by Susan Sontag
I dread their eyes more than their words. How well I know—from having worn it myself—the characteristic expression that comes over their faces when dealing with delinquent members: the expertly blended look that becomes in turn indignant, envious, contemptuous, mournful, indifferent. No special merit exempts me from their reproaches. Why shouldn’t my colleagues rage if I desert them? What right have I to be free if they’re not?
No, I get a better idea—always the same better idea. I’ll move abroad. Lee, with a brand-new promotion at the hospital, won’t want to go, especially now, with the war on. I’ll insist. I’ll sulk. I’ll weep. I’ll explain. Luckily, we both renewed our passports last month, our modest savings could be withdrawn from the bank any weekday morning, and a translator (I’m good at languages) and a doctor can find work anywhere. But then (this is the next thought), if I leave, how could I face them? I don’t mean now the local members—there’s a sizable branch here, while in the tropical country I have in mind for Lee and myself and our daughter to emigrate to, members are sparse and leaderless—but the dead ones: those I’d meet when I died and went to wherever it is one goes.
(Don’t smile when I say I do believe in an afterlife of some kind.)
They would crowd around me as I entered diffidently, washed and nicely dressed for my funeral, my lungs un-gassed, unmarked by bullet or whip or fire; and they would parade their implacable faces and mutilated bodies before me. Martyrdom is a hard legacy to disown. Sisters and brothers! I shout. I sink to my knees and stretch out my arms, pleading for their forgiveness, explaining that it wasn’t their sacrifice that I’d repudiated. But they would refuse to pardon me. They would say, how could you? When we were steadfast unto death, how did you dare to leave?
You’ll interrupt impatiently. Then it’s fear that detains you. Fear of their arguments, their disdain, their reproaches, their pathos. Fear of the gray mouths; fear of the organizer’s rheumy, uncertain eyes, focusing doubtfully, straying, slipping back into focus, coming to rest the blade of guilt against your throat. Confess yourself a coward and stay. Go on being the good member, the slave of seriousness, disciple of virtue, duty’s fool. Haven’t you observed that not everyone’s destined to be free?
Don’t be impatient. Oh, if I were just a coward. But it’s worse. Let’s leave the dead out of it; I’m being literary, as the old man might say. As for the living members—how could I be afraid of them, since they have so little power as power is generally conceived? Those outside the organization suppose that we wield tangible power; indeed, they’re convinced that we’re becoming more powerful all the time. But I know, everyone who belongs to us knows, how weak we are. Retaliation, in the form of physical harm or irreparable damage to my career, is either contrary to members’ principles or beyond their powers. Even the humiliating procedures of expulsion, which used to be practiced on those who left us, have fallen into disuse. And in the unlikely event that I should be threatened or harassed, there would always be nonmembers to protect me. I have only to be discreet and slip away quietly to be safe. Why, my departure might scarcely be noticed (except by the organizer, who would have to get a new translator for his books) so long as I didn’t make a public scandal—denounce the organization in letters to the newspapers, reveal our secrets on television talk shows or on the college lecture circuit. What prevents me from defecting isn’t just fear.
It’s that, really, I’m convinced by them. Phoenix-like, my allegiance resurrects itself each time I imagine I have killed it—because that isn’t a murder; it’s a suicide. And one’s feelings, contrary to the deplorable idea rife among members, can’t commit suicide. However much I recoil from what the organization enjoins, in my heart I remain a member. Though I know they’re wrong, I can’t help feeling that it’s a privilege to be a party to their error. I find it a glorious error.
Better wrong with them than right with the others.
That’s a quotation, I think. (“Better wrong with us than right with them”?) My skull is crammed with quotations.
Understand, I don’t believe all that. I can’t. Stripped of every flattering excuse and extenuating circumstance, my dilemma seems absurd. And, like you, I see its absurdity.
One way out. (The rewards of candor.) By setting down my feelings in all their shameless illogic, I’ve vaulted outside the charmed circle of those feelings. By declaring that what I believe is false, and truly meaning what I say, I’ve broken the spell of credulity. Liberated, by the white magic of reason. I might feel about the organization, about myself, as I’ve explained. But I can’t believe any longer in what I feel.
No, not so simple. Try again.
The Translator Seeks a Showdown with a Long-standing Problem. A brief message. Or perhaps the title of a book.
First paragraph: the organizer’s accent. He was born abroad, and all his relatives were consumed in some purge or massacre. I translate his books, and live between his language and mine. I do other books as well. (And it’s soothing to translate books that are not essential, mere entertainments: novels, studies predicting the future.) Of course, I say I have to do them to make a living. The old man’s books have never sold enough to support him, so you can imagine how tiny a sum is the small percentage of his royalties that accrues to me. He smiles indulgently at my other activities. He says he doesn’t have time for “literature.” That, too, is for the others—the nonmembers.
You can’t imagine how enfeebling it is to be a translator. But I’d hardly be better armed, more lucid, if I’d written my own books about the organization.
Look, this is how it is. We are a very old organization. And, as you know, while in one sense we are a secret organization, we are also well known to the general public. Many books and articles, of both a scholarly and a popular nature, have been written about us. Though any account written before the present century is bound to be unreliable, recent histories of the organization are at least likely to be based on solid source material. Many original documents were salvaged from the Second Purge, when the old archives were shredded: confidential memoranda drawn up by past presidents and their sub-ordinates, minutes of plenary councils, manifestoes, petitions, privately circulated tracts, correspondence between branches, and biographies of leading members. As an accredited translator, I can get permission to consult these arcane yellowing pages in the lead vaults where they’re stored. But to use these sources it’s not necessary to have access to the new archives. Thirty years ago, in an uncharacteristically humble gesture toward improving our stormy relations with the outside world, the organization put on microfilm an edited selection of these documents, which may be found in any well-stocked municipal or university library.
A dog is barking in the neighboring apartment. Louder than the ambulance siren in the street below. Louder than the shouting children on the staircase.
At the turn of the century, some members charged that all these records, those kept for the eyes of authorized members only as well as the ones made available to the public, were forgeries. (One of their arguments: the papers were too well preserved, too legible; documents of such antiquity should be partly undecipherable.) These dissidents claimed that not even our most highly placed members know the truth about our origins. But they have to keep up the pretense that they do, because origins are very important to us. Origins are, in fact, the pride of the organization; all members are given to boasting about how we began so long ago, and under such glorious auspices.
This heresy has died out in recent years, since the last purge. Few think it worthwhile now to contest the received version of our origins. Even if the canonical account were mere guesswork, or a lie, it seems to matter much less today. Our members have hallowed this account by generations of unbroken belief. Were it not true to begin with, it is true now. And it becomes still truer, probably, as our point of origin recedes further into the past. (Certainly, it becomes heavier.)
Once, I said as much to the organizer. “Right,” he answered, a gracious smile twisting his wi
thered face. “It’s truer.” Wheezing, he hauled himself out of his oak swivel chair, hesitated before the book-laden shelves behind his desk, took down a heavy old folio, and read aloud a gloss—with which I wasn’t familiar—on the Commentator’s gloss on the Seventh Lesson that was right to the point. (I must explain that the seventh of the Eight Lessons has been thought to treat the topic of retroactive truth.)
We’re more sophisticated now. Even the cleverest and most contentious among us agree that a retroactive truth is enough.
Indeed, we are altogether less concerned with origins. Now it is our history—above all, the history of our sufferings—that absorbs us; and of the veracity of these accounts there can be no dispute. The movement’s unhappy history is the first item to be laid before new members, even before the four-volume Commentaries and the reading of the anthology of quotations What Must Be Done.
Lee will be home soon from the hospital, and then it will be time for dinner. Our daughter, who is built like a tiny jockey, is laboring over her homework in the living room and watching a basketball game on television. I mention this so you can visualize how plainly I live.
Dissent must be set off from dissent. I dissent differently.
Far from wanting to dispute the details, or accuse our leaders of ignorance or of deceiving us, I want to challenge our very involvement with history. That our origins are debatable (possibly), remote (certainly), is not the problem. The sheer continuity of the organization is. It seems to me far from enough that our movement is so old, that we have survived so much misunderstanding and vilification and injustice.
Understand me. I am not objecting that the movement has not been more successful, or urging that in all this time it should have accomplished more, won more members than it has, infiltrated more institutions, taken over territories, ruled cities. Our successes, whose real scope only highly placed members know, are hardly negligible. (Prudently, the organization minimizes this sort of thing.) And I see how a more visible success might have imperiled the very idea of the movement, which depends on its remaining small and closely knit, however dispersed our adherents. It is just that I doubt if our successes are worth the price we’ve paid for them—unless the organization was designed simply to demonstrate the power of human perseverance in the face of crushing obstacles. But even our bitterest members wouldn’t claim that.
It’s too late to go to the typewriter repair shop to pick up the other machine.
I don’t claim that the organization is without taint. Plenty of shady deals have been closed in its name: our history does have its disreputable chapters. And I will admit that certain charges made against us—snobbishness, exclusiveness, our deliberate cultivation of differences from others—are, to some degree, true. It’s not our faults that trouble me. It’s our virtues.
Consider the genuine glories of the movement. The varied ways in which it retains the allegiance of the members. The subtlety and flexibility of its teachings. The loftiness of its ideals. Finally, what all this amounts to is the creation of a certain type: the member. Far from conspiring to overturn society, as many people suppose, the movement operates mostly upon itself, not upon the world. And for what end? To knit together ever more tightly those who belong.
What justifies this endless self-perpetuation? That we possess a secret of which the others, the nonmembers, are ignorant? But they do know it, in part. We’ve made it available to them. And they have founded larger and more ample organizations that imitate ours and draw upon our doctrines. Why do we continue, then? For the residue of our truth, which they haven’t yet adopted? But they’ll never adopt it, never. What they have left us, unimitated, is our truth alone.
My fingers are often print-stained. I own between five and six thousand books and periodicals. Lee has almost as many, a third of which are medical books. The roaches like to breed in the books. Our daughter doesn’t like to read.
Someone is knocking at the door of the neighboring apartment.
In this city, you can tell the exact age of a building by the thickness of the walls. The knocking is getting louder.
We disdain outright proselytizing among nonmembers, but members seem to need continual reproselytizing. (Privately, our leaders admit that many members are lax in their duties, unmindful of the exalted responsibilities of belonging to the organization.) After the initial enthusiasm, which lasts, typically, for several years, the majority of us tend to use the movement mostly to make social and business contacts, to strike up a deal or find a trustworthy lawyer or select a mate. Our members have a tradition of suspecting nonmembers. For good reason, I readily admit: we have in fact been cruelly persecuted. Our membership gets regularly thinned by massacres, in which the loyal and the disloyal, the zealous and the lax, are treated with equal severity; the others do not distinguish among us. Finally, neither do we. For we don’t hold to any clearly identifiable doctrines, and even the Eight Lessons are best known for the latitude of their interpretations. What unites us is rather what we reject.
I could compile a new anthology of quotations: What Must Not Be Done. Perhaps the real title was a mistake.
What unites us is a certain specialization of character, which draws the members together in the bonds of familiarity. We know what to expect from members; and while we can be harder on each other, more acerbic in our contempt for ourselves than nonmembers ever are, we usually end by making allowances. These unifying characteristics also make us easily recognizable to nonmembers. We are recognized everywhere by our distinctive customs, vows, energies, scruples, even (people say) by a common physiognomy and posture.
How many demented prejudices still exist against the organization! Obviously, we can’t all look alike—since our members are drawn from several races and are citizens of many countries (we are indeed staunchly internationalist); further, it’s not even common for membership to stay long within the same family. Take my own case. Lee is a member, of course. But our younger daughter has so far shown neither the temperament nor the interests that indicate a future member. We’re a little disappointed, to be sure—Lee more than myself. I, in my present mood, should be rejoicing at my daughter’s good fortune.
A small mercy. At least, no one is born into the organization! To have such a choice assigned to one by birth, to have one’s childhood paralyzed by such morbid predilections, would be too oppressive. There is this much humanity in our leaders’ otherwise rigorous severity: they leave us to find the organization ourselves.
Lee is late today. Maybe I should start the dinner.
Whatever induces anyone to join, you ask. Idealism—which goes without saying. And other motives that are less noble, but not ignoble, either. For some, it is the social advantages I’ve mentioned. A member knows he or she can present our credentials to another member anywhere in the world and be offered aid and hospitality, for members consider that they constitute one family. That’s no small asset, the world being the dangerous place it is, to have helpful relatives to call on wherever you find yourself. For some, it is the number of distinguished writers, scholars, scientists, actors, political figures, and so on, who have been members; those who join us feel they are entering a select society. For some, it is the moving story of our hardships; suffering has great prestige among those who are drawn to us.
What attracted me, I think, was all these reasons. Even as a child, I had the psychological predisposition that marks a potential member. From the age of nine, I wanted to be a writer. Since I never did find the freedom to write with my own voice, I entered a profession that puts me at the service of other writers. Service, being useful to the community and to the highest ideals, has always seemed to me what made life worth living. But no vocation—not even that of the writer, exalted as was the conception I had of it—seemed to exhaust my hunger for the truth, my wish to lead not just a good but a morally intense life.
Also, as I remember, I was fascinated by the idea of being different. Dozing off in the grade-school civics class, I longed to have been
born a Jew; I fancied myself left-handed; I imagined myself, grown up, as a homosexual, as a monk or a nun, as a bomb-throwing revolutionary; I dreamed about Robin Hood. While still young, I’d heard vaguely of the organization. (Here, where branches are numerous, who hasn’t?) But I never thought of joining until I was nearly grown, mainly because I’d never actually met a member: personal recruitment, of course, is the chief method by which the movement gains new adherents. People rarely make application to join us on the basis of reading or hearsay alone.
Sometimes one’s first contact with a member—if he or she is disagreeable or stupid—drives the prospective candidate away. This nearly happened to me, for the first member I met, a plaintive-voiced, sandy-haired man with spectacles who had recently married my father’s young sister, was the dreariest kind of member, the kind who turns up regularly at meetings and pays his dues, as if nothing more were to be expected of him. Uncle George’s lack of seriousness was already suggested by his very willingness to marry into a family of nonmembers. My well-off suburban parents, who prided themselves on being enlightened, had promptly yielded when my aunt brought home her fiancé. They even swallowed comment on his table manners and shortsleeved sports shirts. He thought he was honoring us; the family thought it was being very modern and spirited in accepting him. Eager at the prospect of knowing a member (I was fifteen), I besieged him with questions. He evaded them all with a trite boast, a complacent shrug. I decided that he must be bound by a rule of secrecy or afraid to confide in me, thinking I was a spy for my family, sent to interrogate him. Later, disillusioned, I realized that the most likely explanation of George’s vagueness was that he took his membership lightly.
Once I described George to the organizer, berating policies so slack that such a person could have been admitted. A naïve complaint: typical of the mentality of members. Even after belonging for many years, my pride in the organization, my wish or belief that members must be better than other people, remained intact.