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Occasionally, I stumble across a quote that sums up my thoughts exactly.  At such moments, I'm startled at the connection that I share with this other person, typically someone I've never met, maybe even a person from another age.  I had such an experience when I read this NYT review of two of Amos Oz's recent publications.  At the end of the article, Oz says, "I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred.  It is, in my view, also a major moral imperative."

I've written before about the importance of imagining the perspectives of "the other" as a basis for compassion, which is incompatible with fanatical hatred.  But the intense identification I felt with Oz's quote related not to these musings, but to my reaction to Adam Hochschild's book, King Leopold's Ghost.

In his thorough research and quoting from primary sources, Hochschild deserves much praise for King Leopold's Ghost.  Nonetheless, Hochschild's story-telling annoyed me.  In presenting his data, Hochschild chose to inhabit the mind of King Leopold, but refused to inhabit the minds of the Congolese living under his oppressive regime.  Hochschild repeatedly offers subjective opinions about Leopold's character, thoughts, morality and conduct, portraying these assumptions as conclusions drawn from evidence.  In reality, they are PC condemnations of a man whose time, thinking, and morality are alien to Hochschild.

Hochschild doesn't make the same mistake with the Congolese.  To the contrary, he refuses to offer any speculation about how they might feel.  The Congolese were routinely flogged to death and forced to walk hundreds of miles over rocky terrain infested with insects that burrowed into their feet, all the while lugging obscenely heavy cargo.  How might they have felt about those circumstances?  According to Hochschild, we have no idea because of the lack of primary sources written by Congolese.

Hochschild's approach is, to my way of thinking, PC nonsense.  In reality, we have no more primary source about King Leopold's mind than we do about the inner thinking of the Congolese who suffered for Leopold's pleasure.  The concept of "primary sources" begins to break down when the "facts" we are hoping the source will "establish" are thoughts, mindsets and moral constructs.  Yes, it's true that people can leave written records of their thoughts.  But most people are inarticulate, and even the articulate among us very often have only an imperfect grasp of the operation of their own minds.  We can never truly know the mind of another to the standard of historical fact.  We can only ever conjecture.

My criticism is not that Hocschild was, of necessity, required to offer conjectures.  My concern is that he doesn't seem to realize that he's offering conjectures about King Leopold, while refusing to do so for the Congolese.  Hochschild, a white man, seems to feel comfortable inhabiting the perspective another white man for purposes of condemning (what appears to our eyes today as) his racism and immorality; but Hochschild doesn't seem to feel qualified to imagine how it felt to be a Congolese person under King Leopold's rule.  Although Hochschild purportedly supports the Congolese against King Leopold, the Congolese remain to him an "other" beyond his imagination. 

Is it really so impossible to imagine the Congolese perspective?  A man is forced, on pain of death, to march three hundred miles across land that razors his feet.  He's carrying an 80 pound load.  He's not fed enough.  Knowing these facts (which are confirmable through primary sources), is it possible that he's pleased about the situation?

I reject the idea that it's wrong for me to ask these questions because I am a white, American woman living in the 21st century, and the Congolese who lived and died under King Leopold were black tribal people living in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I cannot, of course, know comprehensively or viscerally what the experience of their lives was like, but mental connections (whether imaginative, cognitive or both) between me and the Congolese are as possible as they are between me and Amos Oz.  Indeed, they are not merely possible but, according to Oz, morally necessary.

Oz's assertion that imagining the other is a moral imperative stands as a severe condemnation of Hochschild's political correctness (however well-intentioned).  Isolating another group as being beyond the imagination, whether out of respect or out of maliciousness, forecloses meaningful comprehension and compassion. 

Far from demonstrating his sensitivity, Hochschild has undermined his credibility with his PC crutch.  By constructing King Leopold's Congolese subjects as unimaginable others, he has telegraphed one indelible impression: fear of criticism.

"Is it surprising if a seed grows where it lands, once it's been scattered? Can it be helped? In 'Brooklyn,' Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim."  This passage in Liesl Schillinger's NYT review of Colm Toibin's novel Brooklyn made me thoughtful because the question of how "place can assert itself" is the subject of two of my novels, The Swing of Beijing and Waiting for Love Child.

In both books, the "place" at issue is Beijing.  In The Swing of Beijing, Beijing is asserts itself in anything but a quiet, modest way.  Rather, the city is a constant challenge to its expatriate residents, an obstacle to their goals, a menace to their souls. 

In Waiting for Love Child, Beijing is more seductive and less aggressive.  The city still crushes Dean Cannon, the expatriate protagonist of Love Child, but the city isn't confrontational; rather, it lures Dean into burrowing into its trap.

In my real life, having been an expatriate in Beijing for more than four years now, the ways in which extpatriates grow in relation to, and in resistance of, Beijing has been consistently fascinating because of the unique landscape of the city.  It's generally welcoming to foreigners (as long as you're not a democracy or Tibet protestor, or Falun Gong supporter), but it's also isolating of outsiders.  You can't join Beijing society; as an expat, you'll never be Chinese.  (Even if you marry a Chinese person, you can't get citizenship).

Outsiders are allowed to form their own enclaves in Beijing, enclaves that are free from the social regulation of both Chinese society and the societies from which the expatriates hail.  Up until recently, expatriates were virtually above the law, as well.  In this context, free from constraints that keep seedlings growing ever "up" in the U.S., seeds can grow in truly warped and delightful directions in Beijing.
 
Liesl Schillinger's two questions, "Is it surprising?" and "Can it be helped?" are also interesting.  I haven't yet read Brooklyn, but from Schillinger's review, the circumstance that prompts her questions is that Eilis, the protagonist, falls in love with an Italian, rather than holding her life in stasis, waiting to return to Ireland.  Should it be surprising that Eilis falls in love with an "outsider" in this strange land?  Can it be helped?

Having lived in Beijing and responded to its rhythm, and watched others do the same, I'm not surprised.   When people are ready to get married, they fall in love with whoever's around them, whether at home or in a far-away place. 

But I do think it "can be helped."  Occasionally, I see an expatriate in Beijing holding themselves back from the city, refusing its provocations and temptations, treading water until they can return again to the open-seas-like-pond of the U.S.  And, although I empathisize with their fear of how Beijing will change them, and although I recognize in their self-control and defendedness a kind of strength, I'm not really interested in these people. 

Not interested enough to write two novels about them.

What causes patterns of dysfunction to repeat themselves across generations in a family?  And how can these patterns be altered?

Literature throughout history has dealt with the problem, and despite the efforts of the most creative minds in humanity, the root cause of pernicious behavior transmission remains murky.  

Moreover, the idea that the behavior patterns across familial generations can be altered seems to be a new one.  The Greeks were convinced that generationall familial disaster was the will of the gods and impossible to evade.  Even modern writers find moderate versions of that position palatable: in his preface to A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and their Remarkable Families, author Michael Holroyd remarks that "the configurations of family life today still echo and reflect the concealed lives of a hundred years or more ago" (as reported in a NYT book review).

One obvious possibility for dealing with such fatalism is to flee.  Oedipus tried with dismal results.  Writers, as recounted in Louise DeSalvo's, On Moving: A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts and Finding Home Again, seem particularly inclined to follow Oedipus' lead and obtain similarly disappointing outcomes.  "In . . . detached moments, . . . [Virginia] Woolf understood that her moves -- like many discussed here -- were efforts to obliterate the past. The next house was always, she said, the 'ancient carrot before me,'" writes Amy Finnerty in a NYT review of DeSalvo's book.

My own sense is that, literature and the experiences of writers notwithstanding, physically disassociating oneself from dysfunctional behavior is a step towards breaking the pattern.  That said, running is not a solution in itself; rather, conscientious and extreme uprooting of the environmental triggers that lead to behavior patterns seems to be necessary.  Oedipus, for example, seeminly could've avoided all his familial woes if he'd joined a monastary.

I don't mean to be blithe about the difficulty of altering behavior patterns, and I'm not typically a supporter of radical measures.  But because the causes of pernicious behavior transmission are difficult to identify with any precision, broader remedial measures seem justified.  Whatever the cause, eliminating all triggers will prevent the harm.  Whether Oedipus slept with his mother and killed his father because of the gods, bad luck, or a mixture of perversion and over-competitiveness, joining a monastary would've averted the evil.

Of course, we resist radical measures.  They're inconvenient.  Also, "[w]e typically take comfort in any discovery of connection to ancient peoples. See, we reassure ourselves, nothing has changed," writes Brad Leithauser, reviewing Anne Carson's An Oresteia for NYT.  But, whether examining the House of Atreus or the House of Alexandri, the comforts of nothing changing are outweighed by the pain of nothing changing. 

David Orr discusses in this week's NY Times Book Review the crisis of "greatness" in the current American poetry scene.  "Poetry needs greatness," he explains, because poetry remains "the highest of High Art."  And while Orr recognizes that the concept of "greatness" can be "strategy for concealing predictable prejudices," he also argues that without it, "we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels."

His argument reminded me of a passage in "The Deluge at Norderney," the first tale in Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales.  In it, a Cardinal and an eccentric older woman, Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag, are stranded during a flood and, to pass the time, they discuss theology.  Miss Malin asks the Cardinal if he believes in the fall of man, and he replies:

I am convinced . . . that there has been a fall, but I do not hold that it is man who has fallen.  I believe that there has been a fall of the divinity.  We are now serving an inferior dynasty of heaven. . . . [N]o human being with a feeling for greatness can possibly believe that the God who created the stars, the sea, and the desert, the poet Homer and the giraffe, is the same God who is now making, and upholding, the King of Belgium, the Poetical School of Schwaben, and the moral ideas of our day.

at pp. 55-56 (emphasis added).  Just as the Cardinal intuits an inferior dynasty of heaven, today's poets perceive an inferior muse: how can Billy Collins and Kay Ryan answer the same Apollonian call as Lord Byron?

But from my perspective, the Cardinal (and perhaps, by extension, Isak Dinesen) got it wrong: it's not the God who has changed, but the worshipful.  "Greatness," in the sense that Orr uses the term, relates not so much to achievement in an absolute sense, but to achievement within a certain context, specifically a society in which an aristocracy (in the sense of a superior class) exists. 

Just as Aristole limited tragedy to a fall by an aristocrat from the pinnacle to the depths, "greatness" is similarly confined to a feat of glory by nobility.  In Aristotle's day (and for centuries thereafter), society widely accepted those categorizations.  But we no longer do so.  In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller claimed tragedy for those who don't have far to fall.  And in Elizabeth Bishop (to take an example that Orr discusses), poetry finds glory without aristocratic pedigree.

The Isak Dinesen who scripted the Cardinal's "inferior dynasty of heaven" was, beneath her nom de plume, a woman mourning the waning of the artistocracy.  She'd married into nobility and clung to her title (Baroness) long after her husband, the Baron, divorced her.  She associated aristocracy with a set of values, like honor, that she seems to have felt wouldn't exist after the aristocrats expire.

But aristocracy was the bastion of unearned privilege, exploitation and cruelty, as much as it was the crucible of beauty, and art at its "highest levels" is as possible without an aristocracy as tragedy is. 

Perhaps what's lacking in American poetry is not greatness, but confidence.  We are not inferior humans to our ancestors, simply because the god we serve is more humane, meritocratic and accessible than in years past.  We are not less because we reject the fall of man altogether.  Our belief in progress, a gradual rise as opposed to a precipitous fall, is an attribute.  When American poetry has the moxy to stop apologizing for society and get on with the harshly difficult job of writing poems, then we will witness a democratic greatness.

Earlier today, as I sat in a cyber-cafe in Kisumu, Kenya, I read Noam Cohen's article in the New York Times Book Review, reflecting on the Google Book Search proposed legal settlement and Robert Darnton's article in the New York Review of Books about same.  Although Cohen seems generally to take a positive view of Google Book Search, resistance to the project is common, typically on one or both of the following grounds: (1) concerns about copyright violations, and/or (2) fear of Google controlling access to information.

Neither of these concerns resonate with me.  In brief, I think both concerns are informed by a general resistance to change and a misguided perception that refusing to adapt to a changing distribution landscape will somehow protect vested interests (it won't).  And while I don't think that Google's "Don't Be Evil" slogan means anything in substance, I think Google will either learn from the Microsoft anti-trust trial or be doomed to repeat it.  

What interests me more are the positive aspects of Google Book Search.  Cohen's article (not without reason) is targeted towards American readers, but what struck me, sitting in Kisumu, was how promising a tool Google Book Search is for places outside the United States. 

I'm in Kenya doing communications work for a social justice organization, and I've been spending significant time strategizing about how to communicate with people.  Apparently, reading isn't high on the list here.  Repeatedly, I've been told, "There's no reading culture in Africa."  I've heard this from colleagues who spend their days publishing a journal and various other written media.  I've been interrupted mid-chapter in my own pleasure reading to be informed of this fact, as if maybe I'd be shamed into putting down the book ("We don't do that here.").

That my Kenyan companions should be so adamant about the lack of a reading culture is interesting.  Generally speaking, the Kenyans I've met are well-educated, politically-informed and socially-engaged people.  They're exactly the sorts of folks who'd be big readers in the States. 

Part of the reason for this situation may have to do with a problem J.M.G. Le Clezio identified in his Nobel lecture: books are too expensive.  Their cost is a pity because, as Le Clezio pointed out, a book is "the ideal tool" for knowledge spreading and banking.  As he said, a book is "practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate."

Sitting in this cyber cafe, I've been watching my co-users log onto Facebook and Yahoo!, to fill out online job applications, and to calculate expenditures on spread-sheets.  These are people who likely don't have regular access to the Internet in their homes or offices, and they're living in a town that lacks physical book resources.  They probably wouldn't frequent a library or buy a book (other than a text book), but they are nonetheless Internet-savvy.  Kenya's book-to-Internet relationship reminds me of developing countries that leap-frog physical phone lines and go straight to mobile. 

Is it not possible that Kisumu's Internet savvy cyber-cafe users could find Google Book Search enormously useful?  In his Nobel lecture, Le Clezio proposed a number of solutions for the high cost of books -- joint publishing with developing countries, greater funds for book mobiles and libraries -- but he didn't mention Google Book Search.  Perhaps Google Book Search has a future as the great leveler of the economic barriers that restrict reading cultures to societies that can afford them.