Thinking over Professor Sari Nusseibeh's ridiculous analogy about the Israeli-built wall that obstructs Palestinian access to Israel (see my previous blog post), quoted with approval in David Hare's "Wall: A Monologue," published in The New York Review of Books, I realized that I had one additional comment on Nusseibeh's analysis. As Nusseibeh writes:
[The wall is like] like sticking someone in a cage and then when he
starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper
as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place. The
wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was
ostensibly built to prevent.
(p. 8.) The last sentence contains some deeply sloppy and irresponsible reasoning and argument. The wall doesn't "create" violence. The wall creates unfair, unjust and inhumane conditions to which people respond.
How people respond to unfairness, injustice, and inhumanity is a choice. In their exercise of that choice, people demonstrate their character and, indeed, their humanity.
Even acknowledging the justifiable, probably hard-wired human need for revenge, choosing violence as a response is not inevitable. The "Red Orchestra" chose non-violent resistance to the Nazis; Indians chose non-violent resistance to British colonialism; Black Americans chose non-violent resistance to racial segregation. Having spent the last five years living in China, India and Africa, I've watched most of the people around me choose non-violent resistance to the myriad and genuine injustices, unfairnesses and inhumane actions to which they've been subjected.
The wall is an instrument of oppression - truly a wailing wall - but it doesn't absolve those Palestinians who chose violence in response of responsibility for their choice. By eliminating Palestinian choice and responsibility in his analogy (the provocation of the wall = the violence of the response), Nusseibeh denies Palestinian humanity as certainly as does some Israeli policy.
Why call a written account of a trip to Occupied Palestinian Territories a "monologue," instead of a "feature article" or "travelogue"? One reason is that, as David Hare apparently has done, the piece is meant to be performed by a single person in front of an audience. Another reason might be that David Hare, an experienced playwright, feels more comfortable writing in a familiar format, and one that absolves him entirely from journalistic standards.
Yet a third reason is that a monologue is a device for allowing the audience a privileged glimpse of the character's interior. From its tone, I suspect that David Hare, in his "Wall: A Monologue," published in The New York Review of Books, intended his monologue as more of a Hyde Park op-ed piece - a voluble, live-action, attention-grabbing public intellectual's speech - than as a window into his depths, but I found the piece most significant for what it revealed about him: that he's a shallow-thinking asshole.
I don't say this for political reasons. I agree with his political conclusions. Like him, I am against the Wall.
But I don't support Hare coming to the same conclusions for the wrong reasons. And Hare, from the evidence of his monologue, can't reason.
Two examples suffice. First, Hare quotes with approval the analogy posed by Professor Sari Nusseibeh:
[The wall is] like sticking someone in a cage and then when he
starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper
as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place. The
wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was
ostensibly built to prevent.
(p. 8.) This analogy is dramatic and emotionally-manipulative, but it's wrong. The wall is like sticking a criminal in prison, along with his family, his neighbors, and everyone in a miles-wide diameter. Yes, it's unfair. Yes, it's disproportionate. Yes, the innocent suffer. But, yes, there is a criminal in the mix. The criminal doesn't justify the wall, but any reasoned conclusion about the wall has to absorb the baseline fact that Israelis are trying to protect themselves from suicide bombers.
Hare does not absorb this fundament. As he says later, after having been scandalized by a Saddam Hussein poster in a coffee shop in Nablus,
At least now I know why the wall's gone up. The Israelis want to
separate themselves from people who display posters of Saddam Hussein.
Who can blame them? Or - hold on, the old conundrum - do they display
posters of Saddam Hussein because somebody just put up a wall?
(p.12.) Hold on, Hare: Saddam Hussein posters are not the issue. The wall has gone up because Israelis are dying in suicide bombings, which have - as Hare acknowledges - decreased 80% since the wall went up.
I don't think this statistic justifies the wall; even 100% reduction in suicide bombings wouldn't justify the wall from my perspective. The wall imposes unwarranted punishments on too many innocent people for its effectiveness against criminals to be justified. But I accept that deaths - not the unbearable sight of Saddam Hussein's visage - is the price of the wall's removal.
In Hare's view, the wall is a frivolous exercise in power "because they [the Israelis] can." (p. 10.) Well, if that's the way you see the balance of costs, then it takes no courage, conviction or intellectual exercise to conclude that the wall needs "gates." (p.12.)
The Israelis who are against the wall, on the other hand, have a more nuanced understanding of the balance of costs. Consciously deciding that the wall is the wrong approach to security in Israel requires an openness to risk, a breadth of compassion, and a generous measure of moral integrity (better to live in danger than impose harm on innocents) - qualities that, in Hare's analysis, the Israelis don't have.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has imposed such profound, unnecessary and devastating costs on so many people for so long for many reasons, but one reason has been an absence of clear thinking. Despite Hare's obvious empathy for the Palestinians (which I share), he's doing them no favors with his contribution to the muddled (lack of) reasoning that has characterized the Israeli-Palestinian confrontations.
Immediately after I wrote the post British authors mentally masturbate about physics, stories suffer, I read Peter Dizikes essay in The New York Times about C.P. Snow, the physicist and novelist who coined the term "the two cultures" to describe the rift between scientists and literary types -- and I knew I would have to write an addendum to my previous post.
According to Dizikes, Snow made three claims that are worth considering in light of Ian McEwan's The Child in Time and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. First, Snow laid the blame for the rift between these two cultures on the literati. Plainly, that claim is untenable today. With the advent of string theory, the mathematics required to understand physics has become so complicated that even other physicists, much less literary scholars, don't understand it. (See, for example, this New Yorker article about Garrett Lisi, renegade physicist, or this review of a couple of books about string theory.)
Moreover, the strenuous efforts at bridging this gap between the scientists and the poets is coming from the poets' side, with novels like McEwan's, plays like Frayn's, and countless other examples (Huxley's Brave New World, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, etc.) Oliver Sacks alone cannot make up for the majority of scientists who are incapable of communicating with the rest of the world.
Second, Snow argued that science, not literature, is what safeguards the progressive betterment of society because scientists are more morally reliable that the literati. This claim, also, is one that cannot be credited. Science, as the history of scientific advances in the 20th century amply demonstrates (atom bomb anyone?), is amoral. The job of scientists is to discover the truth, regardless of the outcome; the moral ramifications of the discoveries are someone else's job.
That "someone else" often, increasingly, is a writer. McEwan has reached the stature of "England's national author" (in the words of New Yorker profile) because, in novels like The Child in Time, Amsterdam, Atonement, and Saturday, he undertakes the task of sorting the moral ramifications of technological and social developments. Copenhagen, as well, is an attempt to parse the morality of working on an atom bomb in World War II, examining the question from multiple perspectives. (Whatever might be said about the moral failings of Ezra Pound, Snow's example of a literary moral degenerate -- or P.G. Wodehouse, or Gertrude Stein, to name a couple of other literati who behaved abysmally during WWII -- none can approach the scale of damage done by physicist Werner Heisenberg who, in addition to being a Nazi, was also almost certainly developing an atomic weapon.)
Third, according to Dizikes, Snow maintained that "20th-century progress was being stymied by the indifference of poets and novelists." This claim, of course, is risable. To whatever extent 20th century progress has been stymied, governments, corporations and academic mismanagement have been vastly more responsible that poets and novelists -- who, as the novels and plays cited above demonstrate, have been anything but "indifferent" to 20th century progress.
That said, something can be salvaged from Snow, namely his prescription for a generalized education. Specialized education, especially too early in life, narrows the mind and exacerbates the gap between "the two cultures." Moreover, a broader educational platform might obviate the need for incorporating physics lessons into novels and plays, leading to better, more elegantly-told stories about these issues (the point I raised in my previous blog post). After all, only when we're able to communicate easily across this divide will we be able effectively to bridge it.
Thinking about Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, I cannot help but relate it to Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen.
When I saw Copenhagen in 2002, at the Kennedy Center, it was much-buzzed as the play to see. I remember leaving the theater befuddled at the buzz: "boring" was the word I would've applied, followed by "repetitive."
The play three times enacts the famous walk that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg took in 1941, during which they had a conversation -- the substance of which remains unknown -- which fundamentally altered their relations for the rest of their lives. At the time, I recognized fully that the repetitive enactment of the walk-and-conversation was a dramatization of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is colloquially (though controversially, from a physicist's point of view) understood to mean that our understanding of any situation is always limited by our perspective; shift the perspective, and the content changes.
However boring Uncertainty might be to learn in the classroom, Copenhagen didn't make the case that dramatizing it improved the learning experience. On the contrary, I found the physics lesson to get in the way of Frayn's proper task: storytelling.
The number one priority in telling a story, so far as I'm concerned, is maintaining interest, entertaining the audience. This imperative is among the most difficult of the novelist's tasks. "Most novels incredibly boring. It's amazing how the form endures. Not being boring is quite a challenge." That's McEwan talking, quoted in a recent New Yorker piece (at p. 48).
But McEwan appears as vulnerable as the rest of us to recognizing principles that we don't apply in our own lives. The Child in Time makes the same blunder as Copenhagen (although, seeing that Copenhagen post-dates The Child in Time by a decade, perhaps it should be the other way around.) The entire plot line involving Thelma and Charles Darke, Thelma's long physics lectures, Charles' regression into childhood, as well as the lorry accident and Stephen's near-miss driving around it -- these some hundred pages or so are all peripheral to the story of Kate's disappearance, and Stephen's reuniting with Julia.
These irrelevancies are not in the book to advance plot. They're in the book to illustrate physics principles about the nature of time. McEwan is elaborating in prose on his intellectual love affair with physics. These passages are all cerebral masturbation. And, while admittedly they're more masterfully done than Frayn's tiresome redundancies, these diversions are as disruptive to McEwan's storytelling in The Child in Time as Uncertainty was to Frayn's in Copenhagen.
The irony, of course, is that nothing illustrates the importance of perspective to determining content, or the elasticity of time, better than a well-told story. With a page-turner in hand, the content of the world of the page is determined wholly by the author's perspective, and time flies.
