Rebecca Solnit’s Call for Roses Rings Hollow
Socialists use the slogan “bread and roses” to emphasize the equal importance of pleasure and material security. In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit attempts to renew this rallying cry, but the result is a hymn to liberalism and a hollow vision of politics.
The social life of roses is the subject of Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses. (Edward Howell / Unsplash)
In an East Coast university town, shortly after the 2016 election, a friend paused, sizing up an elegantly planted rosebush in front of a colonial-era home that shrieked of comfort, and declared, with a strident impatience and generalized ambience of despair, that this was the reason the revolution had not gotten underway. I recollect peering at the carmine, unnaturally uniform petals, unlikely objects of rage, curdling in the unseasonably warm morning air, and pointed out that perhaps the problem was not flowers per se, but the property on which they grew. But flowers, I could see that he saw, were not simply a metaphor of prosperity but a distraction that hid the real divide between wealth and poverty in the city. They also seemed a personal assault on his own committed asceticism, as if such violently pleasing sights were a risky distraction on the long road to social reform.
The social life of roses is the subject of Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses, which grapples with the seemingly competing projects of revolution and beauty, or socialism and nature, or capitalism and the future. It is a kind of biography in the guise of ecological manifesto, or an art essay that hints at politics. Orwell’s Roses is Solnit’s twentieth book and it weaves together many of her enduring interests: the environment, women, politics, and place. From the publication of her first book, Secret Exhibition, which chronicles an avant-garde Californian art movement, Solnit, who describes herself as a product of the Californian public school system, has been a prominent voice of the West Coast’s cultural history.
Slow and Hopeful
Averaging a book a year, Solnit’s work is distinguished by a lyrical style of writing that is insistently meandering in its subject matter, and which returns to two principle themes: the art of walking and the art of getting lost. These are books conceived as collection boxes of miscellaneous cultural information and individual memory. A style of writing that is usually confined to the essay is, in Solnit’s work, expanded to a book-length study; the bric-a-brac of academic insight merges into dreamily turned phrases into which one peers mystically. Solnit is far from alone in this literary endeavor, though the tone of her work — Californian, slow, and hopeful — makes it exemplary of a certain mode of nonfiction writing that raises eclectic musing to a literary art.
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