by Susan Sontag
6. What do you consider the most urgent tasks, the most dangerous prejudices, the most important causes, the biggest perils, and the greatest intellectual joys of today?
This provoked nine answers to some of the questions asked and (I thought) implied.
1
WHAT THE WORD intellectual means to me today is, first of all, conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines about the role of intellectuals in which well-known intellectuals have agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, irrelevance, obsolescence, and imminent or already perfected disappearance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies, they belong.
2
WHETHER I SEE myself as one (I try to do as little seeing of myself as possible) is beside the point. I answer if so called.
3
BEING A CITIZEN of a country whose political and ethical culture promotes and reinforces distrust, fear, and contempt for intellectuals (reread Tocqueville), the country which has the most developed anti-intellectual tradition on the planet, I incline to a less jaded view of the role of intellectuals than my colleagues in Europe. No, their “mission” (as your question has it) is not completed.
Of course, it’s speaking much too well of intellectuals to expect the majority to have a taste for protesting against injustice, defending victims, challenging the reigning authoritarian pieties. Most intellectuals are as conformist—as willing, say, to support the prosecution of unjust wars—as most other people exercising educated professions. The number of people who have given intellectuals a good name, as troublemakers, voices of conscience, has always been small. Intellectuals responsibly taking sides, and putting themselves on the line for what they believe in (as opposed to signing petitions), are a good deal less common than intellectuals taking public positions either in conscious bad faith or in shameless ignorance of what they are pronouncing on: for every André Gide or George Orwell or Norberto Bobbio or Andrei Sakharov or Adam Michnik, ten of Romain Rolland or Ilya Ehrenburg or Jean Baudrillard or Peter Handke, et cetera, et cetera.
But could it be otherwise?
4
ALTHOUGH INTELLECTUALS COME in all flavors, including the nationalist and the religious, I confess to being partial to the secular, cosmopolitan, anti-tribal variety. The “deracinated intellectual” seems to me an exemplary formula.
By intellectual I mean the “free” intellectual, someone who, beyond his or her professional or technical or artistic expertise, is committed to exercising (and thereby, implicitly, defending) the life of the mind as such.
A specialist may also be an intellectual. But an intellectual is never just a specialist. One is an intellectual because one has (or should have) certain standards of probity and responsibility in discourse. That is the one indispensable contribution of intellectuals: the notion of discourse that is not merely instrumental, conformist.
5
HOW MANY TIMES has one heard in the last decades that intellectuals are obsolete, or that so-and-so is “the last intellectual”?
6
THERE ARE TWO TASKS for intellectuals, today as yesterday. One task, educational, is to promote dialogue, support the right of a multiplicity of voices to be heard, strengthen skepticism about received opinion. This means standing up to those whose idea of education and culture is the imprinting of ideas (“ideals”) such as the love of the nation or tribe.
The other task is adversarial. There has been a daunting shift of moral attitudes in the last two decades in advanced capitalist countries. Its hallmark is the discrediting of all idealisms, of altruism itself; of high standards of all kinds, cultural as well as moral. The ideology of Thatcherism is gaining everywhere, and the mass media, whose function is to promote consumption, disseminate the narratives and ideas of value and disvalue by which people everywhere understand themselves. Intellectuals have the Sisyphean task of continuing to embody (and defend) a standard of mental life, and of discourse, other than the nihilistic one promoted by the mass media. By nihilism I mean not only the relativism, the privatization of interest, which is ascendant among the educated classes everywhere, but also the more recent, and more pernicious, nihilism embodied in the ideology of so-called cultural democracy; the hatred of excellence, achievement as “elitist,” exclusionary.
7
THE MORAL DUTY of the intellectual will always be complex because there is more than one “highest” value, and there are concrete circumstances in which not all that is unconditionally good can be honored—in which, indeed, two of these values may prove incompatible.
For instance, understanding the truth does not always facilitate the struggle for justice. And in order to bring about justice, it may seem right to suppress the truth.
One hopes not to have to choose. But when a choice (between truth and justice) is necessary—as, alas, it sometimes is—it seems to me that an intellectual ought to decide for the truth.
This is not, by and large, what intellectuals, the best-intentioned intellectuals, have done. Invariably, when intellectuals subscribe to causes, it is the truth, in all its complexity, which gets short shrift.
8
A GOOD RULE BEFORE one goes marching or signing anything:
Whatever your tug of sympathy, you have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about.
In the absence of such firsthand knowledge and experience: silence.
9
ON THE SUBJECT of the presumption—it’s worse than naïveté—of so many intellectuals who take public positions and endorse collective actions that concern countries they know virtually nothing about, nobody said it better than one of the most compromised intellectuals of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht (who surely knew whereof he spoke):
When it comes to marching many do not know
That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is the enemy’s voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.
[1997]
Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo
Nothing to be done. / Ništa ne može da se uradi.
—opening line of Waiting for Godot
1
I WENT TO Sarajevo in mid-July 1993 to stage a production of Waiting for Godot not so much because I’d always wanted to direct Beckett’s play (although I had) as because it gave me a practical reason to return to Sarajevo and stay for a month or more. I had spent two weeks there in April, and had come to care intensely about the battered city and what it stands for; some of its citizens had become friends. But I couldn’t again be just a witness: that is, meet and visit, tremble with fear, feel brave, feel depressed, have heartbreaking conversations, grow ever more indignant, lose weight. If I went back, it would be to pitch in and do something.
No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world. The news is out. Many excellent foreign journalists (most of them in favor of intervention, as I am) have been reporting the lies and the slaughter since the beginning of the siege, while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb fascism. I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer. It would be a small contribution. But it was the only one of the three things I do—write, make films, and direct in the theatre—which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there.
In April I’d met a young Sarajevo-born theatre director, Haris Pašovi, who had left the city after he finished school and made his considerable reputation working mainly in Serbia. When the Serbs started the war in April 1992, Pašovi went abroad, but in the fall, while working on a spectacle called
Sarajevo in Antwerp, he decided that he could no longer remain in safe exile, and at the end of the year managed to crawl back past UN patrols and under Serb gunfire into the freezing, besieged city. Pašovi invited me to see his Grad (City), a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors; he’d put it together in eight days. Now he was preparing a far more ambitious production, Euripides’ Alcestis, after which one of his students (Pašovi teaches at the still-functioning Academy of Drama) would be directing Sophocles’ Ajax. One day Pašovi asked me if I was interested in coming back in a few months to direct a play.
More than interested, I told him.
Before I could add, “But let me think for a while about what I might want to do,” he went on, “What play?” And bravado suggested to me in an instant what I might not have seen had I taken longer to reflect: there was one obvious play for me to direct. Beckett’s play, written over forty years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo.
HAVING OFTEN BEEN ASKED since my return from Sarajevo if I worked with professional actors, I’ve come to understand that many people find it surprising that theatre goes on at all in the besieged city. In fact, of the five theatres in Sarajevo before the war, two are still, sporadically, in use: Chamber Theatre 55 (Kamerni Teater 55), where in April I’d seen a charmless production of Hair as well as Pašovi’s Grad, and the Youth Theatre (Pozorište Mladih), where I decided to stage Godot. These are both small houses. The large house, closed since the beginning of the war, is the National Theatre, which presented opera and the Sarajevo Ballet as well as plays. In front of the handsome ochre building (only lightly damaged by shelling), there is still a poster from early April 1992 announcing a new production of Rigoletto, which never opened. Most of the singers and musicians and ballet dancers left the city soon after the Serbs attacked, it being easier for them to find work abroad, while many of the actors stayed, and want nothing more than to work.
Another question I’m often asked is: who goes to see a production of Waiting for Godot? Who indeed if not the same people who would go to see Waiting for Godot if there were not a siege on? Images of today’s shattered city must make it hard to grasp that Sarajevo was once an extremely lively and attractive provincial capital, with a cultural life comparable to that of other middle-sized old European cities; that includes an audience for theatre. As elsewhere in Central Europe, theatre in Sarajevo was largely repertory: masterpieces from the past and the most admired twentieth-century plays. Just as talented actors still live in Sarajevo, so do members of this cultivated audience. The difference is that actors and spectators alike can be murdered or maimed by a sniper’s bullet or a mortar shell on their way to and from the theatre; but then, that can happen to people in Sarajevo in their living rooms, while they sleep in their bedrooms, when they fetch something from their kitchens, as they go out their front doors.
BUT ISN’T THIS PLAY rather pessimistic? I’ve been asked. Meaning, wasn’t it depressing for an audience in Sarajevo; meaning, wasn’t it pretentious or insensitive to stage Godot there?—as if the representation of despair were redundant when people really are in despair; as if what people want to see in such a situation would be, say, The Odd Couple. The condescending, philistine question makes me realize that those who ask it don’t understand at all what it’s like in Sarajevo now, any more than they really care about literature and theatre. It’s not true that what everyone wants is entertainment that offers them an escape from their own reality. In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art. This is not to say that people in Sarajevo don’t miss being entertained. The dramaturge of the National Theatre, who began sitting in on the rehearsals of Godot after the first week, and who had studied at Columbia University, asked me before I left to bring a few copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair when I return later this month: she longed to be reminded of all the things that had gone out of her life. Certainly there are more Sarajevans who would rather see a Harrison Ford movie or attend a Guns N Roses concert than watch Waiting for Godot. That was true before the war, too. It is, if anything, a little less true now.
And if one considers what plays were produced in Sarajevo before the siege began—as opposed to the movies shown, almost entirely the big Hollywood successes (the small cinematheque was on the verge of closing just before the war for lack of an audience, I was told)—there was nothing odd or gloomy for the public in the choice of Waiting for Godot. The other productions currently in rehearsal or performance are Alcestis (about the inevitability of death and the meaning of sacrifice), Ajax (about a warrior’s madness and suicide), and In Agony, a play by the Croatian Miroslav Krleža, who is, with the Bosnian Ivo Andri, one of the two internationally celebrated writers of the first half of the century from the former Yugoslavia (the play’s title speaks for itself). Compared with these, Waiting for Godot may have been the “lightest” entertainment of all.
INDEED, THE QUESTION IS not why there is any cultural activity in Sarajevo now after seventeen months of siege, but why there isn’t more. Outside a boarded-up movie theatre next to the Chamber Theatre is a sun-bleached poster for The Silence of the Lambs with a diagonal strip across it that says DANAS (today), which was April 6, 1992, the day moviegoing stopped. Since the war began, all of the movie theatres in Sarajevo have remained shut, even if not all have been severely damaged by shelling. A building in which people gather so predictably would be too tempting a target for the Serb guns; anyway, there is no electricity to run a projector. There are no concerts, except for those given by a lone string quartet that rehearses every morning and performs occasionally in a small room that also doubles as an art gallery, seating forty. (It’s in the same building on Marshal Tito Street that houses the Chamber Theatre.) There is only one active space for painting and photography, the Obala Gallery, whose exhibits sometimes stay up only one day and never more than a week.
No one I talked with in Sarajevo disputes the sparseness of cultural life in this city where, after all, between 300,000 and 400,000 inhabitants still live. The majority of the city’s intellectuals and creative people, including most of the faculty of the University of Sarajevo, fled at the beginning of the war, before the city was completely encircled. Besides, many Sarajevans are reluctant to leave their apartments except when it is absolutely necessary, to collect water and the rations distributed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); though no one is safe anywhere, they have more to fear when they are in the street. And beyond fear, there is depression—most Sarajevans are very depressed—which produces lethargy, exhaustion, apathy.
Moreover, Belgrade was the cultural capital of the former Yugoslavia, and I have the impression that in Sarajevo the visual arts were derivative; that ballet, opera, and musical life were routine. Only film and theatre were distinguished, so it is not surprising that these continue under siege. A film production company, SAGA, makes both documentary and fiction films, and there are the two functioning theatres.
IN FACT, THE AUDIENCE for theatre expects to see a play like Waiting for Godot. What my production of Godot signifies to them, apart from the fact that an eccentric American writer and part-time director volunteered to work in the theatre as an expression of solidarity with the city (a fact inflated by the local press and radio as evidence that the rest of the world “does care,” when I knew, to my indignation and shame, that I represented nobody but myself), is that this is a great European play and that they are members of European culture. For all their attachment to American popular culture, as intense here as anywhere else, it is the high culture of Europe that represents for them their ideal, their passport to a European identity. People had told me again and again on my earlier visit in April: We are part of Europe. We are the people in the former Yugoslavia who stand for European values—secularism, religious tolerance, and multi-ethnicity. How can the
rest of Europe let this happen to us? When I replied that Europe is and always has been as much a place of barbarism as a place of civilization, they didn’t want to hear. Now no one would dispute such a statement.
CULTURE, SERIOUS CULTURE, is an expression of human dignity—which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost, even when they know themselves to be brave, or stoical, or angry. For they also know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved. They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life—for instance, by having to spend a good part of each day seeing to it that their toilets flush, so that their bathrooms don’t become cesspools. That is how they use most of the water they queue for in public spaces, at great risk to their lives. Their sense of humiliation may be even greater than their fear.
Putting on a play means so much to the local theatre professionals in Sarajevo because it allows them to be normal, that is, to do what they did before the war; to be not just haulers of water or passive recipients of humanitarian aid. Indeed, the lucky people in Sarajevo are those who can carry on with their professional work. It is not a question of money, since Sarajevo has only a black-market economy, whose currency is German marks, and many people are living on their savings, which were always in deutsche marks, or on remittances from abroad. (To get an idea of the city’s economy, consider that a skilled professional—say, a surgeon at the city’s main hospital or a television journalist—earns three deutsche marks a month, while cigarettes, a local version of Marlboros, cost ten deutsche marks a pack.) The actors and I, of course, were not on salary. Other theatre people would sit in on rehearsals not just because they wanted to watch our work but because they were glad to have, once again, a theatre to go to every day.