Writing in the Dark

by Grossman, David

  There is one other clear advantage to observing reality through the enemy’s eyes. The enemy sees in us, in the nation facing him, the things that each of us always shows an enemy: cruelty, aggression, brutality, self-righteousness, self-pity. We are often unaware of everything we “project” onto the enemy, and thereby onto others as well, even those who are not our enemy—and eventually onto ourselves too.

  Not infrequently, we tell ourselves that we are taking a certain course of action, committing an act of violence or brutality, only because we are in a state of war, and that when the war is over we will go right back to being the moral, upstanding society we used to be. But we must consider the possibility that the enemy—toward whom we direct these hostile and violent acts, and who thereby becomes their permanent victim—senses long before we do how much these behaviors have become an integral part of our being as a nation and as a society, and how deeply they have seeped into our innermost systems. It is also possible that reversing our point of view, by looking at ourselves through the eyes of the nation we are occupying, for example, can sound the alarm bells within us, enabling us to understand, before it is too late, the depth of our denial, our destructiveness, and our blindness. We will know then what we have to save ourselves from, and how essential it is for ourselves to change the situation profoundly.

  When we are able to read the text of reality through our enemy’s eyes, it becomes more complex, more realistic, allowing us to recover the elements we suspended from our world picture. From that moment, reality is more than just a projection of our fears and desires and illusions: when we are capable of seeing the story of the Other through his eyes, we are in healthier and more valid contact with the facts. We then have a far greater chance to avoid making critical mistakes and perceiving events in a self-centered, clenched, and restricted way. And then, sometimes, we can also grasp—in a way we never previously allowed ourselves to—that this mythological, menacing, and demonic enemy is no more than an amalgamation of people who are as frightened, tormented, and despondent as we are. This comprehension, to me, is the essential beginning of any process of sobriety and reconciliation.

  These are some of the counsels that literature can offer to politics and to those engaged in politics, and in fact to anyone coping with an arbitrary and violent reality. The advice may sound weak and out of touch today, against the clamor of war that surrounds us, but the principles are valid for novel-writing, for interpersonal relationships, and for delineating policies—of peace or of war.

  This approach to ourselves, to the enemy, to the entire conflict, and to our lives within it, an approach I have broadly termed “the literary approach,” is to me, more than anything, an act of redefining ourselves as human beings in a situation whose essence and methodology consist entirely of dehumanization. It can once again remind us of everything we hold dear that is now in danger, and it can restore something of the humanity that was swiftly and violently robbed from us, in a process whose severity we were not always aware of. Insisting on such an approach can also, slowly but surely, put us on the road to sincere dialogue with our enemies, a dialogue that will lead, one hopes, to reconciliation and peace.

  January 2006

  Writing in the Dark

  “Our personal happiness or unhappiness, our ‘terrestrial’ condition, is of great importance for the things we write,” says Natalia Ginzburg in It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself, in a chapter in which she discusses her life and writing after a deep personal tragedy.

  It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I reflect on my writing experience now, at this time in my life, let me say a few words about the effects of a trauma, a disaster situation, on a society and on a nation as a whole.

  The words of the mouse from Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable” come to mind. As the trap closes in on the mouse and the cat prowls beyond, he says, “Alas, the world is growing smaller every day.” After many years of living in an extreme and violent state of political, military, and religious conflict, I am sad to report that Kafka’s mouse was right: the world is indeed growing smaller, growing narrower, every day. I can also tell you about the void that slowly emerges between the individual and the violent, chaotic state that encompasses practically every aspect of his life.

  This void does not remain empty. It quickly fills up with apathy, cynicism, and above all despair—the despair that can fuel a distorted reality for many years, sometimes generations. The despair that one will never manage to change the situation, never redeem it. And the deepest despair of all—the despair of human beings, of what the distorted situation ultimately exposes in each of us.

  I feel the heavy price that I and the people around me pay for this prolonged state of war. Part of this price is a shrinking of our soul’s surface area—those parts of us that touch the violent, menacing world outside—and a diminished ability and willingness to empathize at all with other people in pain. We also pay the price by suspending our moral judgment, and we give up on understanding what we ourselves think. Given a situation so frightening, so deceptive, and so complicated—both morally and practically—we feel it may be better not to think or know. Better to hand over the job of thinking and doing and setting moral standards to those who are surely “in the know.” Better not to feel too much until the crisis ends—and if it never ends, at least we’ll have suffered a little less, developed a useful dullness, protected ourselves as much as we could with a little indifference, a little repression, a little deliberate blindness, and a large dose of self-anesthetics.

  The constant—and very real—fear of being hurt, the fear of death, of intolerable loss, or even of “mere” humiliation, leads each of us, the citizens and prisoners of the conflict, to dampen our own vitality, our emotional and intellectual range, and to cloak ourselves in more and more protective layers until we suffocate.

  Kafka’s mouse was right: when your predator closes in on you, your world does get smaller. So does the language that describes it.

  From experience I can say that the language used by the citizens of a conflict to describe their situation becomes flatter and flatter as the conflict goes on, gradually evolving into a series of clichés and slogans. It starts with the jargon invented by the systems that handle the conflict directly—the army, the police, the bureaucracy. The trend spreads into the mass media, which create an elaborate, shrewd language designed to tell their audiences the most palatable story (thereby erecting a barrier between everything the state does in the twilight zone of the conflict and the way its citizens choose to see themselves). The process eventually seeps into the private, intimate language of the citizens (even if they vehemently deny it).

  The evolution is all too understandable: human language’s natural richness and its ability to touch on the finest nuances of existence can be truly hurtful in a state of conflict because they constantly remind us of the exuberant reality that we have lost, of its complexities and subtleties. The more hopeless the situation seems and the shallower the language becomes, the more public discourse dwindles, until all that remains are tired recriminations between the enemies or between political adversaries within the state. All that remains are the clichés we use to describe the enemy and ourselves—the prejudices, mythological anxieties, and crude generalizations with which we trap ourselves and ensnare our enemies. The world indeed grows smaller.

  These thoughts are relevant not only to the conflict in the Middle East. In so many parts of the world today billions of people face some threat to the existence, the values, the liberty, and the identity of human beings. Almost every one of us faces his own threat, his own curse. Each of us feels—or can guess—how his unique “situation” may quickly become a trap that will rob his freedom, his sense of home in his country, his private language, his free will.

  In this reality, we authors and poets write. In Israel and in Palestine, in Chechnya and in Sudan, in New York and in the Congo. There are times in my workday, after a few hours of writing, when I look up a
nd think: Now, at this very moment, sits another author, whom I do not know, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or Dublin, who, like me, is engaged in the strange, baseless, wonderful work of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and alienation, indifference and diminishment. I have a distant ally who does not know me, and together we are weaving this shapeless web, which nonetheless has immense power, the power to change a world and create a world, the power to give words to the mute and to bring about tikkun—“repair”—in the deepest, kabbalistic sense of the word.

  As for myself, in the works of fiction I have written in recent years, I have almost intentionally turned my back on the immediate, burning reality of my country, the reality of the latest news bulletin. I have written books about this reality in the past, and I have never stopped discussing it and trying to understand it through essays, articles, and interviews. I have taken part in dozens of protests and international peace initiatives. I have met with my neighbors—some of whom were my enemies—every time I thought there was any chance for dialogue. Yet over the past few years, out of a decision that is almost a protest, I have not written about these disaster zones in my literature.

  Why? Because I wanted to write about other things, things no less important, things for which it’s hard to find the time, the emotion, and the total attention, while the near-eternal war thunders on outside. I wrote about a husband’s obsessive jealousy of his wife, about homeless children on the streets of Jerusalem, about a man and a woman who establish a private, almost hermetic language within their reverie of love. I wrote about the loneliness of Samson, the biblical hero, I wrote about the subtle and tangled relationships between women and their mothers, and between children and parents in general.

  Roughly four years ago, when my second son was about to enlist in the army, I could no longer remain where I was. I was overcome with an almost physical sense of urgency and alarm that gave me no rest. I began then to write a novel that deals directly with the difficult reality I live in, a novel that describes how the cruelty of the external situation invades the delicate, intimate fabric of one family, ultimately tearing it to shreds.

  “At the moment someone is writing,” says Natalia Ginzburg, “he is miraculously driven to forget the immediate circumstances of his own life … But whether we are happy or unhappy leads us to write in one way or another. When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality.”

  It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can say at this time, from where I stand now.

  I write. The consciousness of the disaster that befell me upon the death of my son Uri in the Second Lebanon War now permeates every minute of my life. The power of memory is indeed great and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing effect. Nevertheless, the act of writing creates for me a “space” of sorts, an emotional expanse that I have never known before, where death is more than the absolute, unambiguous opposite of life.

  The authors who are here today know: when we write, we feel the world in flux, elastic, full of possibilities—unfrozen. Anywhere the human element exists, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and there is no status quo (even if we sometimes mistakenly think there is; even if there are those who would very much like us to think there is).

  I write, and the world does not close in on me. It does not grow smaller. It moves in the direction of what is open, future, possible.

  I imagine, and the act of imagination revives me. I am not fossilized or paralyzed in the face of predators. I invent characters. Sometimes I feel as if I am digging people out of the ice in which reality has encased them. But perhaps, more than anything, the person I am digging out at the moment is myself.

  I write. I feel the many possibilities that exist in every human situation, and I feel my capacity to choose among them. I feel the sweetness of liberty, which I thought I had lost. I take pleasure in the richness of a real, personal, intimate language. I remember the delights of breathing fully, properly, when I manage to escape the claustrophobia of slogans and clichés. I begin to breathe with both lungs.

  I write, and I feel that the correct and accurate use of words acts like a medicine. It purifies the air I breathe, removes the pollutants, and frustrates the schemes of language defrauders and language rapists. I write and feel my sensitivity to language and my intimacy with its different layers, with its sensuality and humor, restore me to myself, to the person I was before my selfhood was expropriated by the conflict, by the governments and the armies, by the despair and the tragedy.

  I write. I purge myself of one of the dubious but typical talents that arise in a state of war—the talent for being an enemy, nothing but an enemy. I write, and I try not to shield myself from the legitimacy and the suffering of my enemy, or from the tragedy and the complexity of his life, or from his mistakes and crimes, or from knowing what I myself am doing to him. Nor do I shelter myself from the surprising similarities I discover between him and me.

  I write. And all at once I am no longer doomed to face this absolute, false, suffocating dichotomy—this inhuman choice between “victim” and “aggressor,” without any third, more human option. When I write, I can be a whole person, with natural passages between my various parts, and with some parts that feel close to the suffering and the just assertions of my enemies without giving up my own identity at all.

  At times, in the course of writing, I can remember what we all felt in Israel for one rare moment, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s plane landed in Tel Aviv after decades of war between the two nations. We suddenly discovered how heavy the burden was that we had been carrying all our lives—the burden of hostility and fear and suspicion. The burden of having to always be on guard, to always be an enemy, all the time. How blissful it was in that moment to do away with the massive armor of suspicion, hatred, and prejudice. How frighteningly blissful it was to stand naked, to stand pure, and watch as before our eyes a human face emerged from the narrow, one-dimensional depiction we had been seeing for years.

  I write, and I give my most private and intimate names to an external, unknown world. In some sense, I make it mine. So do I return from a land of exile and alienation—I come home. I change, just slightly, what previously seemed unchangeable. Even when I describe the cruelest arbitrariness that determines my fate—whether man-made or preordained—I suddenly find in it new subtleties and nuances. I find that simply writing about the arbitrariness lets me move freely in its presence. That the very fact of standing up against the arbitrariness gives me freedom—perhaps the only freedom man has against any kind of arbitrariness—the freedom to articulate the tragedy of my situation in my own words. The freedom to articulate myself differently, freshly, against the unbending dictates of arbitrariness that threaten to bind me and pin me down.

  I also write about what cannot be restored. About what has no comfort. Then too, in a way I still cannot explain, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me and leave me paralyzed. Many times a day, as I sit at my writing desk, I touch sorrow and loss like someone touching electricity with bare hands, yet it does not kill me. I do not understand how this miracle has come to pass. Perhaps after I finish this novel, I will try to understand. Not now. It is too soon.

  I write the life of my country, Israel. A tortured country, drugged to the point of overdose by history, by emotions beyond what humans can contain, by an extreme excess of events and tragedy, by an excess of fear and a crippling sobriety, by an excess of memory, by dashed hopes, by a fate unique among nations. It is an existence that sometimes seems to take on the proportions of a mythic tale, diminishing our prospects of ever living an ordinary life as a state.

  We authors know periods of despair and self-loathing. Our work, fundamentally, entails dismantling personalities and relinquishing some of our most effective defense mechanisms. Willingly we struggle with the hardest, ugliest, rawest, and most painful matters of the soul. Our work forces us, again and again, to acknowledge our helpless
ness as people and as artists.

  Yet still—and this is the great miracle, the alchemy of our act—in some sense, from the moment we take pen in hand or put fingers to keyboard, we have already ceased to be a victim at the mercy of all that enslaved and restricted us before we began writing.

  We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.

  The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, New York, April 24, 2007

  Individual Language and Mass Language

  To open the International Literature Festival Berlin as an Israeli author is not only a great honor, but also a conjuncture that would have been unthinkable until not so many years ago, and even today I cannot be indifferent to its significance.

  Despite the close relationship between Israel and Germany today—and between Israelis and Germans, between Jews and Germans—even now there is a place in one’s mind and in one’s heart where certain statements must be filtered through the prisms of time and memory to be refracted into the entire spectrum of colors and shades. As I stand here before you in Berlin, I cannot help but begin with the thoughts that are constantly refracted within me, in that prism of time and memory.

  I was born and raised in Jerusalem, in a neighborhood and in a family in which people could not even utter the word “Germany.” They found it difficult to say “Holocaust” too, and spoke only of “what happened over there.”

  It is interesting to note that in Hebrew, Yiddish, and every other language they speak, when Jewish people refer to the Holocaust, they tend to talk about “what happened over there,” whereas non-Jews usually speak in terms of “what happened then.” There is a vast difference between “there” and “then.” “Then” means in the past tense; “then” enfolds within it something that happened and ended, and is no longer. While “there,” conversely, suggests that somewhere out there, in the distance, the thing that happened is still occurring, constantly growing stronger alongside our daily lives, and that it may re-erupt. It is not decisively over. Certainly not for us, the Jews.