In exploring these three fundamentally different meanings of “representation,” I begin by showing how the class status of the ruling elite in Just’s imaginary influences the ways they develop a coherent “upper-class” form of consciousness that limits their ability to adequately represent the poor and working class. I wrestle with issues related to “representing” the very nature of social class in fiction and argue that Just’s imaginary of our ruling elite, despite the limits of his own personal experience and his own inherent biases, can be reasonably taken to “represent” the ruling elite in ways that allow us to use his novels as case studies of the behavior and ideology of that elite. I go on to illustrate how the “upper-class” consciousness of Just’s political protagonists determines the way they exercise power in American policy, not adequately “representing” the interests of the majority of their constituencies; and how Just’s diplomats do not adequately represent the interests of America to the rest of the world.
I chose Ward Just’s novels for this study because I consider his body of work to be our greatest chronicle of those people who have governed America and represented us to the world from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to that of Barack Obama. As a novelist Just is unique in his knowledge and experience of ruling elites in what we might consider the four concentric circles of power and influence in the American government. At the center are our elected officials in the executive and congressional branches of government and those sitting on the Supreme Court. In the next circle are all those bureaucrats and supporting staff whose job it is to help shape and implement the programs and policies decided on by the White House and Congress, both at home or overseas through the foreign service, or to research the law for members of the Supreme Court. At the third level are all those lobbyists, consultants, and public interest groups, whose explicit job it is to influence the government as it composes legislation, implements programs, or interprets the law, either in the bureaucracy or the courts. The fourth circle is composed of the foundations and think tanks that promote the ideological rationales for differing policies and programs and the television networks, major media conglomerates, and influential New York and Washington law firms that control between half and three-quarters of the country’s industrial and insurance assets, banking interests, and private university endowments (Dye 2002, 10).
Ward Just is knowledgeable about how power functions at all four of these levels of power and influence. As the son of a prominent newspaper family in Waukegan, Illinois, Just had an upper-middle-class upbringing, but his education at private prep schools and Trinity College made him aware of those above him in the class system. As a nationally-known reporter for Newsweek, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly, Just covered Congress and three major election campaigns. As a war correspondent, Just covered civil wars on Cyprus and the Dominican Republic, and for a year and a half he covered the Vietnam War. Overseas, Just developed a host of contacts in the foreign service and became good friends with future ambassadors and people connected to the CIA. He writes about our ruling elite as an outsider with an intimate knowledge of what it feels like and means to be on the inside of the American government, both at home and abroad.
Because Just was a journalist primarily during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, his political fiction tends to focus on that period. Still, his novels are also set during each of the following decades until the 2010s, and portray the way our ruling elites have not only implemented policy at home and abroad but gradually become part of a larger global elite participating in an expanding version of what some experts call a “neo-liberal” transnational version of capitalism around the world.
Just’s view of our nation’s ruling elites at all levels is that they govern not from any deep ideological commitment but because of who they are, what Neil Gordon (2004) calls the “intricately woven fabric of relationships and expectations out of which grows [their] political and ethical identity.” Their political and ethical identity is shaped by their upper- and upper-middle-class status, which isolates them from the ways the poor and the working class actually live. Our ruling elites live in upper-class enclaves and generally only associate with those from the same class. They are raised in families that expect them to fulfill their potential, to be the best at what they choose to be, and they are given all the support they need to succeed: they are sent to exclusive private schools, they are given private tutoring if they need it, and they are introduced to networks of relatives and family friends who can help them achieve their personal goals. They are not class-conscious in the Marxist sense of a group organized to oppose another group. They do not think of themselves as being in conflict with anyone. Neither do they think of themselves as prejudiced in any way. Once launched into the world—the men into business, finance, or the law; the women into household management and public service—they accept members of other classes and minorities as equals, but have no sense of what these minorities may have gone through to makes themselves “equals” professionally.
Just’s focus on the shaping influence of class in American politics may be unique in modern literary fiction. Other modern fiction writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and Louis Auchincloss, have dealt with the rich, but none of these writers explores in any detail the ideology of our ruling elites or the way they exercise power. Alan Drury in Advice and Consent focuses on the politics of the Senate confirming a nominee to be Secretary of State, but he does not provide enough background on his numerous characters for us understand why they do or do not support the nominee other than because of their political affiliation or their personal knowledge of the nominee. Drury’s later political novels deal more melodramatically with international crises and rely on stereotypes of various political factions with little insight into how his characters make the decisions they do. Gore Vidal in his Narratives of Empire series has traced the history of two elite American families, the Sanfords and the Days, involved in American politics since the Civil War, and the two novels that end the series—Washington D.C., and The Golden Age—deal with contemporary American life, but, perhaps because he has modeled his characters after people in his own family lineage, Vidal takes his characters at face value and provides little context for assessing their social roles and sense of identity in our political system. He does not dwell on how their particular personalities, past experience, or social and business interests influence their behavior. His characters seem to vie for power simply as a game, trying to beat their opponents because they can.
Although Just has not attracted much attention in the academy, he is highly respected in literary circles in the larger world. Just himself claims that he is not underappreciated, only that he is undersold. His work is widely reviewed, including without fail, a review of his latest novel in the New York Times Book Review. He has received a number of major awards and honors: Jack Gance, a bildungsroman about the rise of a U.S. senator, received the Chicago Tribute Heartland Award in 1989. Echo House, a three-generation saga of a Washington political family, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997; A Dangerous Friend, a “romance” about a naive American foreign service officer in Vietnam, received the Cooper Prize for Fiction from the Society of American Historians in 1999. And An Unfinished Season, a coming-of-age story about a UN mediator, won a second Heartland Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Just has also received a fellowship from the American Institute in Berlin, and been accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Each of the three kinds of representation in Just’s fiction—literary representation of social class, political representation, and diplomatic representation—has, of course, its own particular theoretical difficulties, and perhaps the “politics” of representing any social group in fiction, especially the “politics” of class, may be the most fraught. Andrew Lawson has categorized three basic ways of conceptualizing class: as structure, as process or relationship, and as performance. All three notions of class have their limits and fail to capture the paradox of class as an abstract concept and the myriad ways in which class is manifested in the world. Peter Hitchcock (2000, 24) reminds us that since “class is not a thing but a relation and one that puts a heavy burden on representation,” the idea of class will always pull us toward “various class markers or signifiers,” which will take our attention