An Interview with H.L. Hix on American Outrage — September 18, 2024
H. L. Hix’s other recent books include a hybrid work, Say It Into My Mouth, and the poetry collections Moral Tales and Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark. His collection Constellation received the 2023 Vern Rutsala Prize from Cloudbank Books. He teaches philosophy and creative writing at the University of Wyoming.
Christopher Nelson: For those unfamiliar with the book—and because it is an unusual book, brilliant and haunting as it is—can you contextualize the work for us? What does the book do, formally and in content? And what was your intent when embarking on what must have been a long and arduous journey?
H. L. Hix: In content, American Outrage testifies to the pervasiveness of gun violence in the U.S., and to the lives of persons killed by gun violence. It attempts to honor the lives as defined by those who lived them, not as defined by those who ended them. Formally, although our most customary ways of organizing our experiences and information and ideas are narrative and argument, American Outrage leans into litany.
Making sense of anything depends on relating it to other things: narrative finds (or assigns) temporal and causal relationships, and argument finds logical relationships. Both are life essentials. Without awareness of temporal and causal relationships, I wouldn’t “have enough sense to come in out of the rain”: I go inside when dark clouds gather in the sky because I’ve imbibed narratives in which rain and lightning follow the gathering of clouds, and catching cold follows getting soaked. Stories put things in temporal and causal order, and my simple story about how rain happens, a story I’ve accepted more or less without question from the society into which I was born, has helped me stay dry. Staying dry is a simple objective, for which the simple story has proven adequate. Many other ambitions—sustaining love relationships, leading a virtuous and happy life—are more complex and subtle, so we have lots of complex and subtle stories (novels and memoirs and films and such) to orient and sustain us.
Similarly, without a grasp of logical relationships, I wouldn’t have even the most elementary “common sense”: I use hot pads to pull the roasting pan from the oven because I’ve drawn the inference that if hot things burn people who touch them, and this roasting pan is hot, then it will burn me if I touch it. Like my story about rain, my inference about the roasting pan is simple, but there are harder problems to solve than avoiding roasting-pan injury—minimizing my risk of cancer, sustaining democratic governance, mitigating climate change—so we have lots of arguments (court cases and op/eds and scientific studies and such) to help us sort things out.
We need both those formal approaches, narrative and argument, because a thick and accurate awareness of temporal and causal and logical order helps us live well. But so does awareness of associative order, which is why we make lists and catalogs and field guides. A grasp of logical order helps one see what follows from what, and a grasp of associative order helps one see what goes with what. It is associative order that litany can thicken and true, and it is associative order that American Outrage listens for, by putting together three litanies: a roll call of persons, a database of statistical information, and a clearinghouse of insights. Gun violence is “noisy” and messy, a welter of countless events and persons and institutions and forces; by its form, American Outrage seeks associative order within that welter, toward thickening our understanding of what goes with what.
I hadn’t envisioned the scale or the scope of the book when I started my research. My original intent was just a private “attitude adjustment.” I frequently complained about our ways of lionizing perpetrators of violence and erasing those against whom violence has been perpetrated, but at some point I had to admit to myself that I was being self-righteous, blaming news media for something I was complicit in. I didn’t have to passively accept the reduction of persons killed to “victims”: I could try to find out how they defined themselves, instead of accepting how their killers defined them. I decided that just one time I would actively search for more information on the persons who were killed in one particular rampage shooting; that initial impulse then expanded into the much larger research project that resulted in the book. In that sense, the roll call of persons is the book’s primary element: it answered to the original impulse, and the other two elements answered to it.
Nelson: Your book makes me think of Paul Slovic’s research on the valuation of human life and psychic numbing in the face of mass tragedy. He says that humans aren’t good at comprehending largescale suffering and death; for example, “48,830 people died [in 2021] from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC” (Pew Research Center). I live in a town with about 10,000 people—Grinnell, Iowa. It’s almost incomprehensible to think that each year in the U.S. four to five “Grinnells” die because of guns. One power of American Outrage’s litany is its individualization of the scale of gun deaths. Page after page of names and descriptions of the people killed. I found this listing to have an accruing effect: the incomprehensible scale becomes comprehensible, and it is exceptionally sad, infuriating—and one sees more clearly the insanity of our situation. You began the book with the intention of an “attitude adjustment.” By the end of writing it, how had the project changed you—or had it?
Hix: I wouldn’t describe the change in dramatic terms, as a sudden epiphany or blinding-light conversion or transformative makeover. The experience was less like discovering something that had been hidden than like looking at something it would be easier to turn away from.
Your way of framing the matter seems to me especially lucid and helpful. Change hasn’t taken the form of substitution: it’s not that I held false beliefs about gun violence but now hold true beliefs, or that I used to be indifferent to gun violence but now I care. I do hope that I am engaged in, and that American Outrage can help me sustain, an ongoing project of development, of resistance to psychic numbing. It is, as you describe Slovic’s research confirming, very difficult to maintain the recognition that large-scale suffering and death is also small-scale suffering and death. It is a tragedy that 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in 2021, but it is also 48,830 distinct tragedies. Keeping both in mind, the tragedy and the tragedies, is difficult, not a once-for-all achievement but an ongoing project. My hope for American Outrage is that it can give sustenance for myself and others in that project.
Nelson: I appreciate the clarity brought by your first endnote, on the etymology of “outrage”—how its original meaning has nothing to do with rage or violence but is, instead, closer to “ultra,” to go beyond, into excess. Reflect, if you would, on your decision to call the book American Outrage.
Hix: The “American” in the title was there early on. This book has an older sibling, American Anger, that was published in 2016, in the run-up to that election. Each book is “its own thing,” but both address matters of national concern, so “American” in the title was inevitable. “Outrage” came later. I hadn’t known the etymology of “outrage” until I learned it in the course of my research for this book. Once I learned that “outrage” entered the language to identify something as out of bounds, not to identify someone as full of rage, it seemed to me ideally suited to what I was learning about gun violence.
Philosophers and others have been showing us for some time that “bad apple” theories are inadequate as explanations of societal injustices, and inadequate, too, as guides for opposing those injustices. For example, Ibram X. Kendi demonstrates that racism is not operative in the U.S. (or anywhere else) because prejudice on the part of individuals accumulates to support for unjust policies, but instead because unjust policies nurture prejudice among individuals. Similarly, Kate Manne debunks the understanding of misogyny as attitudinal, clearly articulating that hatred of women is not essential to, or even typical of, misogyny, but that, instead, misogyny is a systemic condition that is unjust because it causes harm, not because it arises from malign intention.
The title American Outrage seemed to me a way to signal the book’s extending to gun violence the recognition that, like other injustices such as racism and misogyny (which it often helps to realize), it is not reducible to the bad attitudes and anomalous behavior of a few “bad guys.”
Nelson: Following Kendi and Manne’s line of analysis, do you think that gun violence in the U.S. has core conditions or causes? I’ve read, for example, about Canada also having a large number of guns but nowhere near the number of deaths that we have.
Hix: You’re right about the facts. Canada does have a large number of guns. By the most recent available numbers from the Small Arms Survey, Canada has the fifth-most civilian-held guns per capita of all the nations in the world: 34.7 firearms per 100 residents. To contextualize that number by means of a contrast, two countries toward the low end of the scale are Scotland at 5.6 and Japan at .3. The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country in the world, at 120.5. That’s more than twice as many as the next-highest country, Yemen, which has 52.8. Those numbers mean that Canada has a lot of guns: one gun for every three people. But the numbers also mean that the U.S. has many more guns. The U.S. is the only nation in the world with more guns than people.
The sense I developed from my research for American Outrage is that gun violence in the U.S. can’t be reduced to a single core condition or cause. Very many factors contribute. Sheer quantity, of course, does matter: having more guns than people certainly influences how many guns get used against how many people. But, as I take your question to suggest, quantity is hardly the only factor. Many other factors contribute to the problem.
Rhetorical factors, for example. In the past few decades, there has been increasing use of the formulation “war on…”: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on crime, and so on. All that war talk supports, and is supported by, parallel policy developments, such as the militarization of police: a shift away from the democratic principle of separating military and police functions, and toward the autocratic principle of merging those functions. If we’re conducting wars on crime and drugs, it means we’re treating a lot of citizens of the state as enemies of the state.
Policy factors relate to conceptual factors. Construing traffic fatalities as a public health issue, rather than primarily a function of “bad apple” drivers, allowed for policy changes (e.g. mandating seat belts and air bags) that have greatly reduced fatalities, but we haven’t gotten to that conception yet when it comes to guns. This in turn relates to regulation: nothing you can purchase is less regulated than guns. A bottle of aspirin has to be childproofed, but a gun does not. Cultural factors contribute: in the U.S., guns are widely granted a symbolic function as signifiers of values, such as patriotism and self-determination, and are often taken to indicate identity factors such as masculinity. And on and on.
If my research showed me anything, it showed that the problem is very complex, not reducible to some single cause, and not amenable to some simple fix.
Nelson: I agree that the problem is complex and there is not a singular or simple fix, but things could be done to lessen the frequency of gun violence and shooting deaths, like universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, a vigorous gun buy-back program, stricter red-flag laws and enforcement of them. While having this conversation, there was a school shooting in Winder, Georgia. They’ve been commonplace for so long. Was there anything from your research that illuminates their etiology—or do you have theories you want to share?
Hix: There has been a lot of research, in its quantity and variety confirming that many influencing factors contribute to gun violence: it can’t be traced to a single cause. Which means both (the good news) that there are many things that can be done to cut down on the number of deaths and (the bad news) that there is no single thing that could eliminate the problem in one fell swoop.
Everything I found in my research confirms the items in your list of things that could be done. So for example Louis Klarevas’s book Rampage Nation includes the data (reiterated as one of the data sets in American Outrage, on p. 80) that in the decade before the Assault Weapons Ban, there were 19 mass shootings in the U.S., resulting in 155 deaths; in the decade in which the Assault Weapons Ban was in place, there were twelve mass shootings, resulting in 89 deaths; and in the decade after the Assault Weapons Ban ended, there were 34 mass shootings, resulting in 302 deaths. It’s no accident that the shooter in the recent Georgia school shooting had, and used, an AR-15 style assault weapon: they are used in the great majority of mass shootings.
But my research indicates, too, that in addition to the items on your list, each of which works, we have plenty of less tractable matters to attend to. Getting an assault weapons ban back in place, and keeping it in place, will be difficult as long as our popular narratives and imagery—bare-chested Rambo with his ripped deltoids and blazing submachinegun eliminating the enemy—connect heroism to weaponry.
And as long as we construe the enemy as evil itself. Jessica Dawson’s research into American Rifleman magazine found two references to evil as an unseen or disembodied force in the American Rifleman in the ten-year period from 1975 through 1984, and 37 such references in the four-year period from 2015 through 2018. Saving a few lives every year by banning assault weapons won’t matter much to someone who thinks we are fighting evil by keeping and using assault weapons.
Nelson: After asking that question, I felt like it was maybe unfair; you didn’t, after all, set out to write a book that proposes solutions to an intractable social problem, and you’ve already eloquently described your intentions for American Outrage. Can we talk about the form of the book, which you call a testamentary. You’ve mentioned litany as an essential mode here. There are also lists, footnotes, marginal comments, and a parerga (notes?) that comprises more than half of the book. How did you arrive at these forms and modes, and what did you find that they allowed you to do or made possible?
Hix: It is a peculiarity of the book that the “primary” element in it takes up 100 pages and the “secondary” element takes up well over 150 pages. That came about as a way to meet competing aims. I wanted the “primary” element, the 100 pages that give the litany of short descriptions of 1,000 persons’ lives, to be as “clean” and distraction-free as possible so that upon reaching the moment of learning that “Irma Garcia taught at the same elementary school for her entire career of more than twenty years,” the reader is free to think about Irma Garcia with full attention. To borrow terminology from Charles Bernstein, I wanted the first portion of the book to be “absorptive,” immersing the reader in the lives (and information and ideas) being attested to.
But I wanted the second portion of the book to be “anti-absorptive,” making the mechanism visible rather than invisible. The operative force in composing American Outrage is not invention—my making up stuff—but curation—my finding out stuff and selecting and arranging it. So I wanted the reader to have access to, and I felt responsible to provide, a kind of “for further reading,” so that, about Irma Garcia, a reader could know not only the detail I chose to feature but also additional details about her and the sources through which I found out those details.
Nelson: Given that so much of the parerga (“secondary” element) is online, I’m curious to hear if you or your publisher have considered making the project available online—a sort of digital database and memorial of a kind that could be updated as the outrages continue, horrifically and apparently inevitably.
Hix: I have had some thoughts along those lines. Even while I was doing the research, I thought about making it both ongoing and collaborative, opening it to contributions from others, developing it into a multi-author project that could take the form of ever-growing print editions and an ever-expanding online presence.
I haven’t gone anywhere other than fantasy with the thought, though. The labor and the managerial stamina it would require is so imposing that I haven’t taken any serious steps toward reality. From making Green Linden Press happen, you know much better than I do all that would be involved in organizing and sustaining such a thing.
My limited capacities, though, don’t change the fact you’re pointing out: that the problem American Outrage addresses is active and ongoing, and it would be ideal if American Outrage itself could be ongoing in some analogous way.
Nelson: I want to make sure I convey how moving I found the book to be—its deep current of sorrow, the immense loss it catalogs, the infuriating repetition of massacres, the impotence at that fact. It’s an important, cathartic work of cultural memory; I thank you for it. What have you been writing since you completed American Outrage, and did this project push you in new directions?
Hix: Thank you for your generous response to American Outrage. I am very grateful for this conversation. And thank you for asking after my work since writing it.
Just days ago I finished (or think I finished—one is never sure) a book I’m calling Resistant Strain. It’s a gathering of “flash biographies” of activists for peace and humanitarian causes. (Its working title for a long time was Lives of the Peacemakers.) Each of its segments is documentary (grounded in the actual historical facts of the real person’s life and work) but tinted with a “speculative” or “magical realist” element.
The effect I’m after with that combination is to hold in mind both the very real difficulty they faced in resisting injustices and the not-yet-realized vision of peaceful coexistence they devoted their lives to, or gave their lives for.
