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Monday, July 27, 2009
Moral Tourism
I recently finished reading Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil. It is a remarkable novel, equal parts beauty and brutality; as its parts accumulate it does an elegant job of evoking through its literary form some of its central motifs and symbols, such as the images gradually revealed, restored, or repaired from the walls of the house decorated originally to celebrate all the delights of the senses. The fallen Buddha that bleeds gold when assaulted by the Taliban’s bullets, the lingering fragrance from the perfume factory, the books nailed to the ceiling and gradually reclaimed but irreparably scarred, the canoe that becomes an unlikely symbol for a desirable but tragically impossible collaboration--the novel is full of rich but delicate details that can make you catch your breath with their unexpected eloquence about the damage, tangible and intangible, inflicted by the conflicts that generate its plot. It is a novel, too, that hums with nuance and yet somehow refuses to judge those on whom such ambiguities are lost: many of its characters themselves hold to intractable, unforgiving, unforgivable absolutes, but the novel often seems to be asking us how they could have done otherwise, with the result that the tragedy of the novel (and it is extraordinarily, lyrically tragic throughout) feels inevitable, which is the saddest thing of all. Like Bel Canto, though also very differently, The Wasted Vigil holds up against brutality an ideal of aesthetic, rather than political, commitment; in fact, at times it seems as if the greatest evil of the Taliban is less their physical violence (which many other factions in the novel are also shown to be capable of, after all) but their violence towards art and the beautiful. When we see a glimmer of hope, it comes from quiet moments of aesthetic appreciation; violence is, ultimately, vandalism.
I was moved and impressed by this novel. But I also became uneasy about it in ways that I did not feel uneasy about Bel Canto, I think because Aslam’s novel is much more directly intervening in our discourse about particular historical and political events. It is at times an exceptionally, horribly, violent novel, but my unease was not queasiness about the violence as such but rather about the kind of aesthetic experience the novel itself was offering me (including through that violence) and how my pleasure in the novel as a whole thus reflects on me as a reader. What does it mean to enjoy, or at any rate to appreciate aesthetically, a novel in which a captive soldier is literally pulled to pieces as sport, a wife is forced to amputate her husband’s hand, a young man’s eye is burned with a blow torch, a suicide bomb is detonated next to a school?
Puzzling over this question made me think more generally about the purpose of such a book and about my own purposes in seeking it out.
The aesthetics-of-suffering issue is not uncommon (Holocaust literature seems the obvious example) and has certainly been analyzed and theorized--I’ve looked into this a little as part of preparation for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Night, for instance. There’s something a bit different about the recent wave of high-profile titles about the Middle East or the Arab or Islamic world, though, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, to name a very few--and that’s not even touching on the many non-fiction titles, from memoirs to histories to political analyses.
It’s possible, of course, that what seems like a trend is actually just the result of my taking note of them as the circle of my own reading interests becomes less parochial, but my sense is that what has happened is that since 9/11, not only is the so-called “clash of civilizations” big news, but there is an interest, an appetite, among western literary audiences for stories that help them see different perspectives on current and historical events in a part of the world which, previously, they might have considered only glancingly, or with the reductive and limited insights available from following headlines and TV reports. The back cover of The Wasted Vigil quotes a reviewer suggesting as much--Peter Parker of The Sunday Times says that the novel “reminds us that fiction can do things that mere reportage can’t.”
One of the purposes of such novels, then, or at any rate one of their uses or effects, is revelation, maybe even instruction or pedagogy. That’s certainly one of the reasons I have been reading them: to the hoped-for satisfaction of a rewarding literary experience I can add the desire to learn more about these worlds that seem so other, to be in my reading life a better-informed citizen of the world and then perhaps, as a result, also to be a better-informed participant in real-world events--though I think there is also the temptation, the risk, to feel as if reading about, say, Afghanistan, is an actual substitute for trying to do anything about Afghanistan (would the money I spent on A Thousand Splendid Suns have been better spent as a donation to Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan?). But if reading leads to understanding, especially appreciation for nuance and complexity, isn’t reading a kind of doing? Isn’t it a good thing to do? And wouldn’t the world be a better place if more people (former world leaders, even) perhaps read such novels?
And yet at the same time, fiction is not (quite) fact; anecdote, especially imagined anecdote, is not a reliable substitute for aggregate data and rigorous contextualization; impressions, however beautiful, are not analysis; and, finally, contemplation is not action, and actions must sometimes be reductive--nuance and complexity are, perhaps, luxuries permitted to those who need not make decisions. In Saturday, Ian McEwan actually makes a similar point about ambivalence, depicting it (or so I read the novel) as a luxury, even a self-indulgence, when decisive action is required; in the more theoretical realm, Geoffrey Harpham notes that “without action, ethics is condemned to dithering,” and perhaps novels feel ethically more satisfactory sometimes than real life precisely because they need not take a singular position. Ethical critics have often pointed to this “negative capability” as a strength of the novel form, but it is also a crucial aspect of its artifice.
While I was thinking these things I came across an phrase in an essay by K. Anthony Appiah that struck me as suggestive in this context. In the essay, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” Appiah is discussing Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions; he is thinking about the question of the novel’s implied audience, “the ‘you’ addressed in the first paragraph of the novel”:
The usual answer, of course, is that the postcolonial African novel is addressed to a Western reader. Here, that is, according to the usual narrative, is a safari moment: an Africa constructed exactly for the moral tourist.
Appiah goes on to argue against reading Nervous Conditions in this way, but my interest is in the model he outlines of literature as a kind of “safari,” “constructed ... for the moral tourist,” which seems at some level an apt characterization of the experience of reading something like A Thousand Splendid Suns or The Wasted Vigil (though the specific experience offered by each is, of course, quite different). I hear Appiah’s tone here as dismissive of that “moral tourist,” the reader seeking only an exotic experience, like a “safari,” rather than ... I’m not sure what, actually. Is the alternative to being a “tourist” somehow “going native”? Is that any less problematic? Perhaps it is the author addressing the “Western reader” who is being faulted for offering up marketable, consumable, safe (fenced?) stories to suit the tourist’s taste. In her talk on representations of Arabs in western literature, Ahdaf Soueif points to some versions of this effect in recent novels; I’ve read some commentaries that object to the western fixation on veiling or stories of women’s oppression along similar lines. And yet ... shouldn’t the story of women’s suffering be known, even if their victimization is not the whole story? Isn’t there something more substantial than “tourism,” than gawking, involved in seeking to know it? And, to come back to my opening comments on The Wasted Vigil, isn’t the aesthetic experience itself a kind of response, however inadequate, to the denial of their humanity?
(x-posted)
Comments
A thoughtful post here. However, it undermines its way forward in the main way such critiques typically falter or fail outright ... where you state:
“... perhaps novels feel ethically more satisfactory sometimes than real life precisely because they need not take a singular position. Ethical critics have often pointed to this “negative capability” as a strength of the novel form, but it is also a crucial aspect of its artifice.”
The gap between fiction and nonfiction and “real life” is not so pronounced, so great. Like fiction, nonfiction need not take “a singular position,” nor need “real life” take “a singular position.” Meanwhile, fiction (as with nonfiction and real life) does and to a significant extent must take singular positions of all sorts, whether explicit or implicit, depending, for one, upon the author’s purpose in creating a novel, e.g.: it is immoral to go about slaughtering people for most any reason that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with immanent self defense. (Every novel need not take such a position but plenty or all liberatory antiwar novels would – as would such books of nonfiction and such “real lives.” These aren’t lesser novels for doing so, quite the opposite: they are meeting their particular imperatives of form, principle, content – not to mention central principles of humanity.)
“Singular positions” are often the heart, brain, and backbone of novels, along with “negative capability,” and wide variety of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and so on (again, as with much compelling nonfiction and real life). The point being that one should not mistake “negative capability,” etc, for the whole or even the bulk of the novel and its vital essence. The “singular points” are often as essential or more essential to the nature and effect of novels than anything else, just as “negative capability” can thrive in “nonfiction” and “real life” too. For example, are people good or bad - how so, in essence? People often don’t take “a singular position” on this in “real life” or in nonfiction (or in novels) - and yet people can and do readily assert or reveal very singular particular or specific positions related to this question in “real life” and in nonfiction (and in novels) very often as well. In other words, the “standard” view of fiction is a fiction. Are there no differences, no distinctions between fiction and nonfiction or real life? Of course there are. But the similarities and overlaps are far more predominant and preponderant.
To a great extent, the ideological and factual elements in novels can be as revelatory and compelling and telling as in nonfiction and real life. With and/or without the base of research and science for painstaking understanding and analysis, one commonly learns or creates a valuable culture of knowing, valuing, and catalyzing through story (as well as through various other types of nonfiction and real life).
An “aesthetic” and other “experience” of another’s “humanity” - of various human conditions - of course is valuable and necessary, imperative. This has been too much limited in fiction, since corporate ideology and related establishment ideology and institutions find it functional to cap it, encouraging in fiction “tourism” of the other, and immersion in the other, encouraging nonthreatening notions of relief, and enlistment in ostensibly benign or ostensibly idealistic establishment crusades, ostensibly “humanitarian” interventions, wars, occupations. Empathizing with the oppressed and others in establishment fiction only goes so far, or is meant to, and is carefully watched and controlled – not conspiratorially but as a function of institutional priorities and ideologies. (The same goes for “mainstream” nonfiction.)
In addition to empathy for and immersion in the humanity of others, what is crucial and directly threatening to illegitimate power is aesthetic and other experience and knowledge of the oppressive powers and their close relation to the reader, for what quickly follows or is inherent in such illustration and understanding, are alternatives to oppressive power and the possibilities and imperatives for resistance and change. The specter of which raises all sort of red flags and restrictions by the gatekeepers, the functionaries of the ruling/owning institutions of publication and lit writ large. This limitation is a function of establishment ownership and control of publication, not the inherent limitations of the novel due to “negative capability” or anything else.
Keats: “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
A great (by any measure) novel could both establish and keep at the forefront how and why the (for example) US or Western economic/military conquest of vast reaches of “The Middle East” and the world is illegal and immoral, barbaric, brutal – and yet still the novel could be imbued with, constructed of, and created by all manner of “negative capability,” ambiguity, indeterminacy. Certainties and ambiguities go hand in hand; they need each other, need not be one and the same. Ambiguities, indeterminacies, “negative capability” might be most strongly elemented in such novels for example in the how and why and if a liberatory global mass movement rises to challenge, combat, and even turn back the conquest. This very notion, the very story hypothesis itself is full of negative capability - as well as much fact and certainty (not unlike real life and some nonfiction). And “negative capability” needs the “singular positions” - crucial facts and understandings of people and the world - to increase its potency and to improve its quality, let alone the worth of the overall novel. (This is how novels are often made up, in relation to non-taboo subjects.)
The problem is, one can document what happens to novels that venture into the socio-political taboo: intense marginalization, censorship, burial, and other terminal efforts by the powerful institutions that make up the society of conquest. A novel might quite aesthetically and compellingly keep prominent by…whatever…motif, theme, plot, info, fantasy, etc…that all the US Presidents since WWII could be hanged by the standard of the Nuremberg trials, along with myriad other mind, heart, and gut rattling realities typically kept buried or contained by the “endless webs of deceit” that make up the conventional story of the US. Novels may well illuminate such vital “singular positions.” Whole literary movements and cultures may create such tremendous work – the furthest thing from a demeaned lit “tourism” or a delimited immersion. Such work continues to be overwhelmingly opposed, whereas “tourism” and immersion of select others are somewhat more tolerated or much encouraged, to benign, destructive, and constructive effects all…but not too constructive…which would mean outright reversal of power or reforms too far that would lead to revolution of various sorts, including of basic conditions of life.
It’s in this reality that novelists and other artists and scholars find themselves, and must decide what routes to move on, what grounds to work. In this regard, “tourism” is a troubled word and “going native” a troubled phrase. “Immersion” seems to me much more to account for what you value, or would value in these novels. Or “perspective.”
“…shouldn’t the story of women’s suffering be known, even if their victimization is not the whole story? Isn’t there something more substantial than “tourism,” than gawking, involved in seeking to know it?”
Responding to the second question above: of course there may be something more substantial in these novels - case by case - depending upon the novel, and depending upon the context in which the novel is read, and depending upon the reader. But:
“And, to come back to my opening comments on The Wasted Vigil, isn’t the aesthetic experience itself a kind of response, however inadequate, to the denial of their humanity?”
Sure, it’s a “response, however inadequate” – which begs the larger question:
What if a novel is exploitative, or minimally attentive to oppression and suffering in relation to its topic and substance, and particularly in relation to its audience? What if novels in general are, that is, have been forced to be so?
It seems to me that you set a low bar in regard to The Wasted Vigil by describing it as “a kind of response, however inadequate … more substantial than ‘tourism,’ than gawking” … an illumination of oppression that links (equates? reduces?) “violence” to “vandalism” and the human to the aesthetic, in which “political commitment” is downplayed:
“The Wasted Vigil holds up against brutality an ideal of aesthetic, rather than political, commitment; in fact, at times it seems as if the greatest evil of the Taliban is less their physical violence (which many other factions in the novel are also shown to be capable of, after all) but their violence towards art and the beautiful. When we see a glimmer of hope, it comes from quiet moments of aesthetic appreciation; violence is, ultimately, vandalism.”
I’m making no critique of any novel you consider here. I’m suggesting that you offer dubious explanation for a delimited scope of novels that are geopolitically contextualized, whether it’s a novel you are more or less comfortable with, like Bel Canto, or a novel, The Wasted Vigil, that makes you “uneasy” because “much more directly intervening in our discourse about particular historical and political events” (however well or poorly handled). Maybe “sad,” or grotesque, or “tragic” philosophical expression or consolation is basically what one can expect of the loosely geopolitical contemporary novel produced by the establishment (however “eloquent,” “nuanced,” “lyrical,” or fair to its characters, i.e., otherwise accomplished). Normative and geopolitical limits are enforced - only so far and no farther - and that’s intolerable, a stunted, oppressive, inhumane delimitation. It does not result from the nature of the art. And again, perhaps most cogently, I can point to three Mainstay Press novels (as well as significant nonMainstay work) and a massive forthcoming anthology that rejects a number of “conventional” limits and artificial delimitation and details how and why this is intolerable, and debunks many of the “fictions of fiction” that can be traced back to their sources.
It may seem that your concerns here can be met simply by looking more closely at how well or how restrictively a novel like The Wasted Vigil handles it’s more direct intervention into the sociopolitical (and to what extent Bel Canto might reasonably or insipidly or grotesquely evade the same), but that the novels appear to be “a kind of response, however inadequate … more substantial than ‘tourism,’ than gawking” leaves a lot to be desired, to say the least, and not due to any fault inherent in the mode of the novel.
Tony, I think Rohan was drawing a distinction between art and real life, not between fiction and non-fiction.
In real life, you can only ever have one live position. Sure, you might waver mentally, but your act of wavering is committing you to one existential position: wavering. Likewise, you can only vote one way or not, or kiss one girl or two girls or not. You cannot ever be x and not-x at the same time.
However, literature *can*, to misquote Robert Frost, hold two contradictory ideas at the same exact time without effectively wavering. One character can do x, another can do not-x, and the novel need not ever raise one act above the other. I was just re-watching Lynch’s *Mullholland Drive*, and that is the perfect example of a work that explores two completely contradicting ideas about Hollywood and artifice to their logical conclusions without ever saying one is more true than the other.
Fiction, nonfiction, real life - what I argue holds for all.
In real life, one cannot be a killer (x) and a life-giver/saver (not-x) at the same time? As I noted, life too is full of “negative capability.” “Life” is not always certain. In fact, it’s often “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.”
While lit/fiction can be as ambiguous or indeterminate or mysterious as you like about crucial realities/experiences, it can also be extremely accurate, precise, or incisive. Again, like the evident in life, or the objective in nonfiction.
If the issue is the representation of violence for readers who are at a distance from that violence, I don’t think it is an Asian writers/Western readers problem at all. Gratuitous violence (and touristic reading experience) is a major issue within the mainstream of western fiction.
I haven’t read The Wasted Vigil, but from my experience with Nadeem Aslam’s earlier novel, I wouldn’t be surprised if the problem is really that he is too precious and sensationalistic in the specific ways he describes acts of violence in the text. For me, in short, it’s more a question of how than a question of what.
I did not feel that Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” had this problem (though the first novel, The Kite Runner, did). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” interestingly, scarcely has any scenes of violence at all (except the implied violence at the very end). I haven’t read the others you name (I’ve heard very good things about Yasmina Khadra, but haven’t got around to reading her)
"I don’t think it is an Asian writers/Western readers problem at all. Gratuitous violence (and touristic reading experience) is a major issue within the mainstream of western fiction.”
Amardeep, this is not the “problem” I meant to highlight, as I meant my allusion to Holocaust literature to indicate. My post is a bit rambling, so it’s my fault if this got obscured. I recognize responding to violence aesthetically (or responding to artistic treatments of violence) as a general issue. In the particular cases I was thinking about, the “tourism” (the choice of a literary destination, if you like) comes from a heightened interest (or what I perceive as a heightened interest), not just on my part but also more generally, in novels about what for shorthand I’ll continue to call the Middle East. I was thinking out loud, I guess, about the implications or the value of reading these novels out of a well-intentioned desire to understand (necessarily from a distance) certain conflicts and histories.
FWIW, “precious” is not at all how I would describe the violence in The Wasted Vigil. Khadra (a man, actually, using a female pseudonym--interesting) does seem based on what I’ve read rather the stylistic opposite of Aslam--very spare, minimal prose. I’d certainly be interested to find out what you think about The Swallows of Kabul.
Khadra, at least, is worth reading, though politically he could go much farther, just as with Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Not that I can say either would be likely to do so.
Much of the conflict in the Middle East, and certainly that which should concern Westerners most (because it’s what we can most affect and have most responsibility for), stems from the not so distant Washington D.C. Where are those novels (and where are they not, and what are they like)?