How to write about war

Somebody had left many boxes of books on the sidewalk on 76th Street between Fifth and Madison, and as Susana and I were walking back from our run in Central Park we stopped and scooped up a bunch. One was a very famous war novel that I had never heard of until our friend Hazel in Carboneras urged it upon us, Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Another was a collection of short stories by Saki, pen name of Hugh Munro, whom I remembered from the delightful, chilling surprise of reading "The Open Window" long ago in high school.

I don't know how I had missed Birdsong -- a quick search on the 'net revealed that it has been a best-seller, there's been talk for years about a movie, and it has even inspired tours of the battlefields that figure in it. It really is a gripping read, especially those horrifying scenes from the trenches of France in 1916 and until the end of the Great War two years later. These are preceded and then intertwined with a kind of love story -- though "love" is an imprecise description for British infantry officer Stephen Wraysford's obsession with a vacuous, self-centered and dimly remembered Frenchwoman. No matter. Even the flightiest characters (including Stephen's Isabelle) are depicted convincingly. There is also a later story, set in 1978-79, about Stephen's granddaughter's search for mature independence and information about that grandfather. All of it clearly and sensitively related, though it is only the two terrible bloody years in France that really matter. Faulks has chosen to remind us of this war which (as his characters say and almost all real-life contemporaries said over and over) unleashed destructive forces so much greater than its predecessors -- including the cruel and bloody Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars that immediately preceded it -- that it changed the world.

So it seemed an odd coincidence to find in the same serendipitous heap of books on the sidewalk of 76th Street the short, poetic piece, "Birds on the Western Front," in Emlyn Williams' 1978 edition of Saki's Short Stories.

The other stories here (there are about 60 in the book, a small sample of Saki's voluminous output) are mostly clever, extended jokes, playing on and confirming a public school Briton's class prejudices. They are often annoyingly sexist, in the light, silly manner of situation comedy. In fact, what gives pleasure in reading Saki is the absurd situations leading to startling outcomes (as in "The Open Window"). The characters are simply caricatures, and they all talk alike, however devious their intentions. But-- "Birds on the Western Front" is something else.

The frivolous, supercilious Saki was perhaps a cover for a somewhat more serious Hugh Munro, foreign correspondent (1902-1906) and author of serious-sounding tomes on Russian history and the pre-1914 turbulence elsewhere in Europe. In 1916, at the age of 46 (rather old to serve), he joined the British Army (Royal Scottish Fusileers) and was soon killed in a trench in France. "Birds", which must have been written just weeks or months before his death, ingeniously describes trench warfare without looking at it directly. Instead, it is about the birds whose natural habitat has been destroyed by cannonade, bombs and machine-gunning, but still must find some scrap of something for nesting and carrying on the only life they know. This is a marvelously effective denunciation of the war, still fresh even after the angry sentimentality of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est” has begun to grate.

I wonder if Faulks was thinking of this short piece by Saki when he chose the title "Birdsong." If so, then maybe what he meant to suggest (with Saki) was that even through the worst horrors, life persists.

Here is my plot summary of and further comment on Birdsong, and rather less on Emlyn Williams' edition of Saki's Short Stories.

Photo of Ancre (France) after the battle from this website.

Which way is Left? (3) - Thinking otherwise

In previous notes, I've discussed the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Roots & Wings, 9/30) and, last Friday, Vidal-Beneyto (The Spanish Exception). In our recent visit to Paris I picked up the latest book of another sociologist, Alain Touraine, whose work has interested me since his publications 40+ years ago on workers' consciousness in São Paulo.

In the course of his long career, Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, France, 1925) has not only explored consciousness and social change among the oppressed, but has also worked to facilitate both. With workers in Latin America and Poland, or more recently with Muslim women in France, his research design has been a guided dialogue (guided by sociologists) among activists, with the objective of helping those activists understand their situation better so as to act to change it. Since 1992, he has been summing up these experiences for the rest of us in a series of books, of which this is the latest:

Touraine, Alain. Penser autrement. Paris: Fayard, 2007.

He begins with a critique of what he calls the "dominant interpretive discourse" (discours interprétatif dominant) or DID of the past 60 years. The 19th century had effectively killed God (i.e., an eternal and unchanging moral arbiter beyond our reach), and then the horrors of the 20th century (world wars, genocide, etc.) destroyed our faith in God's replacement, Progress (better and juster society through the advance of science and technology). Then, before the world's thinkers could recover from the shock of World War II, they were split by an Iron Curtain that almost completely blocked new social thought on either side. The sudden and unexpected collapse of that curtain left intellectuals on both sides without any clear idea of where to go next and deepened their pessimism that human beings could even affect the course of our history. From such pessimism arose what Touraine calls the "dominant interpretive discourse", that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control, and any contrary idea is an illusion or "false consciousness." According to the DID, our individual lives are ruled by material and sexual instincts that we barely understand and can't change, our social lives by the market, especially the mechanisms of global capitalism. This is a view of a society without "actors" (acteurs), that is, human beings capable of acting upon and changing their situation. Such a desperate view of our possibilities encourages people to behave completely narcissistically, with no sense of any larger social purpose or moral control. For those with power, it's all about money and how to get more of it, with no reason to regard the poor. For those without, it's also sometimes about money and survival, but also about something more precarious, personal identity, the precariousness of trying to be recognized as a human being with rights. Among the social consequences of such desperation among the poor are delinquency and "identity politics," including the many forms of fascism or extreme, exclusionary nationalism we see all over the globe, even in places thought to be as staid and stolid as Belgium and Switzerland (not to mention ex-Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sudan, Guatemala, etc.) Among the social consequences of the irresponsible behavior of the powerful, eager to exploit and profit from the turbulence of the less powerful, are wars and global warming.

The second half of Touraine's new book is his proposal to "think differently" -- penser autrement. It is a continuation of an argument he has been developing in a series of books since 1992: that we don't need faith in either God or Progress, but in ourselves. And the self that you or I or Touraine needs to look to is what he calls "el double", the better self or ideal self that I or you imagine and constantly compare with our practical, here-and now selves: a self with rights, affirming its "right to have rights." Most importantly, this must be a self that recognizes equal "rights to have rights" in all the other selves we encounter.

Touraine insists that this is not just wishful thinking, but a description of something that is already happening all around us. In myriad groups, organized around concerns ranging from global warming to neighborhood deterioration or, what he takes to be the most significant change-agent today, women's rights, people are coming together, discovering their differences and how to accept and even profit from them in terms of personal growth. In the end, Touraine's proposed solution, or path to a solution, to the world's problems is parallel to and quite compatible with Ulrich Beck's: we liberate ourselves and one another through social movements, by which he means self-conscious organizations (conscious of our aims and of the conditions in which we struggle) to confront whatever form of oppression we experience.

Like Vidal-Beneyto, Touraine thinks that the "Left" is exhausted and has nothing more to offer us, but that is because both thinkers think of the Left the way the Left thought of itself in recent decades -- the decades of the "dominant interpretive discourse" where individuals counted for nothing, and only a mass organization led by an enlightened elite had a chance of effecting change. And since the forces of global capitalism were so strong and pervasive, the only change worth struggling for was a total, violent rupture with the present order, that is, revolution.

But the Left (at least in my mind) is and always has been something much more valuable and more permanent, since long before the French Communist Party (Touraine's bête noire) and similar outfits tried to congeal it. That something was never better expressed than in 1789, exactly 200 years before the collapse of Soviet communism: liberté, égalité, fraternité. And those are the values that Touraine is working to recover.

My earliest contact with this thinker, research still worth reading:

Touraine, Alain. "Industrialisation et conscience ouvrière à São Paulo." Sociologie du Travail Octobre-décembre.4 (1961).

Beauty and the beast

In preparation for a visit to Paris, I wanted something to read to revive my half-forgotten French, and among the dozen or so things in French abandoned by tourists in our public library in Carboneras, I found this little bomb of a book. Very short (87 pp.) and very intense, the story of a monster of the civil wars in Russia, 1917-18, how he got that way and the girl who (at least partly and at least for a moment) transformed him.

Kessel, Joseph. Makhno et sa juive. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987. See my note in Fiction Readings.

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was a real anarchist guerrilla chieftain and there are those who defend his reputation and denounce Kessel for the bloody, horrific portrait. His defenders see him more or less the way Sonia, the Jewish girl in the novel, does -- "un homme dévoué au peuple, le sauveur des moujiks, le martyr de Sibérie que vengeait sur les riches et les seigneurs les souffrances que lui et ses frères avaient subies." (A man devoted to the people the savior of the muzhiks, the martyr of Siberia who was taking revenge on the rich and the lords of the land for the sufferings that he and his brothers had undergone.)

But this is a novel, not history or biography, and we know the writer has made up stuff. Whether or not the real Makhno was such a monster as Kessel's narrator claims (and the narrator is nearly hysterical and certainly unreliable), it's a terrific story and a very effectively written one. It is also a very old story, going back to Enkidu and the maiden in the Epic of Gilgamesh. But this is an especially vivid telling. And good practice in reading French.

For something about the historical Makhno, here's a socialist take, The Makhno Myth from the International Socialist Review.

Massacre in Beit Hanoun: Gush Shalom - Israeli Peace Bloc

See Uri Avnery's column in Gush Shalom - Israeli Peace Bloc: In One Word: MASSACRE! And on the impact of the U.S. elections on the near future:

A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them with a new moron.

But let's not be too cynical. The fact is that the American people has accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around the word - including us here in Israel - were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.

The change will not be quick and dramatic. The US is a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a very big circle and needs a lot of time - unlike Israel, a small speed-boat that can turn almost on the spot. But the direction is clear.

Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neo-conservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.

The War Prayer

A very short story, very angry, very pertinent to today's events -- though Mark Twain was thinking about the U.S. war in the Philippines at the time.
The War Prayer

Photo from rotten.com: Mark Twain

Revolutionary terrorists: Benjamin Franklin?

Regarding Luis Posada Carriles, Cuban former C.I.A. operative and free-lance assassin and mass murderer (he planted the explosive toothpaste tupe that blew up a Cuban airline in 1976, killing all its 76 occupants):

"How can you call someone a terrorist who allegedly committed acts on your behalf?" asked Felipe D. J. Millan, Mr. Posada's El Paso-based lawyer. "This would be the equivalent of calling Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or Benjamin Franklin a terrorist." Castro Foe With C.I.A. Ties Puts U.S. in an Awkward Spot - New York Times

No, Mr. Millan, not those guys. Henry was an orator, Revere a silversmith famous for a midnight ride warning of an attack, and Franklin -- well, Franklin was many things, printer, author, diplomat, inventor. Not one of them was an assassin or, as far as I can tell, ever fired a shot at a human being. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys would be better examples of terrorists among the American revolutionaries, if we apply the Bush standards. In fact, by those standards (the ones applied in Afghanistan, that fighters without regular uniforms or with authorization of a recognized state are not "soldiers"), the entire Continental Army should have been sent to Guantánamo. But not Franklin, Revere or Henry. Though if they had fallen into British hands they would have been hanged as abettors of terrorism, or insurrection as it was then called.

More journalists killed

BBC NEWS | Europe | Chechen war reporter found dead
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Journalists killed in Afghanistan

The drive for war

Mark Engler has just sent me and other friends a copy of his review of A history of nonviolence | Salon Books, by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky maintains (among other things) that "The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain; it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews." Rather, all these goals could have been achieved more cheaply (in money and human lives) and efficiently by non-violent political struggle.

I agree with Mark Engler's conclusions. Kurlansky makes an interesting, even stimulating argument, but hardly convincing when applied to extreme cases. For example, the Nazi genocide in Holland, Ukraine, Poland and other countries could hardly have been stopped by the type of non-violent resistance that proved effective in Denmark. Perhaps American independence from Britain could have been achieved without war (after all, the Canadians managed it), but there are deep, ineluctable reasons why that option was not attractive to the most influential colonists in Boston, Virgina, Philadelphia and New York.

I recently read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience (see my note), which is one of the places where he talks about the "moral equivalence to war". James recognized a psychological need (among males -- he is very insistent on the "masculine" character of this impulse) to kill, destroy or at least to test oneself by undergoing physical hardship. Sea voyages and mountain climbing might do the trick, but James was more taken by monastic penitents, who forced themselves to undergo hunger or other forms of deprivation or pain.

As I think James would say, the violence of the American war of independence, or "revolution", and the other wars Kurlansky discusses, is the expression of some deep, "hard-wired" or instinctive need to strike out and to test oneself. Whether or not such violence is the best way of accomplishing some political goal is quite beside the point. As in Bush's totally unnecessary war on Iraq, the political goals are generally merely pious lies to cover the drive to demonstrate one's high testosterone count. More recently I've been reading Günter Grass, Dog Years (more on that in a later note) which seems to confirm this hypothesis. Especially, it helps understand why passive resistance to Hitler became almost inconceivable to many German men, even when they were dimly aware that the Führer was marching them to their doom.

Photo Fraud in Lebanon

The Israelis wreaked plenty of real damage on Lebanon, so there should be no need to exaggerate. But, yes, there has been exaggeration in at least some of the photojournalism. I suspect that such "photo fraud" is career- rather than politically-motivated. That is, the photographer just wants to get (or to fabricate) the most dramatic shot possible to call attention to his (her?) work and self. Whatever the motives, we should be aware that it's going on. Check out Photo Fraud in Lebanon.

Some other consequences of Israel's war

This from César Chelala, M.D. and political analyst: The Japan Times Online - Children died as Western leaders stared

Not quite all Israelis pro-war

Prominent front-page headline in today's NYT: Left or Right, Israelis Are Pro-War. Pretty depressing. Even the peaceniks in "Peace Now" see it as a "necessary" war rather than a "war of choice" that Olmert could easily have avoided if he had only agreed to talk to the other side (about those prisoners, to start with). But not quite all Israelis have gone berserkly jingoistic. Check out Uri Avnery's sad, angry analysis: Junkies of War

Petition for U.S. Jewish Solidarity with Muslim and Arab Peoples of the Middle East

I'm not Jewish, nor were any of my known ancestors (but then, one never really knows about ancestors), but I am a human being with the usual human capacity for empathy -- especially with those who like Jews, Lebanese and other Arabs, Serbs and Kosovars and Bosniacs, Chechens, Uighurs, Sudanese, and too many others have been victims of mass historical outrages during my lifetime. One outrage does not justify another, as this petition states eloquently. The drafters of the petition have asked Jews to sign. If you consider yourself (or are considered by others) a Jew, maybe you can bring yourself to add your name, to stop the reciprocal outrages. Petition for U.S. Jewish Solidarity with Muslim and Arab Peoples of the Middle East

WorldNetDaily: Our moral culpability for Qana

It's sometimes surprising how much sense Patrick Buchanan can make. WorldNetDaily: Our moral culpability for Qana

Mike Davis on the History of the Car Bomb

Davis takes it back to a 1920 attack by an Italian American anarchist, Mario Buda, and traces the evolution of the weapon through the Mafia, the pieds noirs of Algeria, Israel's Stern Gang and Palestinian reciprocity, the CIA in Vietnam during French colonial days, the Hezbollah in the 1980s, and on down to today. TomDispatch - Tomgram: Mike Davis on the History of the Car Bomb Very cheap and effective as a destructive weapon, disastrous politically because it alienates its employers' base, argues Davis: viz., Spain's ETA and Northern Ireland's IRA. But sometimes a political movement isn't interested in mobilizing its civilian supporters, just in sowing terror.

What's missing (maybe Davis will give it in his Part II, to be posted next week, he says) is analysis of the kinds of situations that encourage use of this weapon. As a first guess, I'd say they are those where there seems to be nothing to gain by more peaceful, democratic political means. Because when there is some hope of gaining power by democratic means, then the leaders are going to be very cautious about using a weapon that makes potential supporters fear for their lives. If I'm right, then the best (probably the only) way to eliminate (or even reduce) terror is to guarantee dissidents that democratic chance, whether we're talking about Sunnis in Iraq or Shiites in Lebanon or Maoists in Nepal. Not an easy thing to do, but I can think of no better alternative.

"Let me be serious now ": Zbig has some things to say

"Let me be serious now because this is a serious time that calls for serious reflection,"says Zbigniew Brzezinski in an address in Washington, .

I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect--maybe not in intent--the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages. Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you’re killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You’ll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.

Cultural notes

(1) I do not love Leonardo [da Vinci, that is]. As the show that just closed at the Met demonstrated, he was a superb draughtsman. However, there is nothing in those exquisite drawings to suggest he cared about people. There is no religious feeling in his drawings of saints and virgins, just meticulous studies of skin texture and anatomical proportions of pretty girls and muscular, usually contorted men. Grotesque faces also interested him, but just their external, nothing of their contexts, nothing to suggest what life might feel like for the persons within those faces. And Leonardo lavished equal attention on those war machines he kept inventing, the beauty of a mortiferous shower of missiles into a castle or a town, the striking and gouging power of ingenious bolt-hurlers, and so on. Not so much as a line or a shadow to suggest the effects of such machines on human beings. No, I do not love Leonardo, because he did not love me or thee. He loved only the power of his creations. Sort of like the guys who thought up "shock and awe" for Iraq.

(2) The other super-exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a sharp contrast: Manet/Velázquez, on view until June 8. Velázquez, Murillo, Zurburán did feel for their subjects. They all seemed much more eager to portray the lives of their models than their anatomical peculiarities. We see the subjects' attitudes, moods and expectations. Then, 200 years later, comes Goya. This was another superb draughtsman, expert in portraying contorted bodies, most notably in the series "The Disasters of War" (scenes from the Spanish resistance to French occupation of Spain under Napoleon) and many others, but with a passion utterly different from Leonardo's. Manet, Degas, even Courbet reinterpreted those passions. And the Americans (Sargent, Whistler, et al.) commodified them. (If you can't get to the show, be sure at least to check out the website.)

(3)Midnight's Children: We caught the last performance at the Apollo Theater on Sunday. Terrific play, in the original sense -- that is, terrifying. We spotted Salman Rushdie himself in the audience, only a few seats away, but we didn't fight through the crowds afterwards to greet him. I don't know what I would have said, other than "I've loved your work." Satanic Verses I especially loved. I never got through the book Midnight's Children, I confess; it's long, and requires close attention to follow, and other things came up to take my attention away from it. Now that I know how it comes out, I want to go back to the book. You can perform a lot more magic on the page than on the stage.

(4)The side benefit of going to the play was that it took us to 125th Street, Harlem's main drag, where before the play we visited one of our favorite places, the Studio Museum in Harlem. The main show, open through June 6, is "Challenge of the Modern: African American Artists 1925-1945." Very, very impressive works by artists famous (van der Zee, Jacob Lawrence) and less famous. Oddly, they include the Cuban, Wifredo Lam (whose name they misspell as "Wilfredo"), but I was happy to see more of his exuberant paintings, whatever the pretext.

Peace mongering

Today's NYT article on the anti-Iraq war movement would have been much more useful if it contained links to the sites mentioned: Move On; True Majority, and a coalition of church organizations (which the NYT calls "the most mainstream"), Win Without War, and the self-explanatory Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities.

Imagining World War I

This morning when I read today's The NYT's "Writers on Writing" essay by Richard Price (which is very good), I at first confused him with another author whose work I've admired, Richard Powers. I remembered liking a Powers' 1985 novel enormously, so I looked up my old (1987) note where I reflected on the book and why it felt so important. It fits perfectly my concept of "Literature & Politics" for this weblog. To demonstrate why, I've posted a much-abbreviated version of my notebook entry on Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, from the Fiction Readings section of my website.

Gulf War II

This is all that needs to be said. For an alternative view, see this lovely site, "Faces of Iraq."

City and Anti-City

On Saturday, January 25, at 8 p.m., I shall be reading the opening chapters of my new novel, A Gift for the Sultan. In it, the greatest city in the Western world and its culture are under attack by intransigent Muslim warriors originally from Central Asia. The city is Constantinople, the attackers are (mainly) Ottoman Turks, the year is 1402. The conflict still reverberates down to our day, right through the events of 9/11. To hear the beginning of the story of the 15-year old Byzantine princess and the Ottoman war chief who is charged with delivering her to the sultan, come to Brooklyn Arts Exchange, 421 Fifth Avenue (near corner of 8th Street), Brooklyn NY.