Cultural Amnesia
Page 67
Compared with terrorism in the Middle East, terrorist campaigns elsewhere in the world tend to strike us as half-hearted: Low Intensity Operations, as regular forces are wont to call them. We should resist that emphasis, or lack of emphasis. There has been nothing half-hearted about terror in Northern Ireland. But there again, ambiguity looms. The Republic of Ireland owes its existence to terror. Terror worked. It was a terror campaign that forced the local constabulary and the British forces to counter-terror. Not only the nauseating activities of the Black and Tans, but what the British army felt compelled to do to maintain order, was sufficient to demoralize the London government and bring about Home Rule. Since partition, the IRA in the North, even when apparently dormant, has worked for the same result, and not entirely without success. At one stage even Conor Cruise O’Brien was suggesting that a further partition was the only solution. It was possible to imagine the Protestant enclave being driven in upon itself to the point where its members would go home. Certainly the terrorists were dreaming of something like that. If the Protestants had not been a majority in the North, it might have worked. Confined by a shorter perimeter, no longer a majority in the North but still a minority within an almost united Ireland, the northern Protestants would be reduced to the position of the pieds noirs in Algeria, who pointed out in vain that they were home: they were born there, and had no other home to go to. But there was always France, where the new man in charge, Charles de Gaulle, having first pretended to listen to them, yielded to the inevitable. The inevitable had been made so by terror. Without the terror, the French army would not have been driven first to torture, then to demoralization, and finally to subversion. Democratic means would never have changed the domocracy’s mind: or so the National Liberation Front strategists, armed with a plenitude of historic evidence, preferred to believe.
For Latin America, the situation has been analysed by Mario Vargas Llosa with clarity, subtlety and an admirably firm hand. A one-time leftist himself—his years at Sartre’s feet turned his head, until Camus began to set it straight—Vargas Llosa found on his return to the Spanish world that the arguments in favour of Marxist insurgency were a confidence trick. New students of Spanish (who would be wise to start with books of essays anyway) could hardly do better than to track Vargas Llosa’s long series of articles on the subject: they run right through his landmark collection Contra viento y marea and on into his late-flowering, consistently brilliant El lenguaje de la pasión. He paints a repetitive but startling picture—the same thing happening again and again, like successive frames in a strip of film—of insurgent groups such as Peru’s Tupamaros subverting the institutions of their countries to the point where a militarized junta launches terror in its turn, with the result that the institutions erode, underdevelopment plunges to new depths, and the oppressed in whose name the insurgents acted end up more helpless than ever. He gives a classic account of a remorselessly recurring pattern. But not even Vargas Llosa can quite bring himself to face the possibility that if the institutions weren’t working in the first place then a convulsion was what they needed.
The standard promise of the terrorist is to reveal the true nature of the state by unmasking the police force as militarists and the military as fascists. In the Americas, that was roughly what terrorist insurgency did. In Argentina, for example, it was only when the bourgeoisie found its own children being taken and tortured that it woke up from its habitual complacency: and the complacency had been complicity, in corruption, exploitation and the deeply damaging sleep of reason. Throughout the Americas, after the CIA’s ground-breaking adventure in Guatemala in the 1950s, there were many young idealists with good cause to believe that the oppressor, drawing on support from Washington, would go on robbing the common people forever. The results of that belief were disastrous, and particularly so for the common people. But the belief can’t be dismissed. Vargas Llosa, with an artist’s mind and a politician’s practical knowledge, is understandably reluctant to reach the philosopher’s uncomfortable conclusion that chaos might have been constructive. But terror, if it was criminally foolish in presuming to dramatize the true nature of states, was historically functional in dramatizing the desperation of societies content to call themselves moribund rather than admit themselves unjust. Luckily, apart from all the dead Indians, everyone involved spoke the same language. When a proper dialogue started at last, they all understood each other. It is some comfort to realize that bright young idealists in Latin American universities today are reading about these matters in the crystalline Spanish of Vargas Llosa rather than in hasty translations of Regis Debray’s inexcusably irresponsible diatribes. But the voice of a man like Vargas Llosa rings so clearly now only because the air was cleared in the first place of its perennial miasma. If the Americas had waited until the United Fruit Company had evolved into a benevolent institution, they might still be waiting. Finally the disastrous pro-strongman foreign policy of the United States was reversed under President Reagan. When Reagan came to office, only two of the U.S.-favoured states in Latin America were democracies. When he left office, there were only two that weren’t. It was one of the great foreign policy revisions in recent history, but it didn’t happen because Reagan was a genius of sympathetic perception. It happened because there had been telegenic chaos. None of this means, of course, that dead terrorists should be venerated as heroes. Most of them were ruthless dogmatists and many of them were homicidal maniacs. But the problem remains of the ones who were neither.
We have to go a long way down the world’s scale of enormities before we find a terrorist scenario that looks like pure farce. When we do, it’s probably because we don’t know enough about it. Already we forget that the fantasy politics of Germany’s glamorous young terrorists in the Baader-Meinhof era had real victims. In the Basque area of Spain, the terrorists are currently collecting what they call “war tax” from their own civilians: pay up or get shot. It looks like the reductio ad absurdum. At one time a regular holiday-maker in Biarritz, I was very glad when a Basque bomber from south of the border, taking a rest from his little war while he constructed a new device, blew himself through the front window of one of my favourite bars and wound up in pieces all over the Rue Gambetta. (Don’t think it didn’t strike me that I would have been less glad if I had been in the bar at the time.) On top of my holiday from London, I got a holiday from pity. To the onlooker, the Spanish government would appear to have done its best to give the Basques everything they want. It seems, however, that they want their own country, coterminous with their own language and culture. When the Slovaks wanted that, Vaclav Hável gave it to them. (Some of his own colleagues thought he was foolish to do so, and that he permanently impoverished the Czech Republic as a result.) But the Spanish government, we are told, is not in the same position to be generous. Too much of Spanish industry is in Basque territory. It is the mission of the ETA terrorists to persuade the Spanish government that their cause is just. It doesn’t seem so to me: it doesn’t even seem sane. But there are some young Basques who are ready to face torture for it. To steel themselves, they torture each other. Faced with that kind of determination, the first idea we must give up is that terrorists are not serious.
The idea we must never give up is that they are not rational. Not even Israel was necessarily a unique case. The Irgun could have wrought suitably unacceptable havoc on a target that was not alive. But it would have taken more resources than they had, and anyway the chances were good that the British, exhausted from the war and with the will to empire fading fast, would pack up and go home. In all other cases, the consequences of killing the innocent are predictable only in the sense that the terrorists will alienate the best elements among their own political sympathizers. The IRA put its own cause back by years when it blew up a London bandstand that contained nothing military except musicians. The whole idea of a soft target is a misconception. Insurgents could choose the hardest target, themselves. All the evidence suggests that if dramatization is the aim, there is
nothing more dramatic than a suicide in the right spot. When the Vietnamese monks set themselves alight in central Saigon, the flames were seen in Washington. When Jan Palach set himself alight in Prague in 1968, the flames were seen in the Kremlin. There was no immediate effect—the sequel was years of oppression in each case—but suppose there had been twice the number of human torches the next day, and twice as many again the day after that, and so on? In recent years the use of demonstrative suicide has expanded to include innocent victims. So far it hasn’t worked: probably because it can’t, in the sense that those groups wedded to it as a weapon have no clear aims that can be granted. (Palestinian suicide bombers, for example, want the dissolution of the state of Israel, a wish that will be granted only on the understanding that the whole area is dissolved along with it, by the atomic bombs that the Israelis would presumably use if the state caved in.) It hardly needs saying that if suicidal terrorists returned to leaving the innocent out of the equation they would no longer be terrorists. But by confining violence to themselves they would be dramatizing one thing for certain: the sympathy for the oppressed that made them ready to give their lives. Young people who see The Battle of Algiers—and they should all see it, although not, I think, before they are old enough to vote—will identify that sympathy as a creative force, and they will not be wrong. In the bar afterwards, however, we might find it hard to resist asking them what they suppose Algeria is like to live in now, almost half a century after the oppressor was put to flight. It isn’t like Italy, that’s for sure. But there lay Rognoni’s big advantage: he was starting with a country that knew what it wanted to get back to, before it went anywhere else.
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Ernesto Sábato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
ERNESTO SÁBATO
Ernesto Sábato was born in Buenos Aires in 1911 and studied physics and philosophy at the University of la Plata. For the first part of his long career he combined science with radical politics. In 1930 he joined the Juventud Comunista and by 1933 he had risen to become secretary of that embattled organization, but his doubts about Stalin had already begun. Reluctant to let the Party go, he eventually sought renewal of his faith by enrolling at the School of Leninism in Moscow. Luckily he had got only as far as Brussels when news of the Moscow trials led him to break a journey which, he later admitted, would surely have ended in his premature death. At the Curie Laboratory in Paris he went on with his study of physics, and was present when the French did enough work on the atom to give an idea of the destructive power that was on its way. Sábato, always prone to thoughts of suicide and large questions about life and death, was suitably impressed by the prospect of doom for all mankind. After 1945 he did no more physics, giving himself full-time to writing, painting and education. But when he wrote articles in dispraise of the Perón regime, the public education system was no longer a field open to him, and he had to transmit his ideas by writing. His novels—most famously The Tunnel (1948)—are important, but unwieldy for the beginning reader. His essays provide the ideal approach to his teeming range of opinion, almost all of it reasonable, even when camped beween the dream world and the world. During the war over the Malvinas in 1982 he took Argentina’s part but that didn’t stop him burying the last credentials of the junta with his editorship of Nunca Mas (Never Again, often called simply the Sábato Report), which detailed and analysed the atrocities of the military regime. He was even better than Borges at being interviewed, so when they talked with each other they could cut out the middleman. The transcripts of their dialogues are delightful. Sábato’s non-fictional prose is collected in half a dozen attractively presented volumes of essays which he himself, as a pedagogue, might have designed as magically unputdownable textbooks for foreigners learning to read Spanish. In his later years, after he was medically declared to be too blind to read and write, he has concentrated on his painting: a typically category-busting gesture from a writer so good at convincing the rest of us that we aren’t looking hard enough, and especially not into our own memories. Sábato’s memory of his radical years has served him well. Protected against snobbery, he never fell for the illusion, rife in the elevated Argentinian literary world, that art was only for the elect. He thought that even humble journalists could share the glory of a genius, simply by pointing out that he was there, and thus offering him the consolation of understanding. Sábato has a phrase for it: la infinita liberación de no saberse solo. The infinite liberation of knowing that one is not alone. I should add, in fairness, that there are young intellectuals in Argentina who find my admiration for Sábato incomprehensible. They remember that he, too, like Borges, sat down with the generals. But I rememer that he stood up again; and his prose, which they find stifling, I find lucid. But that could be the usual effect of reading in a language not one’s own: one is too easily impressed.
Only a thick skin can defend itself, and the characteristic of an artist is an extreme delicacy of skin.
—ERNESTO SÁBATO, Entre la letra y la sangre, P. 126
IF I HAD my time again, I would never react publicly to criticism, no matter how unjustified. Unless the point in dispute is a point of fact, all you can do by doing so is to cooperate in your assailant’s aim of getting you onto your back foot and keeping you there. But this is mainly a tactical consideration. The injunction that you should not feel criticism is an impertinence. After all, when you criticized other people, it was on the assumption that they would feel it, or anyway ought to have done. Savagery of critical expression can often be put down to the critic’s belief that his subject, having become renowned, has attained a position of power, and might not be troubled unless well whipped; with the conscience-saving clause that the hurt will not go deep, because its recipient is too well-armoured with the world’s rewards. Success has given him a thick skin. But as Sábato was right to point out, for an artist there is no such thing as a thick skin. Sometimes his thin skin has to bear the weight of complete steel, but it will suffer from that too: the burden of seeming toughness is hard on the nerves, and you can’t wear a suit of armour to bed without losing sleep.
In his diaries, Thomas Mann made what sounded like anti-Semitic remarks about the critic Alfred Kerr. Mann was no anti-Semite, but he flew off the handle because Kerr had belittled him in print. (Mann, with some justification, thought that he was Goethe, so making him feel belittled was easy: all you had to do was suggest that he was only Schiller.) Proust’s invariable response to adverse criticism was to write to the critic at great length. When the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu came out, it was panned in Le Temps by a blundering hack called Paul Souday. Proust wrote to him in detailed protest, and over a period of years invited him several times to dinner. Souday later claimed to have discovered Proust. In effect, Proust had disarmed his tormentor by taking him at his own absurdly exalted estimation. From my experience as a critic, I would have to conclude that no writer of any kind or degree is content to be taken any other way. Anthony Powell and Patrick White had in common an elephantine capacity to remember the perpetrators of an unfavourable notice: White sincerely believed that they were all in touch with one another. He kept a list. When I heard that I was on it, I wondered if he would send his seconds, or some large man carrying a tyre iron. I was also struck by John Le Carré’s private reaction to a bad notice I gave his long novel The Honourable Schoolboy, which I thought, and said, was a put-up job. Le Carré did not react in public, but in private he spread the opinion that I was conducting a vendetta. Since, in the same article, I had called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a masterpiece, it would have been a strange vendetta.
Le Carré would have been on solid ground if he had confined his annoyance to the industrial fact that a negative notice in the New York Review of Books coul
d be of no help to his new book’s prospects in America, and might well have damaged them. I would guess, however, that he threw his toys out of the pram because I had suggested that his new book was a dud by his own standards. The compliment involved in that kind of condemnation never registers. I once saw a famously cool literary friend of mine turn angry enough to commit murder. A collection of his critical pieces had just been dismissively reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, the burden of the review being that somebody of my friend’s high talents should not be wasting his time writing journalism. The paper’s reviewers were still anonymous in those days but my friend knew who the culprit was: a notorious dullard. The victim pronounced anathema not only against the dullard for writing the review, but against the editor for printing it. Clearly he would have liked to see the guilty pair lashed back to back with cable and used as landfill in the Thames estuary, but only after being toasted to the point of death with a flame-thrower. I was so shaken by the spectacle of his white lips and clenched fists—one of the fists had a pint of beer in it, so there was danger from flying glass—that I had trouble remembering three pertinent facts. The dullard’s sedulous mediocrity was fully revealed in his piece for all to see; almost every piece in the book that he had reviewed was more intransigent than the review; and it had been scarcely twenty-four hours since the victim, in that same pub, had given me a withering lecture on my absurd sensitivity to criticism.