service sector. Absolutely is waitresses setting out jauntily to make money while going to college and ending up three jobbing it to make payments on the college loan.  Absolutely is the cool music played at Starbucks. Absolutely is emotional labor, while emotional surplus value is hauled off to be plasticized in the cultural industries. But absolutely never reaches into the now dominent upper reaches, who invaded every crannie of the popular arts in the U.S.A. and made it a mirror of their own vanity. Absolutely is said to them. They never say it back. Instead, they say things like, I’ll have the Chilean sea bass.

 

I sure hate what absolutely did to the States.