The International Novel 9780300210408

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T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L N O V E L

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THE I N T E R N AT I O N A L NOVEL

A N N A B E L PAT T E R S O N

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Copyright © 2014 by Annabel Patterson. Maps by Daniel Mugaburu. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales. [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Gotham and Adobe Garamond types by Westchester Book Group. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patterson, Annabel M. The international novel / Annabel Patterson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-19800-3 (alk. paper) 1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Fiction—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Internationalism in literature. 4. Nationalism in literature. I. Title. PN3503.P35 2014 809.3'04—dc23 2014002218 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the late Lee Willing Patterson

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

23

Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina

39

Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone: The Costs of Being Small

57

Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch

79

Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns: The Worst Boundary Problem in the World

99

V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

111

Nuruddin Farah, Maps

131

Rhea Galanaki, The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: The Trouble with Crete

151

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

163

CONTENTS

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

181

Roberto Bolaño, 2666: Apocalypse in a Border Town

205

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns: And Some Conclusions

223

Notes Index

243 251

viii

Acknowledgments

My first and most exacting debt is to the man who suggested this project to me, Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. The context was a course he wished me to design for seniors in the soon to be dissolved International Studies Major, and as an incentive he shrewdly mentioned that I might get a “nice little book” out of it. Th is is that little book, nice or not. Next in line for my gratitude must be the students themselves, two years’ worth of them, whose own sense of gratitude was provoked by their new familiarity with places on the map of the world of which before they had been oblivious. Learning to teach novels I designated “international” was a steep learning curve for me, trained only in English literature, and hence I also reverence the translators of these books. I also owe much to colleagues who suggested novels or works of criticism for me to read under this, for me, totally new rubric: Amy Hungerford, David Quint, and especially Lawrence Manley, the bestread person outside his professional field, Tudor and Stuart drama, I have ever met. Richard L. Petersen arranged for me to try out the Maps chapter at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Towards the end I discovered Daniel Mugaburu, who became my infinitely patient mapmaker. And above all I owe intense thanks to Eric Brandt, the former Humanities Editor at the Yale University Press, who had the kind of faith in this outside-the-box project that was necessary ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for it to survive in a system of intellectual and publishing habits and pigeonholes. None of this would have been possible without the support of the Koerner Center, itself royally supported by a grant from Joseph Koerner and Lisbet Rausing, and brilliantly managed by Bernard Lytton and Patricia Dallai. This foundation sent me into the classroom after retirement, kept me in my office on dark and bright days alike, and saw to it that for me and the other Fellows of the Center the academic life gets longer and better.

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“A nation is the same people living in the same place.” —James Joyce, Ulysses “He had skipped over the mother-land (whom he did not truly love) and gone straight to internationality.” —E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, chap. 34

This book is intended as a prophylactic against insularity, an easily swallowed dose of information about countries other than our own. It is a modest introduction, via the practice of novel reading, to two of the knottiest ideas of our time: nationalism and internationalism. Since the end of the nineteenth century world leaders and the people they organize have struggled to define what a nation is, where boundaries should be drawn and redrawn, what are the rights and wrongs of territorialism, why peoples should not be displaced and why they sometimes should be, or at least have been. World history has been and still is the story of the expansion or breakup of empires, invasions, annexations, occupations, secessions, and partitions, all of which have been fought for or against. The primary motive was, of course, the desire for more territory, with religion, race, and language differences playing sometimes a great part. The stories of these struggles— and struggles they were, not academic arguments— cannot be intelligently understood unless one is better informed

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about both history and geography than are many young people today, especially in the United States, from which perspective I write. With or without our intelligent awareness, geopolitics will be with us as long as the globe survives. And we should know what to support and what to protest, if only from the sidelines. Initial access to such knowledge is offered here in the palatable but powerful form of the novel—the international novel; and towards the end of this Introduction I will spend some serious time with the terms “nationalism” and “internationalism,” and explain why I far prefer these terms, despite their protean behavior, to the currently fashionable “globalization.” Why novels? Why “the novel,” a concept given more than individual substance by way of that prefatory “the”? Why “The International Novel,” as if there were obviously some such category? Well, to begin with, the seed of this book was a pedagogic challenge. In 2010 a colleague asked me to design a course for Yale seniors in the International Studies major, hoping for something to balance the predominantly social scientific, economic, and legal emphases of the program. Accordingly, I sketched out a plan for considering nationalism and internationalism in today’s world by way of reading novels— certainly a novel approach. The result was a course called “The International Novel,” out of which this book grew. Thus institutional duty opened up for me a wide, wide world of which for far too long I, an English literature recluse, had taken no serious cognizance. I became acquainted with countries a few of which I had never previously located on a map, such as Bosnia and Somalia. The novels I chose were technically extremely diverse, making it possible to show students, some of whom had never studied fiction before, how novels can engage us, can demand sympathetic atten-

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tion where social scientific discourse or statistics may not, and use skills of communication that cannot be easily graphed. They have people in them. The novels discussed in this book are “international” in a much stronger sense than merely emanating from different countries. They were chosen to expand geographically the definition of “the novel” as a genre, since for at least a century this strange literary product has been dominated by Eurocentric and often imperial assumptions, its authors British, French, German, and Russian. To this extent my project runs parallel to that of Pascale Casanova, in The World Republic of Letters,1 whose subject is the inequality built into the literary world and its rewards by the age and size of the producers: The unequal structure that characterizes the literary world opposes large literary spaces to small ones and often places writers from small countries in situations that are both tragic and unbearable. . . . I propose here to analyze literary poverty—but also literary greatness, and the invention of literary freedom, in dominated spaces. (p. 181) Casanova, however, explicitly differentiates her project from political analysis and political egalitarianism. Like me, she enters the conversation at a time when the Nobel Prize and the Man Booker International Prize, not to mention the huge growth of translation, enable writers from countries of which we know very little to come to international attention (p. 120). But she assumes and ratifies a centripetal desire on the part of writers from “dominated spaces” to be recognized in London, Paris, or now New York (and in some cases to live there).

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Although I discovered some of my novels via the international prize lists, my objective is very different. It is to recognize precisely those authors who wrote from dominated spaces in order to bring attention to the trials and tribulations of their nations. Most of them wrote first to their countrymen and women in their own language, and it was a bonus to achieve an international profile by way of translation. Not all my novelists won the big international prizes. E. M. Forster did not win a Nobel Prize for A Passage to India, though he might have done so had not William Butler Yeats just preceded him, in 1923. Ivo Andrić won the Nobel in 1961, before the English translation of The Bridge on the Drina appeared. Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel in 1982. V. S. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 before he wrote A Bend in the River, and the Nobel Prize in 2001. Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children, but the Nobel has so far escaped him. Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Snow, and who knows what Roberto Bolaño would have won had he not died tragically of liver failure at the age of fifty. Amusingly, 2666 features a fictional novel writer, Benno von Archimboldi, who is constantly being spoken of as a future Nobelist. But one of my criteria for inclusion was, of course, prize or no, the quality of the writing, the clarity of the vision, the capacity of the novel to grasp the reader by the throat and give him or her a good conceptual shake. The novels had to have been written, though not set, after World War II, since one of my premises was that the geographical upheavals caused by Hitler and Mussolini had brought to people’s attention hitherto dormant or restricted concepts of nation, state, and boundary. This rule was breached in the case of Forster’s Passage to India, written by an Englishman and published in 1924, because it is so

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prescient of India’s becoming a nation, or two, or three, a postcolonial work avant la lettre. It therefore set up the premise of colonialism and what would come after. This book of mine is in no way “postcolonial” in the sense of the position taken up in the 1970s by American intellectuals, that the legacy of colonialism in Third World countries was primarily harmful, an accusation famously made by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978). But it is charged beneath the surface with my outrage at what I discovered about the meddling, from a position of strength, by large states in the fate of small ones. The status of Britain as chief meddler has now been passed on to the United States, and such interference is almost never disinterested. My final criterion, which overshadowed the others, was that the novelist had to be visibly conscious of nationalism and internationalism as issues, rather than taking them for granted or avoiding them for the sake of aesthetic distance. Thus on the sliding scale between experimental writing designed for the intelligentsia and a content and style we immediately recognize as realistic my novels all lean towards the “realism” end. “Real” is a term I shall use often, the quotation marks acknowledging its own instability. My fi nal list included two novels about India, A Passage to India nicely pointing forward to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), which goes to and fro between modern London and Bombay and seventh-century Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Its themes are international travel (thanks to the airlines) and the psychological difficulty of changing one’s country, trying to be British with a brown skin. Then I turned to the Balkans, a region so torn by invasions  of  and  rapine among its small countries that it gave us a

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word—“Balkanization”—to refer to the division of an area into small and often warring parts. Bosnia and Serbia have never really recovered from the dissection of the Ottoman Empire. The extraordinary Bridge on the Drina was published in Bosnia in 1945 by Ivo Andrić, who set it in the long period between the sixteenth century and the First World War, and made the great Ottoman bridge of the title into a symbol of traffic between East and West. Andrić also focused on a frequent device of internationalist fiction, locating his story in a boundary city, Višegrad, close to what is now Serbia, and having his townspeople discuss the shocking mobility of boundaries. Another completely different take on the Balkans is Ismail Kadare’s Albanian Chronicle in Stone (1971), also set in a border city, Gjirokastër, close to Greece. This book is much tighter in historical scope, covering only a few years at the outbreak of World War II, and restricting its historical commentary to the perspective of a very young boy, who speaks in the first person. Closest to Chronicle in Stone in geographical space is Orhan Pamuk’s great novel on modern Turkey, Snow (2002), also set in a border city, Kars, as far as possible from modernized and successful Istanbul, and set also in the immediate present, which Pamuk handles by inserting himself at the novel’s conclusion—as the author who has come to Kars to do research for Snow! This is a novel which surveys economic and cultural desolation, and ethnic and political conflict, with a dry smile on its face, and is hence unique in the list as having a sense of humor. And if we may understand modern Turkey through Snow, we can go back behind it in time with Rhea Galanaki’s brilliant novel about Crete and its struggles against a much earlier and invasive Turkey. The half-true Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha (1989), written by a woman in her native Greek, is set in the early nineteenth century in the context of a Cretan revolt against the Turks. 6

INTRODUCTION

But so far we have not ventured outside Europe. The most alarming geographical space to consider is modern Africa, the victim of nineteenth-century colonial greed, arbitrarily divided between the great European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. One particularly pertinent find was Nuruddin Farah’s 1986 Maps, which not only requires one to learn the history of Somalia’s dissection by England, France, and Italy, but includes a theoretical conversation on the arbitrariness of national boundaries. Maps was preceded by the greatest twentieth-century novel about central Africa, V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), set in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The novel’s historical moment is in the early days of independence of Belgium, in the “reign” of Mobutu Sese Seko, when the country was renamed Zaire and subjected to radical Africanization. Paradoxically, Mobutu wanted to eradicate the traces of Belgium colonialization, the worst in the world, by both modernizing the new nation-state and taking his people back to primitivism. Naipaul, himself born in Trinidad and always equivocal about his own identity, chose the years in which it was still possible to be uncertain about where the Congo, and Africa as a whole, were headed. At the end of the story, the answer is “nowhere,” and his narrator ends by abandoning his own experiment in relocation. A crucial space in which to consider nationalism, the colonialist heritage, and especially the concept of boundaries and frontiers, is Latin America. The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), by Gabriel García Márquez, is not his most famous novel, but it deals more directly with frustrated Latin American nationalism than does One Hundred Years of Solitude. That frustration, García Márquez implies, is largely due to North American interference in South and Central America, interference which typically supports dictators. This claim emanates, 7

INTRODUCTION

brilliantly, from the central character and narrator, a man who is himself a dictator. But since the message is woven into a fantastic web of memories uttered by someone who has lived an impossibly long time, from the days of the caudillos to, at least, the Rio Treaty of 1947, it is less “realistic” than some of García Márquez’s later novels. García Márquez also blurs the novel’s geography. It is not clear which Latin American nation-state on the Ca ribbean is our focus, but this deliberate vagueness allows the concept of “the nation” to be articulated in indefinite space, without a name and boundaries on the map. In fact, García Márquez once said that his aim was to produce a synthesis of South American dictators, a strategy which sacrifices specificity to our ability to draw larger lessons—in other words, to generalize. And now we have another great book from Latin America about whose main location we can be specific— Mexico, but more specifically still, a city on the Mexican-American border: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, published posthumously in 2004. Although this vast novel does a good deal of traveling in both time and space, around Europe in a flashback to World War II and contemporaneously as it follows a group of academics from conference to conference, the heart and point of the book is its take-no-prisoners account of what is now an international scandal, the epidemic killing of girls and women in Ciudad Juárez, the last and worst of the border cities under my inspection. This up-to-the-minute narrative reminds us that the Holocaust was only one of the modern killing fields (a term invented for the massacres in Cambodia). But the real point of 2666 is that men have invented a new form of massacre, one governed not by race but by gender. As now fully documented, among its causes are the corruption of Mexico’s border cities, including

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the police, by the drug trade and the cultural effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which permitted capitalists from the United States to build factories across the border, maquiladoras as they are called, in order to employ Mexican women at wages a small fraction of what they would have to pay Americans. Obviously this devalues the women. Though the claim is mutual economic benefit the maquiladoro system has not worked well for Mexico. And lastly, a foray into the intransigent history of the Middle East and South- Central Asia, regions as difficult to understand as they are to negotiate with. Needing at least one more woman author, I found Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian writer who, though having attended an American university, chose to return to her home on the West Bank, in occupied Palestine. The novel that deals most directly with this late case of dispossession of peoples is Wild Thorns, written in 1976 before the two intifadas and therefore more noticeably out of date than, say, Maps. Yet it is much more present to us than Maps, since its moment, the Israeli occupation, is still with us, and this fact makes it almost unbearable to read in the light of our later knowledge. To end this book, therefore, I chose Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) to provide a less desolate closure for my own narrative. Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner (2003), became an American best seller and won the South African Boeke Prize, but A Thousand Splendid Suns turns a clearer eye on Afghanistan, the sore thumb in international relations that refuses to heal. While perhaps too easy a read to ever win its author a major prize, A  Thousand Splendid Suns fulfi lls my criterion that an international  novel must be self-conscious about at least some of these issues: national

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INTRODUCTION

history, ethnic and religious divisions, the forced movement of populations, the dangers of encroachment by greedy neighbors, the interference of the Great Powers, early and late. And, in this case alone, the turning of half the nation, the women, back into incarcerated slaves. The result of these choices was an extremely heterogeneous collection of works, recognizable as different literary subgenres: the chronicle, the romance, the fairy tale (writ large in The Satanic Verses), semi-historical biography (The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha), half-concealed autobiography (Maps), the detective story gone bad (2666), and the novel of protest or complaint (Wild Thorns, which names as its predecessor Les Misérables). The relation between history and fiction in these works is never simple, and theorizing about “the novel” is best done by Fredric Jameson. I did not, however, include a work that not even I could call a novel, though it is certainly about the kind of issue this book addresses, namely, The United States of Banana, by the Puerto Rican Giannina Braschi, published in 2011. It explores the bizarre situation of Puerto Rico, torn between desire for independence (Wishy), desire to become an American state (Washy), and desire for the status quo (Wishy Washy). From the title on, it is very funny, extremely original, but a novel it is not. It is partly allegory, partly absurdist drama (with the Statue of Liberty as a speaking character), and partly an autobiographical account of Braschi’s own experience when the Twin Towers came down. It would have been nice to have been able to give a woman the last word. Now comes the hard but necessary part: clarification of terms. In order to understand “international” one must first be clear on

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what is a nation. Alert readers will have noticed that I have been using the terms “country,” “nation,” and “nation-state” as if they were interchangeable or at least unproblematic. Of these three, “country” is the least liable to challenge, “state” the most easily defined but probably the least useful because intellectually confining, “nation” the most contentious. Despite definitions which simply equate “country” with “state,” they are historically distinct. “Country” as “fatherland” or “patria” has been with us for centuries, and is used by the general public to refer not only to the territory around them but also, objectively, to a block of space on a map surrounded by a boundary and carrying a name; though the boundaries may change, and so may the name, it is still roughly the same place. It is thus primarily a geographical designation. A “state,” however, while it may be geographically visible on a map, refers to a political entity, and its meaning has long been agreed upon. The thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1926) defined it thus: “The theory of international law contemplates the world as divided into independent states. States are sovereign within their own territories, independent of other states, and equal among themselves.” The force of the definition falls on the necessity of a central government and its apparatuses, as well as on formal recognition from other governments. Thus Somaliland, which separated itself from the troubled southern part of the country, may see itself as a state, but it has not, up to this point, received recognition from any other state; while its southern brother has the distinction of being called a “failed state” by the world outside. Robert Kaplan, in his brilliant The Revenge of Geography (2012), takes a darker and far less settled view of what statehood means or confers. Changes in demographics and the centripetal force of

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megacities have, he suggests, rendered that concept of the “state” both anomalous and ineffectual: The very burden of governing vast, poor urban concentrations has made statehood more onerous than at any previous time in history; a reason for the collapse of sclerotic dictatorships, as well as for the weakness of young democracies. A state like Pakistan can have weapons of mass destruction, even as it can barely provide municipal services and protect its population from suicide bombers. States like Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, barely function, and are besieged by substate militias. As we know to our cost, substate groups like Al Qaeda are not deterred by boundaries, arm themselves with lethal weapons, and can increase their power without the responsibilities of governing. Citing Jakub Grygiel, Kaplan continues, “A state is a bad fit . . . for those with absolutist goals inspired by religious zeal or absolutist extremism.”2 So far, so good— or bad. But when we come to “nation,” all clarity vanishes. Almost all the theorists who have made pronouncements on what makes a nation have stressed that there must be strong cultural affinities and sympathies between the members of a nation, a sense of a shared past and of stability into the future, and a shared language. “Cultural” is a term, equally ambiguous, that derives from modern anthropology. There is a utopian air about such definitions. The most famous was delivered by the French historian Ernest Renan in a lecture to the Sorbonne in 1882: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things . . . constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, 12

INTRODUCTION

one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together. . . . The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion. . . . These are the kind of things that can be understood in spite of differences of race and language. . . . A nation never has any real interest in annexing or holding on to a country against its will.3 Th is statement is itself the soul of nineteenth-century nationalism, pertinent only to a large country, secure in its history, secure in its boundaries, secure in its postrevolutionary constitution. It is a definition entirely irrelevant, obviously, to regions striving to acquire national status for the first time, sometimes by secession, such as southern Sudan, or to retrieve it from a new imperialism, such as Palestine. And it is completely innocent of any prescience of mid-twentieth-century aggressive imperialism, as manifested, one hopes, for the last time in fascist Germany and the Soviet Union. Czechoslovak ia, on the other hand, is an instance that translates Renan’s theory into practical terms. Coming into being by achieving independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it had been taught the nationalist idea by nineteenth-century intellectuals. Twice more it suffered and survived imperialist subjugation, first by Hitler’s Germany (Hitler planned to eradicate nationalism in the country by eliminating the intellectuals), and then by Soviet Russia. But the ethnic tensions between Czechs and Slovaks, which by Renan’s theory should have been subordinated to a common goal, finally, in 1993, divided the nation in two. An up-to-date map will show the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This perhaps indicates that nationalism 13

INTRODUCTION

lost its spiritual force after the nineteenth century as ethnicity became more prominent as an idea. But what about language? Is a shared language crucial to a sense of nationhood? Today the only way that can be achieved is to have a “language of state,” an official language, in which all legal and political business is conducted, and which is taught in the schools. We know very well now that this does not necessarily result in cohesion. The current history of Turkey is an example, where the Kurds who were included involuntarily in the boundaries of modern Turkey have struggled for half a century to be allowed to use their own language, and most recently have demanded that it be taught in the schools. Interestingly, the Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin respected small language groups and gave them their own writing systems; Russian acquired the status of the official national language only in 1990. Today, the nation-states of India and Pakistan have, in their language diversity, made linguistic nationalism almost a contradiction in terms. The theorist who has most carefully nuanced the concept of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, admits that, in opposition to Renan, nationalism is not a social expression of consent, but is (a) imaginary and (b) official: “something emanating from the state, and serving the interests of the state first and foremost.” 4 In this formulation, “state” and “nation” seem to have converged, despite the fact that they are usually two separate stages of development. Anderson, however, says almost nothing about religion, which is a cultural root if there ever was one, and liable at present to create a new geographical space, Muslim space, that overrides current political boundaries. I have been using Renan as the old idealist theorist of “nation,” as against the new theorists, like Anderson, preceded by Ernest 14

INTRODUCTION

Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, who are/were realists in their belief in empirical study but skeptics as to the possibility of generalizable results. As Anderson put it, they all faced “the formal universality of nationality as a cultural concept . . . vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations” (p. 5). However, one must not overlook Renan’s own qualifications of his theory, which show remarkable prescience: The secession, you will say to me, and in the long term, the disintegration of nations will be the outcome of a system which places these old organisms at the mercy of wills which are often none too enlightened. . . . The nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end. A European confederation will very probably replace them. (p. 55; italics mine) Th is begins to show us that without going through the stages of nationalism, we cannot conceive of internationalism. Practically speaking, the first stages of international consciousness are agreements among states over boundaries, trade, access, and so on. In the past, we might also use the term to refer to agreements among the Great Powers as to how divide up the world. But what of internationalism, as an abstraction signified by an ism? Is this a utopian ideal, a credo, by some intended to replace “nationalism” as the goal and pride of civilized countries? Could there be internationalism without nations? Could countries, as the Indian hero of A Passage to India imagined (in a poem), skip “over the mother-land . . . and [go] straight to internationality?” Walt Whitman imagined internationality as an ideal in the poem from which A Passage to India takes its title, written at the end of the nineteenth century, specifically in 15

INTRODUCTION

1871, to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. This was Whitman’s vision: Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by networks, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near The lands to be welded together. About fifteen years later, in 1884–85, the Berlin Conference registered the age of separating the nations, dividing up Africa between the Great Powers, and drawing boundaries where previously, as Whitman noted, the “map [showed lands] incognita, blanks to be filled.” Unlike Poetry, History tells us that one could never have gone straight to internationality. First one had to have empires and their colonies, then, after years of struggle for independence, sovereign states, and only then would traffic among states be conceivable, trade genuinely reciprocal instead of exploitative, and help, military or financial, available across national boundaries. In the twentieth century the quest for nationhood was largely imitative, as new territories sought to make sense of their future. In the case of pending Indian nationhood, Forster allows himself some closing irony, though it is not clear who speaks: India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood. Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps. (p. 361)5

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If newer nations, then, came into existence as a defense against the presumed entitlements of the older ones, one kind of internationalism was born of the Second World War, the worst case on record, or at least since the Roman Empire, of “a nation having a real interest in annexing or holding on to countries against their will,” to cite Renan’s dogma against itself. Setting aside for the moment the great international alliances, England, America, and Russia on one side, and Germany, Italy, and Japan (the Axis) on the other, after the war internationalism took a different turn. It was undeniable that Germany’s and Italy’s incursions into other nations’ territory had to be revoked. Dislocated populations had to be relocated, and some new dislocations ordered. On the other hand, this movement was limited by Russia’s claims to hold on to territories it had occupied in fighting Germany, territories that, roughly speaking, had previously been part of the Russian Empire. Thus was born the new bloc of Soviet satellite states, including those around the Baltic, and, of course, the split between Russia and America that we now recall as the Cold War. If this was a form of internationalism, it was one about which few could have utopian thoughts. Tony Judt, who died in 2010, wrote a brilliant book on the aftermath of World War II where readers can find what is missing from this over-abbreviated summary, especially in what happened to small nations then formally incorporated into the Soviet Union.6 But Judt’s book takes us fast forward to what Renan had predicted, “a European confederation.” Postwar considers in detail the founding and development of the European Union (E.U.), about which Judt was formidably ironic but ultimately hopeful. “And yet, taken all in all,” he wrote, the “all” being a survey of its limitations, “the EU is a good thing. . . . [It] represents an unusual compromise:

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international governance undertaken by national governments” (pp. 732–33). Th is leads us to think about formal international organizations, and what forms of internationalism they represent. One of the first was the League of Nations (1920–42), mentioned in several of the following chapters. Collapsing, it was replaced by the United Nations, or U.N., established in 1945 with the express purpose of preventing another world war. Now largely relegated to peacekeeping forays into smaller countries and to humanitarian assistance outside Europe, the U.N. has been superseded in the public mind by the E.U., with its mandate to promote European unity and compatibility by way of open boundaries for the member states, a common currency, and big loans where necessary. There are stringent requirement for membership, which include not only financial stability but also good behavior on human rights and the environment. Established in 1957 as the European Economic Community with six original member states, it was expanded by the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 to seventeen countries. In January 2012, with the addition of Croatia, the E.U. has reached a total of twenty-eight member states. What kind of internationalism is this, if not the West against the East? Turkey is still trying gain entrance, and is struggling with its human rights violations with respect to the Kurds and, as of 2012, its increasing restrictions on free speech. But it is clear that the European Union has undertaken to be the political conscience not just of Western Europe but of Eastern Europe also, including some countries only fairly recently liberated from the Soviet Union. It is also clear that it is better to be inside than outside. To this we should add the International Criminal Court, commonly referred to as the ICC, which was established in June 2010, and already adds to internationalism’s moral 18

INTRODUCTION

stature; and also, of course, UNESCO, which alone of the big fellows has been (a) genuinely devoted to peace through education, and (b) inclusive. As of now, it has 195 member states, the 195th being Palestine. In November 2013 the New York Times reported that the United States had lost its vote in UNESCO because it had not paid its dues since 2011 in protest against the inclusion of Palestine. The World Bank came into being at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, and since then has basically just lent money, first to European countries and later to developing countries. Its domination by the United States and the United Kingdom has meant that loans have often been made on principles subject to Western theories of development, more destructive than helpful to small countries, and its early policies came under heavy criticism, which resulted in some reforms. In the late 1980s UNICEF (another international organization) reported that the financial policies of the Bank— lending to ser vice Third World debt, itself created by the Bank—had been responsible for reducing the health, nutritional, and educational levels of millions of children in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The Bank is dominated by the United States, and all its presidents since 1946 have been American. There are also widely differing opinions on the effects of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, as we shall see in my chapter on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. The problem with international organizations designed or believed to aid smaller or less-developed countries is that they sometimes teeter on the edge of a new colonialism. Th is gives utopian thoughts about internationalism, such as those of Walt Whitman, a bracing cold shower. If the alternative, however, is “globalization,” I recommend that we return to internationalism. “Globalization” invokes a world organized 19

INTRODUCTION

not by countries, nations, or states but by the World Wide Web and other forms of communication, huge corporations with international reach and no legal restraints, and, again, the free flow of trade over national boundaries; that is, not orga nized at all. The word may seem more value-neutral than “internationalism,” but it is certainly much more opaque, unless you see it as verbal veil for neoliberal policies of uninhibited investment and the interdependence of financial markets. The dangers of the latter became apparent in 2008, when a financial crisis initiated in the United States spread rapidly through Europe. “Globalization” has acquired a large body of skeptics and critics, some of whom fear the sidelining of nation-states, especially the small ones, while some fear for the environment (who in a global economy is responsible for large-scale damage?), some see it as a carte blanche for outsourcing to countries where lower wages can be paid, and some see it as an inevitable threat to democracy, which can only operate, if at all, within nation-states. And “globalization” carries with it the dangerous air of inevitability (it’s happening anyway) which can lead us back to insularity and complacency. Few of the novels discussed here take on the political and social implications of these giant changes, though the one of the most recent, Bolaño’s 2666, addresses some of them indirectly. As it dawns on writers what we have allowed to happen to their world, though, there will be more novels that indict the persons or governments behind these supposedly disembodied forces or that simply cry for help. The last point to make about my book, however, is that everything in it is a moving target. We will always need new descriptors: failed states may begin to succeed, occupations may end, China may release Tibet, the United States may cease to interfere so ineptly in

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INTRODUCTION

the Middle East, Turkey may fully integrate the Kurds, the European Union may pull itself together, conservative Islamism may be contained, the Democratic Republic of the Congo may finally live up to its name, more physical walls may come down than will be erected. And pigs may fly.

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E . M . F O R ST E R , A PASS AG E TO I N D I A

Not until she is a nation will her sons be treated with respect.

“Passage to India” is, you were reminded in my Introduction, the title of a poem by Walt Whitman that was adopted for a novel by the English writer E. M. Forster. The poem was written in 1871, and Forster could have read it by the turn of the century. It speaks (at length) Whitman’s exuberant internationality, and the most salient stanza has already been quoted. But another stanza specifically celebrates India, jewel of the Old World, for its wideness: The old, most populous, wealthiest of Earth’s lands, The streams of the Indus and the Ganges and their many affluents; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On one side China, and on the other side Persia and Arabia, To the south the great seas, and Bay of Bengal; The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes, Old occult Brahma, interminably far back—the tender and junior Buddha, Central and southern empires, and their belongings, possessors.

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Whitman, I believe, would never have approved of British India, over which by 1889 England claimed various levels of possession. In recalling Whitman’s poem, Forster chose not to endorse Whitman’s sense of great possibilities in the future. Never mind. What it offers, on a smaller imaginative scale, is still extraordinary: a closeup view of the then modern state of India, England’s prized possession, from the perspective of certain educated Indians, both Muslim and Hindu, who deeply resent their country’s subordinate position and crazy patchwork of governments. It also, of course, registers the statements and reactions of the colonizing class, as well as of two Englishwomen who most certainly do not belong to that class. A Passage to India was Forster’s last novel, and although it was published in 1924, a little over a century ago, it has passed into that enviable and lightly populated realm of the classic that does not read like a classic. It speaks to us as if we were seated with its author on a verandah, enjoying a civilized conversation about the state of the world; a verandah, not an English drawing room, the implied venue of Forster’s earlier novels, which fall into the sheltered if occasionally enchanting category of the “novel of manners.” The characters in the novel of manners, as practiced preeminently by Jane Austen, usually face no greater problems than those of class, and this is also true of Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End. A Passage to India, in contrast, is a remarkably early study of race as one of the greatest causes of human conflict, and the manners it displays are the bad manners, the contemptuous rudeness, of the British as colonial managers of India. This, then, explains why A Passage to India rightfully belongs in this study, despite its date and its English author. Indeed, it sets my agenda. Forster’s novel is not only a warning of the end of the colonial era, it shows an enlightened sensitivity towards the issues of 24

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nationality, sovereignty, foreign interference, and the imbalance in power between the West and elsewhere. That it was written before World War II only amplifies one’s sense that Forster was ahead of his time, and to some extent ahead of ours. A Passage to India can be read as a wary prophecy of India’s independence, and even of something we have seen only in glimpses thereafter: a Whitmanesque better world in which nations learn to deal with each other as equals, whatever their disparities in size and wealth. E. M. Forster may have been predisposed to unconventional thought by the fact that he was a closeted and unfulfilled homosexual, a plight altered only in fiction, his posthumously published novel Maurice (1971). He was protected somewhat by inherited wealth from the need to make a living, so he had the leisure to write. He also traveled considerably, and spent two periods in India, one in 1914 and one in the early 1920s as private secretary to Tukojirao III, the maharajah of Dewas, one of the native states. The first trip was in the company of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who was also a homosexual, equally unfulfilled, and an independent thinker who during World War I formed the idea of a League of Nations. The second passage to India was undertaken at the invitation of a young Indian whom Forster had met in England, Syed Ross Masood, with whom he had fallen in love and to whom he dedicated A Passage to India. His ser vice to the maharajah of Dewas amusingly placed Forster in the same position as the reckless Miss Derek of his novel, silently criticized by Ronny Heaslop, who “did not approve of English people taking ser vice under the Native States. Where they obtain a certain amount of influence, but at the expense of the general prestige [of the English administration]” (p. 84).1 By 1924, when A Passage to India was published, British ownership of India was already causing resentment among Indians 25

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themselves, that mélange of Muslims, Hindus of various castes, and Sikhs, whose difficulties in getting along with each other would eventually (and disastrously) result in the partition of the peninsula in 1947. Direct rule by the British Crown had been the result of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a conflict started by dissatisfaction in the army, but which is recalled by Forster’s Englishmen as “the unspeakable limit of cynicism, untouched since 1857” (p. 176). But there is no reference to other events that preceded the novel’s appearance: the Lucknow Pact of 1916, when the Hindu Congress and the Muslim League united behind a demand for more self-government, a demand rejected by the British; the repressive Rowlatt Acts passed in 1919, or the Amritsar Massacre that followed, or the MontagueChelmsford Reforms that responded to both of the above; and, most important of all, the beginning of Gandhi’s Satyagraha, the movement for a free India, announced in 1920. The effect of these curious silences is to make it possible to place the events of the novel rather farther back in time, to the period before the First World War. Significantly, no other dates are mentioned. Aziz, the novel’s hero, states that his maternal grandfather fought against the English in the Rebellion (at that time designated the Mutiny), which might locate the story about 1910. This has led to an argument among critics as to the novel’s interior chronology, some believing that Forster muddled information from his two visits, others that he deliberately repressed overt references to significant political events in order to make the novel less “political,” others, including myself, believing that the veiling of contemporary politics constitutes another challenge to detection, to rival the mystery of what happened in the Marabar Caves. If readers know the context, their brains will start to work; and while the Gothic plot of the caves, though resolved by societal procedure, is never solved, the political plot lures us to read 26

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on, to learn more about India, colonial, independent, past, present, unified and divided. How Forster himself worked can be shown in one telling conversation. When the racism of the English is excited by their wrongful belief that Aziz has attempted the rape of Adela Quested in the Caves, the abominable Mrs. Turton, wife of the Collector, exclaims, “Why, they [the Indians] ought to crawl from here to the caves on their hands and knees whenever an Englishwoman’s in sight, . . . they ought to be ground into the dust, we’ve been far too kind with our Bridge Parties and the rest” (p. 204). At the surface level she refers to the bridge party thrown by her far more humane husband, Harry Turton, the city’s governor and tax collector, to enable the Indian community to meet the English, in particular the new arrivals, Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore. His goal, as he says lightly, was to “bridge the gulf between East and West” (p. 24), a phrase that is, however, the key to the novel’s endeavor. At the level of deep allusion Mrs. Turton refers to the events of the Amritsar Massacre, whose catalyst was the assault on an English schoolteacher, Miss Marcella Sherwood, by a mob in the Punjab. In revenge, Major Reginald Dyer planned the most extreme reprisal in English history, the firing on a crowd of unarmed civilians in a crowded space from which they were not ordered to disperse but simply mown down until the troops’ ammunition ran out. The following week he issued the notorious “crawling order” about the street where Miss Sherwood was assaulted. For six days, people wishing to use the street had to crawl up or down it on all fours, lying flat on their bellies. The houses on the street had no other means of egress. The actual “crawling order” of 1919 is thus invoked (recalled) by the novel’s most hated character. If chronologically we cannot date the action of the novel except inferentially and roughly, geographically it is located in the imaginary 27

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town of Chandrapore, a desolate outpost of the British administration in Bengal in northeast India, on the edge of the Ganges, not far from the real Barabar Hills, which are transmuted into the sinister Marabar Hills. Chandrapore was suggested by the actual town of Bankipore, and Forster himself visited the Barabar Hills. It is a culturally long way from New Delhi, whose construction as the new capital had begun in 1912, or Amritsar, home of the massacre, or Benares, the sacred city with its music and its universities, the first of which was founded in 1916, or Hyderabad or Bhopal, native states in which Aziz imagines escaping British insults, or Bombay, the port to the west, or Dewas, where Forster actually stayed in the service of his maharajah. It is, in short, a provincial dead-end consisting of bungalows cheaply erected on a grid by the British, and nothing to see except the disastrous caves. There is a hospital run by Major Callender, a vicious racist, a law court where Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate, administers “justice,” and a social club with gardens and tennis courts from which Indians are excluded. Its contribution to education, Britain’s greatest justification of its rule, is Government College, a small school “slapped down by the Public Works Department” (p. 58), where the novel’s other hero, Cyril Fielding, has been brought from England to teach. Given the extraordinary cultural resources of India, the town is an insult to taste and intelligence. Forster himself says of it, “It charms not, neither does it repel” (p. 6), but he stacked the cards against it. Its British administrators, therefore, are nobodies, with nothing to draw on except the occasional British public school education (Heaslop), and an inherited distaste for the “natives.” Into this narrow world comes a very plain girl, Adela Quested, with something of a personal fortune and a chaperone, Mrs. Moore, Ronny Heaslop’s elderly mother. Adela wishes to “see India” before 28

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she decides finally to marry Ronny, whom she has met only briefly before on a walking tour of the Lake District. Her odd character manages to disrupt completely the complacent life of the British station at Chandrapore, bringing disgrace and loss of employment to some of the British officials, but exhilaration to the Indian community, who feel that they have won a symbolic battle. Like many great works of literature, the novel’s crisis occurs in the form of a trial. This is not the place to offer a summary of the plot, which would spoil the suspense for any reader who has not previously either read the novel or consulted Wikipedia. In the rest of this chapter, I shall focus on what is less often noticed or discussed, the role of Aziz in focusing Forster’s views on nationalism and internationalism, with ever increasing explicitness. Aziz is a partly Westernized Indian, a Moslem, a young but efficient doctor and surgeon. We are never told where he trained, though in the manuscripts it was in Germany, and the omission lowers his status. Aziz is a widower who has left his children to be brought up by their grandmother, a man of quick friendships and generosity, punctuated by acts of small malice, ungenerous thoughts, unreasonable suspicions, and racial hostility against the British to equal theirs against the “natives”; in other words, a believable human being. It is important that he is a poet. He may be the fictional profile of Syed Ross Masood, in which case Forster’s own role is played by Fielding, the English schoolteacher. In the second chapter Aziz and his friends discuss “whether or not it is possible to be friends with an Englishman” (p. 8), thereby introducing the Friendship plot, the ups and downs of Aziz’s friendship with Fielding, which in my view is the main plot. Most readers focus with awed fascination on the Gothic mystery plot, on what actually happened in the Marabar Caves, but this is concluded before 29

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the third section of the novel. Not all readers read on. The Friendship plot frames and embraces the Mystery plot, and its climax is essential to Forster’s message about India. Everyone knows that the novel is divided into three sections, roughly aligned with three different religious possibilities: “Mosque” sets up the Muslim element; “Caves,” the extra-long second section, posits some very ancient chthonic power; and “Temple” is devoted to Hindu rituals and theology. In “Mosque” Aziz meets and establishes immediate intimacy with Fielding. In “Caves” we follow the nearly tragic story of Aziz’s accusation by Adela, with its heavy political overtones. This tests the friendship, and Fielding passes the test with flying colors. In “Temple,” it first emerges that Aziz has unilaterally abandoned the friendship: A rift had opened between them after the trial when Cyril had not joined in his [victory] procession; [his] advocacies of the girl had increased it; then came the post-cards from Venice, so cold, so unfriendly that all agreed that something was wrong. (p. 278) A later letter from England telling him that Cyril was married—he did not stop to read it through— convinces him that he has been betrayed, that Cyril has married his adversary and made off with the fortune which should have come to him in reparation. It was the end of a foolish experiment. And, though sometimes at the back of his mind he felt that Fielding had made sacrifices for him, it was now all confused with his genuine hatred of the English. (pp. 278–79)

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Thus the question of chapter 2, which seemed so lightly posed but became so deep, is answered in the negative. But Forster has not finished with it yet. When Fielding arrives in Mau, and all Aziz’s misunderstandings and suspicions are resolved in a great rainstorm and a great tank of warm water into which everybody falls (the symbolism is a trifle obvious), the friendship is reestablished on carefully guarded terms. We will need to follow this wary reconciliation, which occurs in a heated exchange between Aziz and Fielding in the final chapter. But before that we need to collect all the statements about nationality (and internationality) and see how they are arranged. In chapter 2, after the pleasant disagreement as to whether it is possible for an Indian and an Englishman to be friends, the group at Hamidullah’s dinner party try to distinguish between the most rude and the more kindly English, especially their women. And here it is important to note that what we hear from Aziz, as indeed from every other character, is mediated by that old-fashioned device of the English novel, the omniscient narrator. Thus the question of whether all Englishwomen are like Mrs. Turton reaches this conclusion: “He too generalized from his disappointments—it is difficult for members of a subject race to do otherwise. Granted the exceptions, he agreed that all Englishwomen are haughty and venal” (p. 11). Then comes the most obvious rebuke to their prejudice—the bridge party offered by Collector Turton. As it looms, a remark by someone we presume is the narrator undermines the generous gesture: “All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt” (p. 34). But a moment later that thought is attributed to the local missionaries, who relied on the

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belief that human unification could and would happen only in heaven. By slightly similar indirection, the attitudes that Forster deplores are articulated by Ronny Heaslop, selected for the role of comic villain by his little red nose, who explains why this cannot be a novel of manners in the traditional sense. “We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly,” he lectures his mother. “We’re out here to do justice and keep the peace. . . . India isn’t a drawing room. . . . I am out here to work, mind, to hold this wretched country by force. I’m not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man [read “Forster”]. . . . We’re not pleasant in India, and we don’t intend to be pleasant” (p. 45). Aziz falls slightly ill; and his Indian friends convene at his bedside, soon to be joined by less friendly persons and Fielding. Aziz recites a poem by the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib, which soothes the group: “Not as a call to battle, but as calm assurance came the feeling that India was one; Moslem; always had been; an assurance that lasted until they looked out the door” (p. 96). In fact Ghalib’s thought mediated slightly between Islam and Hindu religion, and told India gracefully “that she was a continent and a unity” (p. 96). Hamidullah, however (Aziz’s host at the earlier dinner), has called in on his way to a “worrying committee of notables, nationalist in tendency, where Hindus, Moslems, two Sikhs, two Parsis, a Jain and a Native Christian tried to like one another more than came natural to them” (p. 114). In reality, they were bound together by their hatred of the English, “and if the English were to leave India, the committee would vanish also” (p. 115). The cynicism too is prophetic of what would happen when the English did leave India. Soon the conversation focuses on just that. Aziz asks, If the British are now mostly atheists, that is to say, no longer have a reli-

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gious cause to back up their colonial policy, “how is England justified in holding India?” (p. 102). There is only one answer to a conversation of this type. “England holds India for her good.” Yet Fielding was disinclined to give it. (p. 102) Fielding falls back on the laissez-faire notion that one should let well-intentioned Englishmen, who wish to serve in India, men like himself, have their wish. Hamidullah pursues the point: “And those Englishmen who are not delighted to be in India—have they no excuse?” he asks. “None,” replies Fielding, “chuck ’em out” (p. 102). It should be apparent by now that the thought of A Passage to India, its agenda, is conveyed primarily by way of conversation— not by long disquisitions by the author, such as we find in the “novel of ideas.” This means that it is dialectical. Occasionally we hear, as it were, a voice from the podium: “Trouble after trouble encountered Aziz, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments” (p. 119). But perhaps, Forster also wants to say, the spirit of the Indian earth can be resisted. When after the trial the Indian magistrate who has presided, Mr. Das, approaches Aziz for a poem for his brother-in-law’s new monthly magazine, which “is not for Hindus, but Indians generally,” Aziz replies, “There is no such person in existence as the general Indian” (p. 251), but in trying to write the poem he moves forward to an entirely new plateau of enlightenment: He longed to compose a new song which should be acclaimed by multitudes and even sung in the fields. In what

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language shall it be written? And what shall it announce? He vowed to see more of Indians who were not Mohammedans, and never to look backwards. It is the only healthy course. Of what help, in this latitude and hour, are the glories of Cordova and Samarcand? They have gone, and while we lament them the English occupy Delhi and exclude us from East Africa. Islam itself, though true, throws crosslights over the path to freedom. The song of the future must transcend creed. . . . Half closing his eyes, he attempted to love India. She must imitate Japan. Not until she is a nation will her sons be treated with respect. (pp. 252–53; italics mine) But in another poem, we are told, Aziz had “skipped over the motherland (whom he did not really love) and gone straight to internationality” (p. 329; italics mine). What that would involve we have no idea. But perhaps Forster thought that the modern novel might replace poetry as the art of imagining a better future. Clearly this is an authorial manifesto. But it is not the last. For that we have again to rely on conversation, on the last argument between Aziz and Fielding as they take their farewell horseback ride in the Mau jungle. This chapter (37), half warm, half fierce, confirms the hypothesis that Forster presented his ideas dialectically: All the way back to Mau they wrangled about politics. Each had hardened since Chandrapore, and a good knock about proved enjoyable. They trusted each other, although they were going to part, perhaps because they were going to part. Fielding had no further use for politeness, he said, meaning that the British Empire really can’t be abolished because it’s rude. (p. 305) 34

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So much for the novel of manners, even in its Indian form! Aziz retorts, “Very well, and we have no use for you,” and glares at him with “abstract hate.” What is abstract hate? Obviously not personal hate, but theoretical, ideological anger. Growing more excited with every rude exchange, Aziz rises in his stirrups as if his mount were a warhorse, and ups the choler of the moment: Clear out, all you Turtons and Burtons. We wanted to know you ten years back—now it’s too late. If we see you and sit on your committees, it’s for political reasons, don’t you make any mistake. . . . Clear out, clear out, I say, why are we put to so much suffering? We used to blame you, now we blame ourselves, we grow wiser. Until England is in difficulties we keep silent, but in the next European war—aha-aha! Then is our time. (p. 305) Th is is also a prophecy, remarkable as it seems, of World War II, when in 1942 the Indian Congress, in support of the Quit-India campaign, withdrew its support from Britain. Then Aziz lurches back to an earlier position, prior to his momentary glimpse of internationalism. “India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!” And Fielding, or Forster, mocks him, as we have already heard: “India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps” (p. 361). Both Guatemala and Belgium, incidentally, gained the status of independent nations in 1839. Warmed by this verbal contest, the two men ride their horses together, and 35

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half embrace. “Why can’t we be friends now?” asks Fielding. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But in a famous conclusion, Forster denies a personal solution. “The horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file,” and the sky, more intelligent, speaks of patience: “No, not yet . . . No, not there.” How anyone, including Forster himself, could claim that this novel is not political is beyond me. But that pose is frequently taken by novelists. Forster himself said in 1962 that if the book had any political influence, it was “not intended; [he] was interested in the story and the characters. But [he] welcomed it.” That is to have it both ways. As we shall see, A Passage to India is not only premonitory of other international novels, as defined in the Introduction, it often exceeds them in its clarity and frequency of statements about nationhood, something not easily noticed until those statements, as here, are extracted and linked in a series. It has been said that the novel is dated. And yet Forster was so far ahead of us that we marvel. In 1920, before he had started work on A Passage to India, he wrote that “the nations must understand each other and quickly, and without the interposition of their governments, for the shrinkage of the globe is throwing them into one another’s arms.”2 Today the shrinkage of the globe by instant communication more likely squashes nations and ethnic groups up against each other, and the arms that they encounter are unlikely to embrace. A Passage to India has received more critical commentary than any other novel surveyed in this book with the possible exception of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which also happens to be about relations between modern England and modern India, and which demonstrates that Forster’s “not yet” was still in force in 1988. Some readers of my book will look for footnotes and gestures to earlier 36

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critics; indeed there is barely a single insight into Forster’s text that has not been seen before, not least the amount of attention that a single word, “muddle” (a synonym for India), has received. But who could miss it? And why burden an older work with a heavy apparatus such as is not available for newer and less famous novels? Especially when there is so much more to notice in A Passage to India than this short chapter can honor. Reader, read on.

37

IVO ANDRIĆ, THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA

Lands and provinces and, with them, living men and their habitations passed from hand to hand like small change. The author of historical novels could put as an epigraph to his works . . . the old saying, “cogitavi dies antiquos et annos aeternos in mente habui” (I have pondered the days of yore and I have kept in mind the years of eternity).

Quite close to E. M. Forster in a generational sense, Ivo Andrić could also be said to have described the end of an empire—here the Ottoman Empire— and imagined its replacement by roaring nationalisms and ethnicisms, like the winds set free from the cave of Aeolus. Forster was born in 1879, Andrić in 1892. When Andrić published The Bridge on the Drina, his magnificent account of his native country of Bosnia up to the beginning of World War I, he shaped it as a story of peaceful coexistence among Turks and Serbs, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, symbolized by the great bridge erected by a Turkish vizier to connect East and West, emblem and agent of international traffic and cooperation for over three hundred years. The beautiful epigraph he proposed for novels such as this, the second of my two, is taken from his acceptance speech to the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, December 10, 1961. It 39

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helps to explain the curiously benign message of this novel. And one might add Andrić’s reparative ideal of storytelling, from the same source: “One might say that after the fashion of the legendary and eloquent Scheherazade, this story attempts to stave off the executioner . . . and to prolong the illusion of life and time.” Undoubtedly this vision glossed over the painfulness of Turkish rule, which was replaced not by independence as the Ottoman Empire weakened but by takeover by another empire, with the connivance of the European Great Powers. In response to insurrections by the Christian peasants against the Turks in the 1870s, and supposedly to “stabilize” the Balkans, the Congress of Berlin, led by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany, decided in 1878 that Serbia should be fully independent, with some territorial gains, but that Bosnia and Herzegovina should become a protectorate of AustriaHungary. In 1908 the Austrians took this as precedent for incorporating these territories fully into their empire. Directly and indirectly this led to Serbian and Bosnian nationalism, which led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, which led to World War I. In 1914, the great bridge over the Drina, which had been mined by the Austrian military six years earlier, was struck so often by fire from the Serbs in the border mountain that the mines exploded, sending the seventh pier flying in fragments; “The broken arches yawned painfully towards one another across the break” (p. 312).1 In English, one wants to complete the pathos, by exchanging “yearned” for the translator’s “yawned.” According to Andrić the bridge had been completed in 1571, a gift to the town of Višegrad from Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, the famous sixteenth-century vizier who had been born in a village nearby. Taken to Istanbul in 1516 as part of the annual tribute of Christian children to the empire, the vizier had remembered his birthplace 40

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and made it famous with one of the greatest monuments of Eastern architecture. The power of the perfectly proportioned white bridge over the story that Andrić tells might, in this context, be seen as civilization’s answer to the malignant nihilism and underground darkness of the Barabar Caves, which may, however, outlive it. In 1943, during World War II, five of the bridge’s arches were completely destroyed, mimicking what happened to Bosnia during that war and its aftermath. Under Marshal Tito, Bosnia enjoyed another period of relative calm, and, as it happened, the famous bridge was rebuilt according to the original design between 1950 and 1952—too late for Andrić’s novel. It now seems threatened by another kind of progress, the taming of the Drina by dams and lakes to provide hydroelectric power; no more Great Floods, but a subtle undermining of the bridge by new currents. Andrić himself was born to Roman Catholic parents from a Croatian family, but raised by members of his mother’s family in Višegrad, on the border between Bosnia and Serbia. In later life he seems to have identified more with Belgrade, and he wrote in the Serbian dialect and script, but all his novels are about Bosnia. In his own words, he “first saw the light of day by the bridge on the Drina,” and while his friends played by the river, he “liked to sit on the stone ‘sofa,’ as it was called, in the middle of the bridge and listen for hours to the tales of the old folk.”2 This reminds us that the remarkable feature of the bridge was the kapia, that part in the center where the bridge widened, making it into a place for meetings and storytelling. On the kapia was the “sofa,” a beautiful long stone bench. This creation, as it were, of a village square on the bridge extended its significance from linking two distinct and opposed cultures, East and West, to creating a new, midstream culture, where Bosnians of all kinds could sit in comfort together and differences of opinion 41

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could be aired. It is no coincidence that the book’s only expositions of political theory—by students—take place on the kapia, but it may also be true that some of Andrić’s inserted stories are folktales that he heard on the sofa. The Mehmet Pasha bridge marked Andrić for life, even after he had moved to Belgrade and become a writerly recluse under the quisling government of 1941–44. In one of his short stories there is, as it were, a sketch for his great novel: “The Bridge on the Zepa,” another Ottoman legacy, which ends beautifully with a moment of “instant rapport” between author and “warm hewn stone,” and a stated decision by the author as “I” to write that smaller bridge’s story. Some such decision must have been made by Andrić in Belgrade, no doubt as a relief from the grisly present. For The Bridge on the Drina deals with the past, from the far past of the bridge’s conception at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to 1914, and no farther. Its scope is primarily that of the nineteenth century, which Andrić presents as the lull before the storm. In his novel, the account of the new overlords is largely positive— a story of modernization, good management, and rational taxation. This stage is brilliantly defined by Andrić in chapter 14, as the century draws towards its peaceful close. As a student, however, Andrić had had a very different view of the Hapsburg regime. He participated in a revolutionary movement, Young Bosnia, that aimed to promote independence and unification for the southern Slavic peoples, defining the region by the fact that its people spoke more or less the same language whatever their religious differences. There was a certain irony in this, since Andrić had acquired his education in world affairs in four Hapsburg universities, Zagreb, Kraków, Vienna, and Graz. At Vienna he had attended lectures on the history of the Balkans that no doubt fed his youthful 42

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insurgency. He was arrested by the Austrian police at the beginning of World War I, the war precipitated by a crazy young Bosnian assassin, and interned. His first major publication was a poetic account of his years of imprisonment, significantly titled Ex Ponto, which appeared in 1918. This is a learned allusion to the letters that the Roman poet Ovid wrote from Pontus on the Black Sea, in northeastern Anatolia. Ovid was lamenting his exile for some unnamed offense, whether political or personal, against Augustus. But there may also be a subdued pun on pons, pontis, the Latin word for “bridge.” On December 1, 1918, shortly after the appearance of Ex Ponto, Serbia succeeded in defeating Austria-Hungary, an event outside the chronology of The Bridge on the Drina, and there was formed the new kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. At this stage, Andrić, who had always suffered from lung trouble, moved to Belgrade, where the climate suited him better, and began a series of slow moves into and upwards in the diplomatic ser vice of the new “country.” He was a delegate from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the League of Nations in Geneva during 1930–34, which alone suggests a dialogue between nationalism and internationalism. At the outbreak of World War II he was Yugoslavia’s minister in Berlin, and when the invasion of his country by Germany seemed imminent he escaped in a hurry to Belgrade. Escaped to what? Occupation and desolation. Belgrade was bombed by the Germans without a declaration of war on April 6, 1941, an attack which destroyed the national library. From thence we have not only the remarkably serene Bridge on the Drina, completed in late 1944, but also the abysmally pessimistic Woman from Sarajevo, a tale of maniacal usury and wartime profiteering by a Serbian (and hence Christian) female, also published in 1945. It is important to note that Andrić refused to 43

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publish anything while his “country” was still under German occupation. Under Tito, he came out of retirement and accepted various honorary positions. But he never wrote another major novel. After the Nobel Prize of 1961, which he received mostly for The Bridge, what was there left to say? Andrić, who died in 1975, did not live to see the worst of the racist and nationalist violence that followed the death of Tito and the breakup of the Yugoslavian federation, with its savage consequences, minor nationalisms, especially Serbian, run amok. Fortunately he did not have to endure the ignominy of the Dayton Accord brokered by America, which finally brought peace to Bosnia by way of its partition on ethnic lines into quite unnatural shapes. Andrić did not have to juggle with the evasive term “ethnic cleansing.” Only recently has the Serbian general, Ratko Mladić, after sixteen years, been captured; he will stand trial in an international court for his leading role in the massacres of Bosniaks and attacks on Sarajevo in the Bosnian wars of 1992– 95. Serbia is pleased, because this will speed its entry into the European Union. But Mladić’s success and immunity was a shaming episode for the United Nations, which managed no effective intervention until too late, and no less a huge blot on the reputation of U.S. president Bill Clinton. The Bridge on the Drina may therefore now seem a little out of date unless one reads it as a form of reparation, with the bridge as the central character. Then its sense of time and place, of ethos and community, establish a quiet space, much like the kapia on the bridge, for meditation on the causes of violence in a country or a region, and what troubles the term “nation” brings with it. The first step in reading, or rather rereading, the novel carefully is to ask in what sense it is a novel. Lovett Edwards, who translated it into English and who knew Andrić slightly, states that Andrić 44

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himself called it a chronicle. This is not quite the case. Andrić speaks of “the chronicle of the bridge” as it draws to a close, but he does not title the book “A Chronicle,” as in his own Bosnian Chronicle. Edwards’s alternative term is intended to deal with the fact that, for a novel, “its scope is too vast, its characters too numerous, its period of action too long” (p. 8). There is no single hero or heroine to hold it together, nor even a family or a dynasty. In place of these there is the bridge, whose birth we attend, whose stability we come to count on, whose purpose is temporarily marred, in about 1804, by a military block house, a place of execution, and whose perfect outline is broken in the last few pages. Shortly before that end, Andrić refers to “the chronicle of the bridge on the Drina” (p. 265), certainly a hint of generic intent. We will have to return to the semantics of “chronicle” with Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, but here we should note that The Bridge on the Drina contains a pathetic version of a chronicler, the schoolmaster who claims to be writing a chronicle of Višegrad, a claim which made some of his neighbors ner vous. “In actual fact,” wrote Andrić, “the chronicle was neither extensive nor dangerous”: In the last five or six years, since the schoolmaster had first begun this work, only four pages of a small exercise book had been filled. For the greater number of the town’s events were not considered by the schoolmaster as of sufficient importance to warrant entry into his chronicle and for that reason it remained as unfruitful, dry and empty as a proud old maid. (p. 128) At the very least, this satire suggests that Andrić, if he thought of himself as writing a chronicle, reinvented the genre. 45

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The term “novel” has traditionally been used to define a work of fiction, as evidenced by the need for still another term, the nonfiction novel! And “historical novel” won’t quite work either, for reasons that would detain us. It is clear that the bridge and its history constitute the plot, and they are indeed “true.” The historical backing is insisted on throughout by Andrić’s clever way with dates, of which more soon. But the work is peopled by dozens of minor characters, minor also in the sense of social status, who have their own little plots, closely related in form and color to Andrić’s short stories, and with no historical claims whatsoever. The only one of these who is given any continuity of his own is the hodja, or muezzin, Alihodja, who appears as a young man halfway through the book, in the year 1878 (p. 114). The question being debated on the bridge is whether to resist the Austrians by force. Alihodja, arguing for passive resistance only, infuriates an incendiary commander, and in consequence is nailed “by the right ear to that oak beam wedged between two stone steps on the kapia, which was all that remained of the former blockhouse” (p. 119). After this cruel symbol of his identification with the bridge, Alihodja is the one character, other than the omniscient narrator, who articulates its significance. Surely it is important to Andrić that Alihodja is a Turk and a Muslim. As the Christian Serbs and Austrians destroy each other, Alihodja becomes more and more the normative figure that novelists often employ. To return to literary terminology, if we wish for simplicity, we can call The Bridge on the Drina a novel to distinguish it from Andrić’s collections of short stories. But if we wish for precision, The Bridge on the Drina can best be described as a collection of short stories of peasant life held together by a bridge, the bridge in this metaphorical sense being the political history that so skillfully appears and then disappears between tales. In the center of the plan, 46

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though not mathematically so, is the discussion about nationalism that takes place on the kapia, the physical center of the bridge. Some readers will prefer the tales and overlook the history. But in order to understand what the book is trying to tell us about history rather than about persons, it might be helpful to insert here a chronology of the events to which it actually refers, takes as given, or significantly omits. Andrić’s first chapters are devoted to the conception and “birth” of the bridge, and to the first two sacrifices to it, the horrific staking alive of a peasant who had been attacking the work under cover of night and the crushing to death of a young Arab workman by a great stone block. The book’s first date is that of the blood tribute of 1516 (p. 22) which carried away to Istanbul the Bosnian Christian boy who would eventually become grand vizier. The prominence and isolation of that date presumably indicates the moment of conception. We are not told when the fearsome Abidaga, who would oversee the construction, actually arrives, but we are told by the novel that it was completed in 1571 (p. 68). A crucial break in the construction occurs when the grisly Abidaga, who had forced the Christian peasants (the rayah) to work on the bridge without pay, is replaced by an upright and genial official, and the forced labor (another kind of sacrifice) ceases. A century passes with nothing noteworthy, it seems, for Andrić to remark, although there is a passing allusion to Turkey’s loss of Hungary to the Austrians. The next episode of which he does take notice is the first Serbian insurrection against the Turks. This began in 1804 and lasted until 1817. The only dating, however, that Andrić allows us is the vague “at the beginning of [the] last century” (p. 82). During this war going on around them, the Turks and the Serbs of 47

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Bosnia “heard with their own ears the rumbling of ‘Karageorge’s gun’ (naturally with completely opposite feelings)” (pp. 82–83). At this point the Turks created the first violation of the bridge by building upon it a hideous army block house. “The lovely kapia was concealed by the wooden structure which squatted over it with its wooden beams like some sort of gigantic bird” (p. 85). To complete the desecration the Turkish soldiers began to ornament the block house with the chopped-off heads of actual or suspected Serbian rebels. So vanished, for about three years, “all meetings, conversations, songs and enjoyment” (p. 90). Then one night, after the Serbian insurrection had died down, the block house burned to the ground. So the bridge was cleansed. Time passes, apparently uneventfully— and without dates. “Those were the few decades about the middle of the nineteenth century in which the Turkish Empire was consumed by a slow fever” (p. 94; italics mine). Andrić forbears to comment on the signs of Serbia’s territorial ambitions, which became evident in the middle of the century, when there were inconclusive attempts to redraw the frontier between Bosnia and Serbia in Serbia’s favor. But at this point Andrić pauses and delivers a statement of purpose: It was not only the wars, pestilences and migrations of the times which broke against the bridge. . . . There were other exceptional events which gave their name to the year in which they took place and were long remembered. (p. 102) This caveat introduces a whole chapter devoted to the tragic story of the beautiful Fata Avgada, who threw herself into the Drina as she crossed the great bridge on horseback on her way to a detested arranged marriage. She gave her name to a year, but we will never 48

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know which it was. Andrić merely writes, teasingly, that the legendary suicide took place on the “last Thursday in August.” Th is alternative concept of “exceptional events” clearly resonates with the discussion, still to come, of the schoolmaster chronicler who can never decide what is worth recording. The concept of folk dating, however frustrating to some, gives power, and a special kind of cover, to the practice of interpolating folktales into a historical narrative. But now, suddenly, and all the more effectively, we get a date, and what a date it is: “The beginning of the summer of 1878” (p. 113). Eighteen seventy-eight was the year of the Congress of Berlin. Among its results was the independence of Serbia, while its neighbor Bosnia was handed over to the Austrians. Not a word of these international deals reaches Višegrad, which only experiences their local effects. “By mid-August the Austrians entered Sarajevo,” and there occurs in the novel that council on the bridge as to the possibility or uselessness of resistance; this, as we have seen, ends with the nailing of Alihodja’s ear to the one piece of block house timber that remains on the stone bridge, and he thus becomes its third martyr. “Eighteen seventy-eight,” then, marks for Andrić an “exceptional event,” even though, as he is quick to point out, nothing much had changed for the inhabitants of Višegrad. The next day the Austrians march into Višegrad and the period of occupation begins. It should by now be apparent that Bosnia was, if not the bone of contention, the poor relation in the middle of the Balkans, torn between two warring powers, Austria-Hungary and Serbia, which was increasingly restless and ambitious. But its citizens were not yet aware of their dangerous position. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century there occurred throughout Europe “one of those short and rare lulls in human relationships and social events” from which Bosnia could also benefit, “three decades of relative prosperity and 49

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apparent peace in the Franz-Josef manner” (p. 173). These decades were marred only by the Austrians’ recruitment of Bosnian youths (a faint echo of the Turkish blood tribute) to serve in their army in Vienna for two years. But here too, after the first maternal outcry, the outcome was positive. “Two years quickly pass[ed],” and as the first recruits returned “clean, close-cropped and well-fed,” the next recruitment went more smoothly. Before we know where we are, two chapters and twenty years have passed since the occupation (p. 200). In the year 1900 (and here again we are treated to a date) engineers come from Vienna to repair the bridge, an intervention to which Alihodja takes superstitious exception. There follows the construction of a fresh water supply for the town, and then a railway, to link Sarajevo with the Serbian frontier at Variste and the boundary of the Turkish-held Sanjak at Uvce; in other words, modernization, against all of which Alihodja grumbled. The railway took four years to build, bringing us, inferentially, to 1904. And then, suddenly, comes “the year 1908” (p. 215), which will bring the Annexation Crisis, when Austria-Hungary formally took possession of Bosnia. The most sinister change that this constitutional (or nonconstitutional) change brought with it was the mining of the bridge. At this point we must pause to introduce one of the most beautiful passages in the novel. This is a strong statement, because it has to compete with the exquisite closings that Andrić supplies for almost every chapter, where the narrator reassures us that the great bridge is still there: symbol, if not of eternity, of durability, perfection of design, “one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world” (p. 214). This occurs at the end of chapter 16, in which the bridge has lost some of its practical significance by way of the building of the 50

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railroad, and some of its permanence in the need for repair. During his tirade against the repairs, Alihodja introduces an extraordinary myth about the origin of bridges. To cut the story short, it was the devil who created deep rivers and ravines by scratching the just-formed surface of the earth with his nails. This meant misery for all until God sent as helpers his angels, who spread their wings over the new gorges and gouges, “and men were able to cross.” From this they learned how to build bridges, and therefore, summed up the hodja, “The greatest blessing is to build a bridge and the greatest sin to interfere with it,” because every bridge has its guardian angel who maintains it “as long as God has ordained that it should stand” (p. 209). But this providentialist calm, or querulousness, does not mean that Alihodja has no political sense, including of causation. Reading the proclamation about the annexation of his country, he formulates one of the most moving statements of the international novel as a genre: These Emperors had for the past thirty years shouted across the lands and cities and over the heads of the peoples; yet every word in every proclamation of every Emperor was pregnant with meaning. For these countries were broken into fragments and in these countries heads rolled because of these words. So they spoke of . . . “cares of the throne,” lest they call things by their real names and speak what was the fact; that lands and provinces, and with them living men and their habitations passed from hand to hand like small change. (p. 220) And this far-seeing and philosophical lament is supplemented by the scene in which the old Muslim men of the town, trying to interpret 51

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newspaper accounts of the Balkan wars of 1912–13, pore over the map “which showed the future partition of the Balkan Peninsula” (p. 209), asking each other who would “get” Skopje, Salinka, Jedrene (Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria). Interestingly, there is no mention here of Macedonia, which suffered the most from partition at the hands of these three rapacious countries. These old men did not complain, but “they felt as if the solid earth was being drawn irresistibly away from under their feet as if it were a carpet, and how frontiers which should have been firm and lasting had become fluid and shifting” (p. 230). Blood tribute. Forced labor. Invasion. Annexation. Moving frontiers. These will all be motifs of the international novel as it begins to come of age in the period following World War II, when the largest redrawing of national boundaries occurred. We come now to the theoretical heart of The Bridge on the Drina, when “nationalism” and “nation” will come under Andrić’s critical scrutiny in his account of the student debates on the bridge, not least because of their purely theoretical aspect. These debates are carefully carved reconstructions, surely, of conversations Andrić himself had during his student days at Zagreb, Kraków, Vienna, and Graz. They require us to modify still further our literary definition of this book. For one long chapter, it has joined the ranks of the novels of ideas, those novels by Sartre or Camus or Mann where the imagination takes second place and doctrine emerges victorious. But here they are very convincingly embodied, and we can see the participants as well as hear them. The most vociferous of the imaginary students, Stiković, is studying at Zagreb, writes poems which he is planning to publish in book form, and is already known as a writer for “revolutionary youth papers” (p. 235) advocating nationalism and independence for Serbia and Bosnia— a 52

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profi le remarkably similar to Andrić’s own. His principal opponent on the bridge is Herak, a law student, “who looked at everything and criticized everything from an orthodox socialist viewpoint” (p. 237). The contrast between their views is over what must come first. According to Herak, “Only the preliminary economic liberation of the exploited classes, the peasants and the workers . . . can create real conditions for the formation of independent states” (p. 238). Herak has been reading Karl Kautsky and Isaac Babel, and believes that communism is necessarily an international movement. “All that is foreign book-learning, my good fellow,” answers Stiković, which vanishes “before the living impetus of awakened nationalist forces among the Serbs and then among the Croats and Slovenes also. . . . Things do not come to pass according to the forecasts of German theoreticians but advance in complete accord with the deep sense of our history and our racial destiny. From Karageorge’s words: ‘Let each kill his Turkish chief’ the social problem in the Balkans has always solved itself by the way of national liberation movements and wars. It all moves beautifully logically, from the less to the great, from the regional and tribal to the national and the formation of the State” (p. 238). There they are, the two great theories of world development after the age of empire. But Herak’s Marxism receives no further development; we hear no more of him. Whereas Stiković keeps on lecturing, and eventually receives a tongue-lashing from the one young man on the bridge, Glasicanin, who has been deprived of secondary education by poverty and ill health. He has descended back into the working class, and despises both Marxist and nationalist prophecy (pp. 249–50). He is probably correct in diagnosing Stiković’s grand theory as a form of egoism: “Theories such as yours only satisfy the eternal need for games, flatter your own vanity, 53

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deceive yourself and others” (p. 250). And the omniscient narrator seems to agree. But if we posit that this episode stages Andrić’s rejection of his radical youth, there is a problem. For there is a second candidate for the role of “the author as a young man.” This is Galus, on his way to the university in Vienna, and intending to study philosophy. The opening description of Galus, as compared to Stiković, is warm, even tender, but the parallels between them are insisted upon. “Galus too had written verses and was an active member of the revolutionary nationalist student organization” (p. 241; italics mine). His combatant, Bahtijarević, is a Muslim, also on his way to Vienna to study oriental languages, and their argument begins with Galus’s protest against such a course of study as irrelevant to a member of the ruling class, though ruling no longer. Somewhat tactlessly, he then proceeds to use the great bridge, Mehmed Pasha Sokolović’s legacy, as a sign of the Ottoman Empire’s obsolescence, one, moreover, based on its having stolen “from us, and from so many other subject peoples, not only property and money, but also our best men and our purest blood” (p. 244). There follows a harangue on modern nationalism, in “all the vocabulary then prevalent in nationalist literature.” The irony here is precautionary, the exaggerations obvious, the use of “we” and “our own” a premonition. For example, “we will build new, greater and better bridges, not to link foreign centres with conquered lands but to link our own lands with the rest of the world” (p. 245). It would be redundant to quote any more from this complex episode, but it serves as an excellent test for the modern reader, not only in registering ideas formally, but in considering the authority of authorial commentary. Galus’s position is, like Andrić’s earlier one, unification of all the southern Slavic states around Serbia; Bahtijarević 54

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has no reply, but the author takes it upon himself to say what he is thinking. And what he is thinking is that everything happens in God’s good time, which is exceeding slow. This device brings to the foreground the essentially artificial device of the omniscient narrator, which most of our international novelists will manage without. The omniscient narrator is, to some, related to a providential view of the universe and therefore misleading at times of meaningless violence. But apart from the narratorial device, what are we to make of Bahtijarević’s silent position, which is also the position of Alihodja, another Muslim? Is this the other side of Andrić, now on the other side of World War II? Is it pacifism, or passivity, or other-worldliness, or none of the above? The editor of the English edition, William McNeill, states that by 1940 Andrić had become “a thorough-going conservative” (p. 5). This, for me, sets the wrong tone. I prefer to let him exit this marvelous book with Alihodja’s epitaph: “If they destroy here, then somewhere else someone else is building” (p. 313).

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I S M A I L KA DA R E , C H R O N I C L E IN STONE THE COSTS OF BEING SMALL

The city, weary and sullen, had changed hands several times. The Italians and Greeks alternated. Flags and currencies were changed, amid general indifference. “Still carving up the world, I see.”

Which city? Gjirokastër, in the very southeast corner of Albania, close to the border with Greece. It is also just across the Adriatic from Italy, which had long desired to annex it, and took the opportunity of the Second World War to invade it, in 1939. As we shall see later, Greece had also aspired to other parts of Albania, nearly acquired them during the Balkan wars, took the opportunity of the First World War to annex the country, and was deprived of its prey by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Even more than landlocked Bosnia, which had less to offer greedy neighbors, Albania suffered the plight of many small nations whose territorial integrity has been difficult to maintain, especially when they need economic support. We will return to Albania’s history in more detail. Now I want to engage my readers in a meditation on this novel’s title. Like Ivo Andrić’s Bridge on the Drina, Ismail Kadare’s novel, Chronicle in Stone, published in 1971 in Albanian, negotiates the connection, or

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the difference, between the novel and (obviously) the chronicle. In this case, the novel claims the chronicle genre in its title, only to raise the immediate question, Chronicle of what? And if Andrić’s answer was the “real” bridge over the Drina, Kadare’s is the “real” city of Gjirokastër, in which he himself spent his childhood. Built entirely of gray stone and, like the bridge, a monument to wealthy Ottoman culture, it survived the Second World War and Enver Hoxha’s Communist regime, becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. In other words, you can still visit it, as you can visit the great bridge at Višegrad. Chronicle in Stone fills in, however, only a small portion of Gjirokastër’s history, and we have to look outside the novel for the long view, of which, however, we are frequently reminded. When the German troops arrive in 1943 and most of the citizens flee into the countryside, Kadare writes, It was the third time in its long history that the city had been abandoned in this way. A thousand years before, the inhabitants had fled when plague struck. The second time was four centuries ago, when the imperial Ottoman army crossed the border under the banner of Islam. (p. 271)1 It may be that the relationship between Andrić and Kadare is not merely loosely analogic. Between 1976 and 1978, Kadare wrote a small book which also focuses on a bridge and its building: The Three-Arched Bridge. Published in Albanian in 1978, it was translated into English in 1993. It is much shorter than Andrić’s novel, and set much earlier in historical time, before Albania became part of the Ottoman Empire. The story starts in 1377 and ends, the bridge complete and in ser vice, a year later. The tale is told by a monk, in

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the first person. He refers to his book as a chronicle, as a monk naturally would. The aura is completely medieval. Old men in the area remember the First and Second Crusades. But both novels feature a human sacrifice that permits the bridge to be built, and the person sacrificed is one of those who have engaged in nighttime destruction of the foundations. In Kadare’s novel, the man sacrificed is interred in the fabric of the bridge, with his head sticking out, as a permanent warning against vandalism. Can this be coincidence? Leaving that aside, Kadare is clearly fascinated by the idea of the chronicle, and in naming Chronicle in Stone (Kronikë neë Gur), he forces us to consider the term and the idea. Is “chronicle” merely a synonym for “novel,” or does it incorporate the essentials of the modern definition, a detailed narrative of historical (that is, “real”) events, told in the order in which they occurred, without authorial intervention? Chronicles must include dates, otherwise one could never find anything in them. Those who provide that definition usually cite The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, though one might also mention Holinshed’s Chronicle, the sixteenth-century compilation later disparaged for its over-inclusiveness. The term smacks of something very old and impervious: in short, much like the city of Gjirokastër, the city of stone, topped by a huge fortress which had been used for centuries as a prison, and described as “allergic to change” (p. 47). It is extraordinarily impressive to this day. It is the city, then, not any written record, that constitutes its own chronicle. To make sure that we continue to think about this, Kadare includes an inadequate chronicler in his novel, as does Andrić with his schoolmaster. Actually two chroniclers. One is a character, Xivo Gavo, an aged man of whose job as chronicler we are constantly reminded and who reappears far more often than his status would

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seem to warrant (see pp. 93, 108, 127, 148, 152, 164, 188, 245, 297). When the Greeks return to the city, he has a burst of unfocused energy: Xivo Gavo’s little window stayed lit far into the night. The old chronicler’s neighbours all thought he was describing the return of the Greeks. It later turned out that he had devoted only a single sentence of his chronicle to the event: “On 18 Nov. the G. entered the city.” No one could account for this laconic mention of such a calamity, and still less for his use of a single letter to represent the multitude of Greeks. (p. 164) He is not, however, satirized for his lack of interest in major events, as was Andrić’s schoolmaster. When the First Crusade passed through the city a thousand years earlier, Gavo, though obviously not on hand at the time, thought that an event worth recording (p. 127). Perhaps he has merely a longer view of what would count as major. And this is still further complicated by the “Fragments of a Chronicle” that intersperse the main narrative, and that illustrate the chaotic mixture of grand and trivial as newspapers from the past often seem to do. Xivo Gavo cannot be their author, since he is mentioned in one of them (p. 93), so the reporter remains anonymous. But the insertion of such banal “Fragments” further harasses our conception of “chronicle” as a genre of history writing. In fact, I propose, Kadare has written his novel to challenge the concept that provides its title. He has a first-person narrator, a young boy, who shares with us his opinions, hopes, and fears about the events raging around him. Our natural assumption is that the boy

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is Kadare himself, suggesting that part of the book’s sense of its genre derives from James Joyce and his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, rewritten as “Portrait of the Author as a Young Boy.” Kadare was born in 1936 and would have been a four-year-old when the novel opens and six or seven when it closes, so the chronology supports the hypothesis. But Kadare offers us no dates, not even the boy’s age. We might forgive the absence of dates as ageappropriate to the child narrator, or appropriate to a memoir, but we have to do some homework to figure out that the novel begins in 1940, when Italy’s influence on Albania became a full-scale occupation, and ends in 1943, when the German army arrives. It thus has a much shorter span of time to deal with than would a traditional chronicle. Kadare does relate events in the order in which they occurred, but the question of relative significance is with us from the start, since the drama that draws us into the story is the near overflow of the underground cistern in the narrator’s house, hardly an event of national significance. Other events of this domestic kind, which dominate roughly the first half of the book, compete with the random killings of each other by rival resistance forces that take over the narrative as it draws to its inconclusive end. In hindsight we, the readers, know that the arrival of the German troops will be as pointless in the long run as the dismal to-and-fro of the Italians and the Greeks, which is satirized by two symmetrical chronicle fragments recording the hasty changes in acceptable currencies (pp. 139–40). And although the arrival of the German troops fulfills a prophecy (“A people with yellow hair will try to reduce this city to ashes,” p. 269) and the novel does indeed close with Gjirokastër in flames, we know that this is not the end. A seemingly casual

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mention of Enver Hoxha as the inventor of class warfare (p. 243) points forward to Kadare’s enigmatic experience of life in Communist Albania. It is not at all clear how much Kadare accommodated himself to that regime. He wrote one novel flattering Hoxha directly, and several that are said to cloak his own resistance in settings from the distance past, such as The Palace of Dreams (1981). This, however, was quickly seen to be a political allegory and banned soon after its publication. Although he has been venerated for his supposedly veiled courage, it is interesting that he was not a writer in exile. While other writers were persecuted, Kadare was given freedom to travel and publish abroad. It was not until Hoxha died in 1985 that Kadare moved to France, where in 1990 he claimed political asylum, from what it is not clear. There is a famous interview with Kadare by David Bellos, translator of many of Kadare’s books, shortly after he was awarded the Man Booker International prize. Bellos asked the questions that arise on reviewing Kadare’s experience under Hoxha, why he claimed to be a political exile in 1990, and why he did not leave for France earlier. The answers are not very convincing. But for our purposes the most important reply was that outspoken dissidence was impossible under Hoxha, but that his books “themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance.”2 But did they at the time? To answer this question in the affirmative one would have to engage in what I have elsewhere called the hermeneutics of censorship, reading between the lines on the assumption that the author obscured his message and yet made sure to deliver it to the appropriate audience.3 To what extent can this strategy apply to Chronicle in Stone, whose events precede Hoxha’s regime, even if some comments towards the end predict it? How can we demonstrate covert meaning, as distinct from 62

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asserting it, which is what Kadare and his reviewers usually do? To answer these questions we will have to engage in some very close reading of individual passages, which will, I predict, neither exactly confirm nor deny the “novel as resistance” theory. How Kadare works is beautifully illustrated by his narrator’s response to the massive rainstorm which threatens to flood the family’s underground cistern. (It must rain excessively in Albania.) On this occasion the child is listening, in bed, to the sound of the raindrops rolling down the roof: Little did they know that a clever trap, a tin gutter, awaited them on the eaves. Just as they were about to make the leap from roof to ground, they suddenly found themselves caught in the narrow pipe with thousands of companions, asking “Where are we going, where are they taking us?” Then, before they could recover from that mad race, they plummeted into a deep prison, the great cistern of our house. (p. 3) Children often engage in the belief that things in nature have human emotions. Adults call this pathetic fallacy, and the word “fallacy” demeans it by the requirements of reason. But where does the equivalence cistern = prison come from? What would have put that metaphor into the child’s head? Then, when the family engage in baling out some of the water before the cistern overflows, the metaphor shifts. The raindrops now become not victims but troublemakers, breeders of sedition: I thought about how the countless raindrops were gathering their rage down below, the old ones that had been languishing 63

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there so long getting together with the newcomers, . . . plotting something evil. . . . The waters of the storm never should have been let into our well-behaved cistern to stir up rebellion. . . . Each bucket was filled with captive raindrops, and I thought it would be good if we could weed out the nastiest ones first, the ringleaders; that way we could lessen the danger. (pp. 6–7) Suppose you were Enver Hoxha or one of his subordinates reading this for official purposes in 1971. I think it fair to say that you would have nodded approval, and let the book go free. The narrator is clearly on the side of authority and opposed to rebellion, however he may have been supposed to have learned that word and its meaning. Later, he would be satisfied to see that the boy’s allegiance by the novel’s end seems to be with the Communist partisans, who, though clearly in one sense rebels, were also Hoxha’s party. The initial sympathy with the raindrops headed for prison has, one might say, been converted to a childish ideology of good behavior. Of course the book records an adult’s memories of what the child thought and felt. This child is, like Joyce’s Stephen, very intelligent, though there is no evidence of any formal schooling. He is fascinated by the “world of words,” he wants his grandfather, who reads endlessly, to teach him Turkish, he struggles to read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he listens to adults talking and remembers the strange words they use. He wonders why Gjirokastër is called a “city.” But even less comprehensible were the words “occupied city,” which came up more and more in the grown-ups’ conversation. Our city was occupied. Which meant that there were

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foreign soldiers in it. That much I knew [but] I couldn’t see how a city could be unoccupied. (p. 15) This is rather sophisticated linguistically, and yet quite age-appropriate. It is also funny. For our purposes, the most important word and concept the boy has to learn is that of “nation.” To mark this process, Kadare divides the first two chapters by an unnumbered section which records, in conversation alone, a childish game of trading stamps: Ok, you can have France and Canada, but give me Luxembourg. You’re kidding. You really want Luxembourg? Etc. We are left to guess which speaker is our narrator and which is his best friend, Ilir. And we are also left to guess their relationship to Javer, a boy evidently much older, who remarks ironically, “Still carving up the world, I see.” That might almost have been an epigraph for the whole of this book, since so many of its chapters deal with countries that have been carved up by wars, rebellions, invasions, partitions, and decisions from above by Great Powers. Javer, who turns out to be our narrator’s elder brother, acquires a papier-mâché globe upon which he constantly meditates, all the while, as it turns out, plotting his own strategy of resistance. In a scene reported by Ilir, Javer taps his globe and says, “Soon it’ll be a slaughterhouse.” When Ilir admits that he and our narrator had, as a game, visited the town slaughterhouse (which had actually horrified them), Javer “started laughing and said, ‘Now you’ll see what happens when they slaughter nations.’ ”

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“Nations? Like on the postage stamps, you mean.” “Right. Like that. Nations.” “Who’s going to slaughter them? Ilir shrugged. “I didn’t ask.” But this sparks our narrator’s imagination, even as it educates him: Maybe we were only at the beginning of the slaughter. But I found it hard to imagine nations being led to the slaughter, bleating as they went. France. Norway. Holland bleating. Luxembourg like a newborn lamb. Russia with a big bell round its neck. Italy a goat (I don’t know why). (pp. 92– 93) The first four of these countries had already been invaded by Germany. Either this child knows more than he understands, or Kadare is playing elegant games with his readers. When the home cellar becomes a bomb shelter, we can see how our boy picks up his scraps of political knowledge. It is host to “some old men who spent hours airing their views on world affairs in endless conversations in which all kinds of names of states, kings and governments came up”; They also talked about Albania a lot. I listened curiously, racking my brain trying to understand what was this Albania they were so worried about. Was it everything I saw around me: courtyards, street, clouds, words . . . or only a part of that? More abstract still than “nation,” the name of his country means nothing to the child. In a conversation that introduces patriotism 66

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and implies much more, one of the old men says, “You can’t make Albania overnight . . . and not in a thousand and one nights either.” And another old man adds, “Albania is a complicated business all right” (pp. 106–7). This is clearly the moment to supply somewhat more of Albania’s history. At almost the end of the novel, there is a brief résumé of that history, a long view like those of Xivo Gavo, of which the boy, however, is incapable: At dusk, the city, which through the centuries had appeared on maps as a possession of the Romans, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Greeks and the Italians, now watched darkness fall as a part of the German empire. (p. 295) But a more manageable and pertinent time frame appears at the book’s opening, in chapter 3, when the oldest women of the town, the crones as they are called, set the pa rameters of living memory. The crones never go out of their houses because “they found the world boring”: To them even major events like epidemics, floods and wars were only repetitions of what they had seen before. They had already been old ladies in the thirties, under the monarchy, and even before, under the republic in the mid-twenties. In fact, they were old during the First World War, and even before, at the turn of the century. (p. 36) This allows us to set the “beginning” of the story not in 1940 but in 1909, when the first stirrings of Albanian nationalism issued in a 67

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national congress, which adopted the Roman alphabet for the Albanian language and appointed a committee for national union. Directly or indirectly, this crucial step in national consciousness led to the 1912 Albanian uprising against the Ottoman Empire, which in turn incited Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro to rebel, driving the Turks out of much of the Balkan peninsula. But when Albanian leaders declared the autonomy of their country, the other Balkan states had no such goal in mind for it. Both Greece and Serbia had designs on Albanian territory, and Gjirokastër was taken by the Greeks, while the Serbs also invaded Albania. Meanwhile, on Christmas Day, Italy landed troops in Albania to protect its interests there. In late December, a conference of ambassadors of the Great Powers who wanted to maintain control of Albania—Italy, AustriaHungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire— convened in London and agreed that a new country of Albania should be formed; but Russian pressure on behalf of the Serbs resulted in the severance of most of Kosovo and its inclusion in Serbia, despite its being home to some 800,000 Albanians. On May 30, 1913, the Treaty of London ended the First Balkan War, but it settled nothing, as events would quickly show. Austria-Hungary supported Albanian independence as a curb on Serbian expansionism. Italy’s designs on Albania were more likely to be achieved if it remained a bloc rather than being divided between the victorious members of the Balkan league. So for the time being, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece had to release it. Yet on June 19, 1913, the Second Balkan War broke out, resulting eventually in the Protocol of Florence, which set out the exact boundaries of the Albanian state. On March 6, 1914, the German prince Wilhelm de Wied was crowned king of Albania and installed as head of the new state by the International Control Commission. But

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this was not the monarchy remembered by the crones nor mourned by the wealthy women of the city. We have several more reversals to follow yet. Within six months of this supposed solution, World War I broke out, and Albania would be occupied by foreign powers for practically the duration of the war. When the war ended, Italian armies occupied most of Albania, and Serbian, Greek, and French armies occupied the remainder. In 1919 Serbia attacked Albanian cities. The Albanians adopted guerrilla warfare in their own defense. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, at which Albania was denied official representation, British, French, and Greek negotiators decided to divide it between Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia. This decision was vetoed by Woodrow Wilson. In 1920 Albanian leaders met in Lushnje and rejected any partitioning. They created a bicameral parliament, and later that same year they forced Italy to withdraw its troops and abandon its territorial claims. The next year Yugoslavia invaded, and this time the League of Nations, into which Albania had been admitted, forced Yugoslavia’s withdrawal and reaffirmed the 1913 borders. In 1924 the restored central government declared the country a republic, but four years later its president, Ahmed Bey Zogu, proclaimed himself King Zog. His policy was to cooperate with and do obeisance to the Italians, until King Vittorio Emanuele III actually invaded the country on April 7, 1939, and took the title of “king of Albania,” which he held until 1943. This sequence of events helps to explain why the crones are “bored” with their country and its repetitive history. Who can make sense of it? It also indicates, however, that alliances formed in one era can be easily dissolved and replaced by others, so in our part of the story it is the Greeks and the Italians who are at war

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with each other, fighting it out over the heads and bodies of the Albanians themselves, who once more have no say in the matter. To complete the bitterness, the British, as part of their war on Mussolini, are bombing the innocent city almost daily; much as President Richard Nixon ordered the bombing of neutral Cambodia in his war against Vietnam (an analogy Kadare declines). In 1944 Gjirokastër is returned to Albanian control, a temporarily happy ending (for Albania) which Kadare also refuses to mention. He knew that there would be more structural changes to come, and by 1971 has seen several of these, including Hoxha’s struggles to develop his country economically while maintaining its independence from, first, Yugoslavia, then the Soviet Union, and then, in 1961, China. Kadare’s later novels take some account of these events. His 1970 Long Winter of Loneliness addresses a “hot” contemporary issue, the 1960 divorce between Albania and the Soviet Union. This was the novel that flattered Hoxha. But there is an increasing tendency in these novels to use political events as window dressing. The split with China is the historical background in The Concert (1989), which ends with the death of Mao Zedong and makes gestures towards a broader international scope.4 Pol Pot, for example, is one of the guests at the memorial concert (p. 308). And there is an early foray into the mind of Mao on “the future Sinization of Albania,” which would reverse the gesture of independence which sets the novel afloat. The scenario is sinister, if brief: “Early in the twentieth century, . . . Albania, the cunning lynx, managed to escape. But that was the last time it did so” (p. 37). So much for Albanian nationalism. But the focus of The Concert is mostly on individuals and their psychological troubles. Likewise, The Successor (2003), which deals with the death, perhaps by suicide, of Hoxha’s assumed successor, abandons realism 70

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for the nonhistorical genres of the murder mystery and the ghost story. We are never told that the suicide victim was Mehmet Shehu, who shared power with Hoxha from the end of World War II, nor that he was found dead in his bedroom on December 17, 1981. In defiance of the demands of historiography, let alone of the chronicle, the novel actually begins by treating the history of Albania as obsolete folklore “moldering under a thick coat of dust” in the espionage files (p. 5).5 Compared to Chronicle in Stone, these later novels seem conceptually murky. They do not readily vindicate Kadare’s claim that he left Albania “to accelerate the process of democratization” there, nor that a platform abroad was necessary for him to speak his mind openly. But our story, happily, is about Chronicle in Stone. I hope I have proven its claim to be an international novel in the sense defined in the Introduction, and that its narrator’s difficulties with the concepts “nation” and “Albania” are intended to be sage advice to the reader. If we read carefully, it is clear that Kadare thought then that nationalism led to internecine violence; but the story is clearly an essay on the plight of a small country, for which the ancient city stands as emblem. It is possible to read it, however, as participating in a traditional branch of the novel, the bildungsroman, or journey from innocence to experience; or, even more simply, as an absolutely charming study of childhood. But one can make a further claim. In relation to Kadare’s slightly breezy statement that his books “constitute a very obvious form of resistance” to the regime, we should notice that Chronicle in Stone, in addition to the abstractions “nation” and “Albania,” investigates the meaning of “resistance.” The novel thematizes resistance: its courage, its dangers, its tendency to internecine divisions, and its frequent futility. 71

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One symbol of this futility is the old anti-aircraft gun kept in the citadel since the monarchy, but now useless. This piece of materiel is the focus of one of the most charming instances of the pathetic fallacy, of which the boy now seems fully conscious: What people obviously held against it more than anything else was the length of its barrel. When I studied the gun with the help of Grandmother’s opera glasses I sometimes imagined I could read its thoughts. You often say of someone accused of a misdeed that he’s retreated into his shell, or that he’s shrunk away. But that poor gun could not hide or cringe, and had to stay sticking out in full sight of all. (p. 151; italics mine) When the old gunner, Avdo Baramo, is finally urged by the citizens to shoot down an enemy plane, all of his shots miss, and his epitaph for the effort is simply “It was not to be” (pp. 156–58). But Kadare’s most obvious comment on fiction as resistance occurs when his narrator actually addresses, in chapter 14, what often happens to nationalist resistance movements. They splinter, along the fault lines of conflicting ideologies. The three groups in Albania were the non-Communist Balli Kombetar, or National Front; the Communist partisans who would eventually take over the country; and the Legalitei, the monarchists, referred to as Isa Toska’s gang, who wanted to reinstate King Zog. Towards the end of this story, men are being deported by the Italians in truckloads, and the reason for this given on the street is simply that “they spoke against.” It is not explained which group they belong to or what they “spoke against,” but the two boys who are friends throughout

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take the phrase as a personal challenge. Ilir comes over to his friend’s house and asks, “Want to speak against?” They agree to go up to the roof and do just that, a ritual of juvenile resistance that starts with nonsense words and ends in a conflict of ideas with themselves, and between the friends: “Dadadada, tatatata! I said. “Rabalama, paramara!” Ilir declared. We sat and thought for a while. “Long live Albania!” said Ilir. “Down with Italy!” “Long live the Albanian people!” “Down with the Italian people!” We fell silent. Ilir looked as though he had had a thought. “No, that’s not fair,” he said. “Isa [his elder brother] says the Italian people aren’t bad guys.” . . . “You’re a traitor,” I told him. “Down with traitors!” “Down with the fratricidal struggle!” Ilir replied, putting up his fists as if he was about to box me. (p. 229) In this childish exchange Ilir is a step ahead of our narrator in seeing the distinction between those who order a war and those forced to fight it. But his “Down with the fratricidal struggle” stands in ironic relation to his raised fists. In the next chapter, Isa (a partisan) is executed by the Balli Kombetar, and in revenge Javer (our hero’s older brother) shoots in the mouth, at his own dinner table, the uncle responsible for this killing. The chapter ends with two symmetrical slaughters of people on either side, a formal device that deliberately recalls that of the two “Fragments of a Chronicle”

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reporting the change of currencies during the occupations (pp. 139 and 141). It might have been helpful had Kadare expanded a little on what Chronicle in Stone has to offer the literary theory of resistance. But it is a much better and more subtle book than either The Concert or The Successor, in which Kadare has almost completely abandoned the realism that makes Chronicle in Stone so persuasive. Neither of these has anything to offer the debate on nationalism and internationalism, which is so lightly rendered in Chronicle that we must pause, like Ilir, to think it through. The Successor reads more like Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, which comes next in our study: that is to say, more like a surreal analysis of absolute power and its burdens than an analysis of what happened to Albania as Hoxha aged and eventually died, in April 1985. The ghost of the Successor, who is privy to the future, mentions in only two sentences “Albania’s subsequent transformation”: We could have more easily imagined the ground changing place with the sky than we could have foreseen the country’s turnaround. But in the end, Albania did turn. (pp. 197– 98; italics mine)

Postscript: Macbeth

One of the pleasures of working with novels as clever as this is close reading. But a second plea sure, which can sometimes become all-consuming, is chasing down the historical context of the work as a whole and of its parts— all of that which lies outside the text, not all of which can be equally pertinent. No part of Chronicle in Stone has fascinated readers more than the child’s obsession with Shake74

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speare’s tragedy Macbeth. We are justified in calling it Kadare’s obsession too, since The Concert contains a strange interpolation, “Macbeth’s Last Winter: Synopsis for Another Version of the Tragedy,” (pp. 363–76). In Chronicle in Stone the play is said to account for the child’s fascination with violence and severed heads (an odd twist since Shakespeare’s Duncan is not beheaded). But so far as I can tell none of Kadare’s readers has asked the pertinent question: How did Javer (who lent his copy to his younger brother) obtain a version of Shakespeare’s play in Albanian? Macbeth was translated into Albanian in 1928 by Fan Noli, an important figure in Albanian nationalism. He knew thirteen languages, and supported himself as a young man partly by translation. In 1906 he moved to Boston to mobilize the Albanian emigrant community against the Greek Orthodox Church there, which was violently opposed to the Albanian nationalist cause. He and a group of Albanians created the independent Albanian Church of Boston, and Noli was ordained as a priest in 1908. In 1923 he was consecrated as a bishop for the Church of Albania. Meanwhile he had been studying at Harvard. After completing his degree, he returned to Europe to promote Albanian independence. He came back to the United States during World War I, serving as head of the Vatra organization, which effectively made him leader of the Albanian diaspora, and won the support of Woodrow Wilson, leading to Wilson’s veto of the attempts by Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro to parcel out Albania between themselves. In 1921 he entered the Albanian parliament for the liberal party, Vatra, while the conservatives were led by Ahmed Bey Zogu. In the chaos of the next few years, he and Zogu exchanged places, Noli serving briefly as prime minister in 1924 of the short-lived republic, being ousted by Zogu’s supporters six months later, and fleeing first to 75

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Europe and then back to the United States, where in exchange for citizenship he had to agree to give up his political activities. The translation of Macbeth was made in Berlin in 1928, and Noli clearly intended it to be a political analogy to King Zog’s coup, which he regarded as a usurpation comparable to Macbeth’s seizure of the throne of Scotland.6 If Kadare knew of the origins and intentions of the play text on which his protagonist broods, he subsequently subverted Noli’s liberal and nationalistic interpretation. In The Concert the narrator is now, briefly, Macbeth himself, who has survived what he claimed was Duncan’s plan to assassinate him by killing before he can be killed. Duncan can therefore be said to have caused his own murder, and Macbeth to have been acting in self-defense. To make matters more complicated, Macbeth is now to be understood as an analogy to the death of Lin Biao by foul play engineered by Mao Zedong. In defiance of the accepted story that Lin Biao, having attempted his own coup against Mao, died in a plane crash over Mongolia in September 1971 while fleeing to the Soviet Union, Kadare describes instead an invitation to Lin Biao by Mao to a dinner party, followed by the annihilation of the guest in his host’s car by, of all things, a rocket: It was all to happen, then, at a banquet, as in a play by Shakespeare (Lin Biao and Mao Zedong had both been passionate advocates of the banning of Shakespeare’s works— was it because they were both hatching a plot based on treachery at a banquet?). In other words, both Mao and his marshal based their plots on the plot of Macbeth. The only thing was, in this

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case, Macbeth wasn’t able to commit his crime because Duncan stole a march on him. (p. 355) This, surely, if it is not just plain silly, is surrealism; and the above will seem less of a wayward digression when we turn to the next chapter, whose coloring is equally crazed.

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A nation is the best thing that was ever invented, mother, he would sigh.

Now himself the patriarch of Latin American fiction, Gabriel García Márquez is, as I write, alive and in his mid-eighties, though suffering from senile dementia. A Nobel Prize winner, he has been one of the strongest magnets attracting international attention to Latin American fiction, which is now a force to reckon with. The Autumn of the Patriarch is not, however, García Márquez’s greatest novel. That place is firmly held by One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, apart from some allusions to U.S. control of the banana industry via United Fruit and a conclusion which restages the 1929 banana massacre in Cienaga, Colombia, does not encourage the reader to think about issues of nationalism, or about the relationship between South and Central America and their all-powerful northern neighbor. The fictional country of Macondo is a world unto itself. The Autumn of the Patriarch belongs in the category of the international novel by way of a verbal strategy we have not yet seen, an extraordinary series of repetitions of the word “nation,” which appears over fifty times. The novel therefore insists that we reexamine the concepts that elsewhere have been loosely attached to that word. But the deconstruction of “nation” is not, in this novel, a rational 79

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critique based on contested boundaries, enforced diasporas, or ethnic criteria. Rather, as in my epigraph, it is a key to the consciousness of a representative dictator figure, a composite of Latin American dictators who have governed the region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The hyperbolical longevity of this figure, who lived to at least 107 and perhaps 232 years old, is García Márquez’s way of saying that his general is no single person, an intention supported by concealing his name and that of his country; no single person, but a concept, which is also a historical fact. It is important to stress that a composite is not an allegory, a literary device that transcends particulars and reaches for an abstract idea. A composite requires that we remember how many dictators there have been in Latin America, and recognize some historical facts in the general general. Nevertheless we must put aside, or at least modify, the simple demand for historical and geographical realism in the international novel, the specificity that characterized and validated The Bridge on the Drina and Chronicle in Stone, and to which we will return eventually in the international novels of V. S. Naipaul, Nuruddin Farah, and Orhan Pamuk. Their analyses respectively of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Turkey insist on the importance of a real location and a real timetable for the problems they inherit. Although Naipaul conceals the name of the town on the bend of the Congo River that pinpoints his story, there can be no doubt that the town is and was Kisangani, and the terrible “Big Man” who rules the DRC is evidently Mobutu Sese Seko. He even wears his famous leopard-skin hat. This preview is useful not only to relate the international novels to each other— a different form of internationalism—but because Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and García Márquez’s Autumn both participate in another subcategory of fiction, the dictator novel. This genre is typically though not exclusively Latin American in origin, for two 80

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reasons. The first is that the phenomenon of the Latin American dictator originates in the region’s military history, its struggle to emancipate itself from colonial Spain, and the prestige that attached to successful caudillismo, or strongman local government, which could readily be transformed into arbitrary centralized power. The initial cause of caudillismo was the Spanish colonial policy of supplementing small cadres of professional soldiers with large militia forces gathered from local populations whenever necessary to maintain public order. The militia were unpaid but they were exempted from certain taxes and criminal or civil prosecution. To be a successful caudillo a man had to have a charismatic personality and something resembling a populist program of future reforms. In the wars of independence, caudillos used their power, which was essentially extralegal, outside the constitution, to take control of the newly independent states. A successful caudillo could assume the title of “general,” which is, of course, how everybody in García Márquez’s novel refers to its central figure, and the novel gives scattered hints of his caudillo background. Caudillismo did not oppose the boundaries inherited from Spanish administrative units, but was naturally antipathetic to “Simón Bolívar’s dream,” the idea of reuniting a postcolonial South America into one great cooperative unit. By force of history and habit, even perhaps temperament, Latin Americans seem tolerant of a caudillo, and not only in his reformist stage. As Kenneth Grieb observed in his biography of Jorge Ubico, Guatemalan history shows a steady series of caudillo governments from the midnineteenth century on, suggesting that its people actually prefer the rule of a strongman to the political chaos that follows whenever a caudillo dies or falls from power.1 But the second reason why the dictator novel is indigenous to Latin America is more sinister. It refers to the long history of U.S. 81

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intervention in the region, which was in part due to its obsession with (or against) communism, in part a response to the interests of huge companies like United Fruit. This policy was dignified by the term “doctrine,” the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, which originally aimed at keeping the European powers out of Latin America, but which, as expanded by Theodore Roosevelt and interpreted by subsequent U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy, became a claim to hegemony over it. As Undersecretary of State Robert Olds put it 1929, in relation to Nicaragua: There is no room for any outside influence other than ours in this region. . . . Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall. Nicaragua has become a test case. It is difficult to see how we can afford to be defeated. This astonishing statement is cited in a 1996 article by Mark Rosenfelder, an independent political commentator, which lists some of the legally elected presidents undermined by the United States and the dictators installed in their stead: José Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua replaced by Adolfo Díaz (1909); Gerardo Machado y Morales in Cuba replaced by Fulgencio Batista (1933); Augusto César Sandino in Nicaragua replaced by Anastasio Somoza García (1934–36); Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala replaced by Carlos Castillo Armas (1954); Salvador Allende of Chile replaced by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973).2 In effect, Spanish imperialism in Latin America was replaced by American imperialism. Latin American nations were treated as dependents, willing or unwilling, of the United States. Under Cold War conditions the Good Neighbor policy proposed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 soon became a mockery. After World War II any 82

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dictator was preferable to a legally elected president who showed leftish intentions, especially by promoting reforms. Of course, the preeminent example is the U.S. treatment of Cuba, ostensibly justified by the declared Marxism of Fidel Castro and his overt relations with the Soviet Union. But a more telling example is what happened in Guatemala in 1954, when Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the president-elect, as part of proposed land reforms seized some lands belonging to United Fruit that were not in use, proposing to reimburse the company for the value of the land as claimed on its tax returns. In response, the CIA organized a “rebel army” to overthrow him, equipped with planes that strafed the capital. Arbenz was forced to resign, and was replaced by a dictator, Carlos Castillo Armas, who was chosen by the United States and who “outlaw[ed] political parties, reduc[ed] the franchise, [and] establish[ed] the death penalty for strikers, as well as undoing Arbenz’s land reform. Over 100,000 civilians [were] killed in the next thirty years of military rule.”3 One should note here that the numbers of deaths attributed to Latin American dictators is often a rubbery statistic. García Márquez has said at least two different things about the novel’s relation to South America, in whole or in part. One was recorded by William Kennedy in 1976 in the New York Times: Some of his friends remember him saying as far back as 1958, when as a newsman he was witnessing the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, that he would one day write a book about a dictator. He has since spoken of the influence of the life of the Venezuelan caudillo, Juan Vicente Gómez, on this book. He himself lived for years under the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship in his native Colombia.4 According to Raymond L. Williams, García Márquez declared that his “intention was always to make a synthesis of all the Latin 83

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American dictators,” but that he was particularly influenced by the career of Gómez, dictator of Venezuela from 1908 to 1935, a model safely in the past.5 In 1982, however, with the prospect of the Nobel Prize before his eyes, he gave Marlise Simons a very different account of the book’s origins and development: For The Autumn of the Patriarch, my only book which I have not lived myself, I read everything I could about Latin American and especially Caribbean dictators over a period of 10 years. . . . Then I tried to forget everything and forced myself to work purely from my imagination so that no event could be linked to a real one. But the dictator became the most autobiographical character of all. Excluding the aspect of power, which I have not known, of course, many of my personal feelings, obsessions ideas, nostalgias, superstitions, are attributed to the patriarch. No doubt there are affinities between power and fame. I think the loneliness of power and the loneliness of fame are much alike.6 The creative idea of a synthesis of actual dictators, over time and from different Latin American countries, is a highly original twist on the concepts of both nationalism and internationalism—such synthesis being possible only because Latin American dictatorships have been so alike. But that later statement from an expectant Nobel Prize winner is clearly a hyper-literary and elusive move. The author who takes the problem of absolute power inwards, into the psyche, into the writer’s psyche, away from the reality of coups and American policy, is toeing the modernist line. Modernism in literature has always suppressed the political significance of novels, arguing, if an ism can be said to argue, that art should be disinterested. Some Latin American 84

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writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, have agreed, turning away from nineteenth-century realism to the fantastic or to magic realism, a term that has been applied to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It has also been applied, I think wrongly, to The Autumn of the Patriarch. García Márquez’s original statements of his agenda seem both truer and more interesting than his Nobel revisions.

Dictator Novels

During his research, García Márquez must have encountered the so-called dictator novels that have been identified in the history of Latin American fiction. These include El señor presidente (1946), written by Miguel Angel Asturias about Manuel Estrada Cabrera’s rule in Guatemala; Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State (1974), most likely focused on Jorge Ubico, another Guatemalan dictator; and Enrique Lafourcade’s King Ahab’s Feast, which was published in Chile, the author’s home country, in 1959. By virtue of its in-your-face courage, this last example is in striking contrast to The Autumn of the Patriarch. An only slightly disguised attack on Rafael Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic—the quasi-fictional dictator is named Carillo—the novel not only bravely appeared three years before Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, it manifestly argues for assassination as the only solution for this island in chains, the only chance for “education and liberty. Respect, tolerance, moral integrity. . . . Make a new worthwhile country” (p. 143).7 Indications that this novel is grounded in fact, both historical and geographical, are the allusion to the Parsley Massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic or near the border in 1937, product of Trujillo’s contempt for black skin, including his own shade thereof, inherited from his mother, and the role of the Basque intellectual Jesús Galíndez, who appears under 85

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his actual and resonant first name and whom Trujillo almost certainly had abducted from the United States and killed. But there is another aspect to King Ahab’s Feast which deserves mention. In a conversation between the American ambassador, brand new and still clean, and the sleazy, cynical, obese French ambassador, the question arises of “reciprocal military assistance pacts” and their usefulness. Behind this conversation lies the Rio Treaty of 1947, a Cold War pact that the United States ignored when there was trouble in Latin America, as occurred in Guatemala (1954) and Cuba (1961). The American ambassador asserts the usefulness of such pacts in defending democracy and heading off communism. The Frenchman responds that communism “is not a menace”: “It is the . . . greatest of all pretexts, yes, gentlemen. The most powerful pretext in Latin America.” And here comes, though from a corrupt source, the most radical indictment of U.S. policy, and the broadest: It is a pretext to keep governments in power, under the supervision, of course, of the selling power, the business man. To control the internal affairs of those countries. Beautiful word. It has many uses. Save the people from communism. . . . We’ve got to back up the monopolies—the banana monopoly, sugar monopoly, coffee monopoly, petroleum monopoly, tin monopoly, copper monopoly—in order to defend those countries from communism. . . . Handsome pretext! In its name I’ve seen universities closed, the Caribbean dictators grow old. The menace of a word! Don’t make me laugh. (p. 159) In the Spanish edition, but not, significantly, in the American translation, La fiesta del Rey Acab is preceded by a disclaimer, the kind of statement that, on the one hand, protects the author and the work, 86

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and on the other draws the right kind of reader’s attention to precisely those aspects of the novel that would infuriate the wrong kind: This is a mere work of fiction. Therefore, the scene, and the characters, including the dictator Carrillo, are imaginary and any similarity to countries, situations or real persons is purely coincidental. Indeed, no one is unaware that neither the United Nations, nor the Organization of American States permits the continued existence of regimes like the one that serves as pretext for this novel.8 Even the tangled negative syntax indicates that this statement needs to be read through the looking glass—backwards. García Márquez began writing his own dictator novel in 1968, after a decade of studying everything he could find to increase his knowledge of other Latin American governments. This search must have included La fiesta del Rey Acab, which was available in 1959. By 1971 he believed he had finished the novel, but he continued to enrich it until 1975. Autumn is as far away from La fiesta as he could make it, not least in avoiding the dashing referentiality of Lafourcade, who made Trujillo/Carillo immediately recognizable and published his indictment while the dictator was still alive. Does this mean that García Márquez was less brave? The answer will take some time to assemble.

Reading Autumn

How, then, shall we categorize García Márquez’s intentions in this novel? His use of stream-of-consciousness, the medium of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, combined with a deliberately mystifying use of pronouns and absence of paragraphs, was clearly 87

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intended to align his novel with modernist practice. “I” and “he” as referents to the dictator constantly change places, and there is also a “we” who occasionally appears, from the first page on, as the voice of the people. The chronology of the novel is initially mystifying. It begins with a death we assume to be that of the dictator, and ends with another, which is rightfully his. The first death is actually that of his surrogate or double, the “official imposter” Patricio Aragonés, who dies of poison intended for the general, and who is washed and dressed by the general in his own uniform so as to mislead the country (and the reader) and flush out his opponents. Death at the beginning and death at the end, each of which causes massive public celebration. But following modernist practice does not necessarily mean accepting modernist doctrine, the “art-versus-politics” decision. Mystification is only half of García Márquez’s intention. The other half is to incite the reader’s detective skills, and to present aspects of the history of dictatorship that are, if not as obviously based on fact as King Ahab’s Feast, tools of realism, carefully disguised as fantasy. First, we know that the unnamed country could be either Colombia or Venezuela, since both are bounded by the Caribbean, though neither Bogotá nor Caracas sees the sea. It could also refer to Nicaragua. The Caribbean is the most obvious geographical marker in the novel, the sea with its string of islands that the general loves, that motivated his acceptance of the presidency. But the repeated emphasis on the country’s international debts must signify Venezuela and the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–3, when Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded the country in order to force President Cipriano Castro to pay up, and Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was formulated to justify America’s function as broker. In real life, of course, the solution was not to sell the Caribbean to the United States, except in metaphorical terms; the Venezuelan crisis 88

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was resolved by a deal in which the country would set aside about 30 percent of its customs duties to settle claims. When Gómez, García Márquez’s favorite dictator, seized power, the fortuitous discovery of oil in Venezuela changed the country’s fortunes completely. There is no such economic miracle available for our general. The national debt and its exorbitant paydown forms the emotional center of the last section of the novel. When one of the long string of facetiously named American ambassadors proposes to accept the sea “on account for the interest of that debt which is in arrears and which won’t be paid off even with a hundred generations of leaders” (p. 228), the general at first doesn’t take him seriously, but is finally driven to accept a surreal scenario: There was no other way, mother, so they took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing’s nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona. (p. 232)9 This episode also alludes to the “mutual assistance treaty” (p. 229) invoked by the new ambassador, Fischer, to justify a landing of the marines: that is, the Rio Treaty so deftly satirized by Lafourcade’s French ambassador. Even more ironically, as the marines depart from the first occupation they “decorated [the general] with the medal of the good neighbor” (p. 48), a bitter allusion to Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. The general allows the sale of the Caribbean to avoid another occupation by U.S. Navy: “It’s better to be left without the sea than to allow a landing of marines” (p. 233). In the early pages of the novel there are several references to the previous occupation of the country by the marines, to whom the general owed his presidency. The 89

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country which most frequently suffered from such occupations was Nicaragua, which experienced this form of intervention in 1910, 1912–25, and 1926–33. The first of these was to support the presidency, soon to be a dictatorship, of Adolfo Díaz, who replaced the liberal José Santos Zelaya. When Patricio Aragonés, the general’s double, is dying from the poisoned dart, he tells the truth that no one else dares speak: “You’re president of nobody and . . . you’re not on the throne because of your big guns but because the English sat you there and the gringos kept you with the pair of balls on their battleship” (p. 24). The English side of this devil’s bargain is not explained until almost the novel’s end, where the general recalls how he was “proclaimed supreme commander of the three branches of the armed forces and president of the republic for such a time as was necessary for the reestablishment of order and the economic balance of the nation, it had been unanimously resolved by the last field commanders of the federation in agreement with the senate and chamber of deputies in joint sessions and the backing of the British fleet” (p. 239; italics mine). This reference, which follows one to “Commander Kitchener” and two to “President Lautaro Muñoz,” poet and Latinist, who appears to have preceded the general in office, is deliberately obfuscatory. Neither this Kitchener nor Muñoz had a historical existence, though there were several presidents of Colombia who were poets. Yet this fictional President Lautaro Muñoz (also mentioned on pages 49 and 85) is tied to one of the strongest historical threads in the novel: the multiple allusions to the federalist war, sometimes called the Great War of the Caudillos, which took place in Venezuela in the middle of the nineteenth century. There are no less than thirteen references to the federalist war, in which, we learn, our general had himself enlisted (p. 189), and at the end of which he is thrust into a leadership position. 90

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A “Real” Poet

But if the novel is studded with named persons who never existed, mostly American diplomats, there is one unequivocally factual name, that of a “real” poet, Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet and mestizo, whose cameo appearances on pages 4, 173, 181, and 251 culminate in his agreement to read his poetry at the National Theater, an event to which the general is persuaded to attend by his shortly-tobe-assassinated wife. Darío did in fact make a literary tour of Latin America in 1912, though his biography only mentions Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Darío was for most of his life an anti-American imperialist. He had collaborated with José Santos Zelaya, president of Nicaragua, in writing Estados Unidos y la revolución de Nicaragua (published for the first time in 2010) in which the United States and the Guatemalan dictator Cabrera were accused of planning the overthrow of Zelaya’s regime. More importantly, perhaps, in 1904, the year after the United States annexed territory for the Panama Canal and the year in which Theodore Roosevelt established his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Darío wrote “To Roosevelt,” a fiery poem both exalting and warning America of its self-contradictions: “You are rich, / You join the cult of Hercules to the cult of Mammon, / and illuminating the road of easy conquest, / Liberty raises its torch in New York.” The poem ends with a direct warning: But our America, that has had poets since the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . it lives, you men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul. And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates, and it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful. Viva Spanish America! 91

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There are a thousand cubs loosed from the Spanish lion. Roosevelt, one would have to be, through God himself the fearful Rifleman and strong Hunter, to manage to grab us in your iron claws.10 One would like to know whether this was the piece so admired by our general that he was “trying to recite the whole poem by heart in the tepid cowshit Olympus of the milking stables” when a tremendous explosion marks the first attempt to assassinate his wife and child (p. 182). At any rate, the hovering presence of Darío is a coded reminder that the novel takes its inspiration from a spirit of South American nationalism, while acknowledging the debilitating effect of imposed North American hegemony. Instead of “a thousand cubs loosed from the Spanish lion,” we have the plague of seven-month runts that the general sires, including his last and legitimate child, who is eaten alive by malevolently trained dogs. It increases the depth of García Márquez’s introduction of Darío to discover that “To Roosevelt” opens with an homage to Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India,” two poets seeing the opening of the Suez Canal from different ends of the continent. The general’s five thousand seven-month runts are of course a symbol of failed reproduction, stunted national growth, as is his notorious ruptured testicle, and his inability to find love, except, finally, in the arms of a Roman Catholic novice, who, though she teaches him to read in his old age and polishes away his caudillo habits, becomes behind the scenes the paradigm of a greedy dictator’s wife. On the other hand, if we reject a symbolic explanation and take the general’s uncontrollable lust literally, it points back to Gómez, who had at least sixty-four illegitimate children, and perhaps also sideways at Trujillo, known for his enormous sexual appetite and preference for very young women, especially virgins. But if we drop both of these modes of reading, the sym92

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bolic and the politically referential, it is hard not to feel increasingly sorry for the general, who becomes pathetic rather than terrible as he ages. Most of his atrocities are not actually attributed to his orders but a sign of his loss of power, his abdication of government to, first among others, Saenz de la Barra, the exterminator, with his sacks of severed heads. And the one really horrible crime the general orders—the drowning of the children who were his tools in the faked lottery scam— frequently haunts him, as we would not have expected of a dictator.

Nationalism

What, then, does The Autumn of the Patriarch have to contribute to the analysis or critique of the concept “nationalism”? To approach an answer one would have to retrace all of the appearances of “nation” throughout the novel in an attempt to determine how they differed from each other and why they are so many. The “nation” expands and shrinks. When listening to Rubén Darío reading his poetry our general senses “an immortal nation larger and more glorious than all those he had dreamed of during the long deliriums of his fevers as a barefoot warrior” (p. 182), that is, a nation approaching Simón Bolívar’s dream, a grand nation of South America; but when approached by an idealistic foreigner who requests funds for a war against every conservative regime from Alaska to Patagonia, from the top of the American continents to their tail, and who claims that there is no higher glory than dying for one’s country, our general “replied smiling with pity don’t be a horse’s ass, boy, fatherland means staying alive . . . and he opened the fist that he had resting on the desk and in the palm of his hand showed him this little glass ball which is something a person has or doesn’t have, but only the one who has it has it boy, this is the nation, he said” (p. 98). 93

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Nowhere in all its appearances in this novel is “nation” equated with “state.” And at last, when the “we” voice of the novel, the people, contemplate the general’s actual death, they concur that “there was no other nation except the one that had been made by him in his own image and likeness where space was changed and time corrected by the designs of his absolute will” (p. 159). To this miserable conclusion, a reader can only say, echoing the general’s favorite lament, “What a mess!”

García Márquez and Pinochet

Originally, García Márquez said that he would not publish another novel until Pinochet was overthrown. But his feelings about the tragedy of Salvador Allende’s downfall at the hands of Pinochet with U.S. assistance were explicitly conveyed in a radio talk in 2006, “Chile, el golpe y los gringos. Crónica de una tragedia organizada” (Chile, the Coup and the Americans: Chronicle of an Organized Tragedy). This talk was topical in a way that startles if one looks closely. Having been arrested and almost tried in Britain for human rights abuses, Pinochet returned to Chile on March 3, 2000, and from then until his death in December 2006 he successfully evaded all attempts to indict him for his well-recorded crimes, including the Caravan of Death, an operation certainly ordered by Pinochet just after the coup, and led by General Sergio Arellano, appointed by Pinochet as “Official Delegate of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and President of the Government Junta.” Between September 30 and October 22, 1973, Arellano and other officers flew by helicopters all over Chile, executing at least seventy-five persons held in army custody, without a trial, ad terrorem, to warn the country against any foolish resistance. 94

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García Márquez’s talk was delivered while Chile was still attempting to bring Pinochet to justice, despite frequent attempts to claim immunity for him on the grounds of “mild dementia.” On September 11, 2006, García Márquez delivered his indictment, which implicated Pinochet in the early planning of the coup. The talk is brilliantly written and does not spare the Pentagon, the CIA, Henry Kissinger, or by extension, President Richard Nixon. It tells a story: At the end of 1969, three generals from the Pentagon had dinner with four Chilean military men in a house in the suburbs of Washington. The host at that time was Colonel Gerardo López Angulo, air attaché of Chile’s military mission in the United States, and the Chileans invited were colleagues from other branches of the military. The dinner was in honor of the director of the school of aviation in Chile, General Toro Mazote, who had arrived the previous day for a seminar. The seven soldiers . . . talked in English about the one thing that seemed to interest the Chileans at that time: the presidential elections of next September. . . . One of the Pentagon generals asked what the Chilean military would do if the leftist candidate Salvador Allende won the elections. General Toro Mazote said: “We will take the Moneda palace in half an hour if we have to burn it down.” One of the guests was General Ernesto Baeza, then director of Chile’s National Security, who [was to] lead the assault on the presidential palace in the coup, and who gave orders to burn it down. Two of his subordinates at that time were celebrated that same day: General Augusto Pinochet, head of the junto, and General Javier Palacios, who participated in the final skirmish against Salvador Allende. Also at the table 95

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were Sergio Figueroa Gutiérrez, then minister of public works and close friend of another member of the military junto, airforce general Gustavo Leigh, who gave the order to bomb the presidential palace with rockets. The last guest was Arturo Troncoso, then naval governor of Valparaiso, who carried out the bloody purge of the progressive officers of the navy, and began the military uprising on the morning of September 11. (italics and translation mine) This historic dinner was the first contact by the Pentagon with the officials of the four branches of the Chilean military. In other, later reunions, both in Washington and in Santiago, final agreement was reached that a Chilean military more addicted to the soul and interests of the United States would take power in the event that the Popular Unity Party won the election. The participants drew up the plan in cold blood, as a simple military operation, without taking into account the real conditions in Chile. The scheme was called the Contingency Plan, and it was urged by International Telegraph and Telephone, which had engineered the coup against João Goulart, president of Brazil, in 1964, and now worked with the CIA again to bring down Allende. García Márquez went on in his talk to describe the economic and social reforms that Allende began during the first year of his presidency, including completing the nationalization of the copper industry that Eduardo Frei had embarked on. At stake were the profits of the American companies Anaconda and Kennecott. It is not necessary to continue his analysis of the social system in Chile, the role of the three main parties, the Popular Unity on the left; the Christian Democrats, the party of the middle class; and the National Party on the extreme right. But it is well to return to the subtitle of the talk he gave on 96

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Radio La Prierisma in September 2006, not so very long ago: “Cronica de una tragedia organizada.” It might remind us of the title of one his brief novels, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Of course this speech, interesting though it be in its contemporaneity, is not the only nor the most important of García Márquez’s personal interventions in Latin American politics. Edward Waters Hood has listed the editorials on the Nicaraguan Revolution that he wrote between January 1981 and March 1983 when Ronald Reagan was the U.S. president, warning the world that Reagan might be planning a military solution for the region—warnings that might, when combined with negative world opinion and internal division at home, have helped restrain the administration. García Márquez apparently regards himself as an unofficial citizen not of Colombia alone but of the whole of Latin America. He has lived in Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico, to which he fled for political asylum in 1981. In another radio talk published in Nicarauac, the journal of the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture, in June 1982, he said, “I consider that one of the obligations of the revolutionary writer is to write well,” and that writing is a work of solidarity.11 Forbidden in the 1980s to visit the United States—unsurprisingly—an embargo lifted by President Clinton, in 2006 he was still pulling the tail of the tiger, which at that point was preoccupied with the Middle East. All this information, I submit, is relevant to how we should today read The Autumn of the Patriarch. Which, then, of García Márquez’s two accounts of his motivation, of the book’s primary meaning, is the likelier to be true? A synthesis of Latin American dictators, or a study of himself, in which his “personal feelings, obsessions, ideas, nostalgias, superstitions,” are explored and therefore, surely, condoned. “No doubt,” he said, “there are affinities between power and fame,” both being forms of supreme loneliness. No doubt. 97

SAHAR KHALIFEH, WILD THORNS THE WORST BOUNDARY PROBLEM IN THE WORLD

Commodities lose their nationality as soon as they reach Eilat. And we pay double taxes, first to the nation of origin, then to the new one. I’m waiting here in the doorway mourning for our nation, for the “disaster” of ’48 and for the “set-back” of ’67 still glowering at me from beyond the bridge over the Jordan. Mourning while the hopes of a lifetime are spilled at the doors of taverns.

The hyperbole of my subtitle for this chapter, which concerns the boundaries of the State of Israel, particularly those between Israel and Palestine, is deliberate. It should seem less flamboyant after I set out, in necessarily simplified form, how those boundaries were first imagined at the creation of Israel as a sovereign state in the Middle East, and how they were then redrawn by violence, overt and covert, to the point where the problem they cause seems worse than intractable. The present boundaries were not, in fact, “drawn” at all, or at least not legally drawn, but they exist nevertheless as a form of fait accompli. And unlike other contested areas such as the line between Sudan and South Sudan,1 the retention of the Ogaden by Ethiopia,2 or the long-term scuffling between Chile and Bolivia over the latter’s access to the coast,3 none of which causes serious international concern, the boundaries of Israel have been and remain a flashpoint for violence, not only in the whole of the Middle East, but also, by engaging the United States in their defense, in the entire world. 99

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Borderologists, one of those strange tribes that partition the world of the mind into their areas or specialties, tend to avoid Israel as a subject for analysis; as Frank Jacobs noted in 2012: Objectively speaking, a borderologist should love the Holy Land, veined as it is with boundaries both old and new. . . . Some internally recognized ones are purposely overlooked, others are unrecognized, yet heavily militarized. Nevertheless . . . this has been the elephant in the map room. And, he continued, The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves a very small area of land, only a few million people, and no mineral resources. The reasonable solution has always been obvious: to draw a borderline somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea that both sides, however grudgingly, could live with.4 As put like this, however, Jacobs’s “reasonable solution” has too much in common with the mindset of the great colonial powers who divided up Africa, confident that “to draw a borderline” was within their mandate. That worked, somewhat, in Africa, though ultimately through an agreement signed by the Organization for African Unity in 1963 not to contest the boundaries drawn in Berlin in 1885. It also worked because the Africans themselves were already in place, and there was no enforced movement of peoples. In the case of Israel, the Jews were not in place, except in their own eyes. The declaration of formal statehood in 1948 followed several years of informal or clandestine emigration by Jews to Palestine during and after World War II, an influx that enraged the Arabs and caused the British who controlled Palestine, and who wanted to remain on good terms with the Arab world, to adopt a rigorous anti-immigration policy. 100

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In blunt betrayal of earlier promises to create a Jewish homeland, the British during World War II consistently turned back ships carrying Jews to Palestine, a cruelty which culminated in the scandal of the SS Exodus in 1947. For a decade, between 1937 and 1947, there were attempts “to draw a line,” to partition the already tiny space of the British Mandate of Palestine into two more-or-less fair shares, one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians. The problem of partition was made worse by the awkward shape of the territory to begin with—-a skinny sort of kite—and the inconvenient placement of Jerusalem, the city claimed on religious grounds by both parties. The 1947 plan drawn up by the United Nations looks now fatally over-ingenious, and, with its gaps and pathways between different nations, a nightmare to administer. It was immediately rejected by neighboring Arab states, who responded by starting the first Arab-Israeli War. On May 15, 1948, the British Mandate was due to expire. So on May 14, seizing the opportunity, David Ben-Gurion preemptively announced his nation’s independence from Britain and the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, or the “Land of Israel,” a vague but alarmingly aspirational term, if one were a Palestinian. By the time the war ended, on July 24, 1949, Israel had retained its independence and increased its land area considerably, compared with the U.N. partition plan. The boundaries of this new nation were never officially agreed on. Such boundaries as arose from the 1948 war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, were armistice lines, never intended to be permanent. The main problem, from the point of view of Israel, was that Jordan retained control of the hill country previously known as Judea and Samaria, which enclosed Jerusalem, and which came to be known as the West Bank. Here was an Arab territory bulging, as it were, into Israel, and, in defiance of the Armistice Agreement, hindering access to the Western Wall and other sites holy to Jews. In the next decade and a half, 101

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Israel reconsidered its options, declared its security fatally compromised by being within firing distance of all its Arab neighbors, and planned, brilliantly, for the preemptive strike of the 1967, or Six Day, War, intended to push its neighbors farther away. In the Six Day War, managed with blinding effectiveness, Israel took from Jordan East Jerusalem and the West Bank, from Egypt the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and from Syria the Golan Heights. In 1979 Israel handed the Sinai Peninsula but not the Gaza Strip back to Egypt and withdrew its forces from Gaza, while retaining control of Gaza’s airspace and seacoast. Indeed, in 2007, when the Hamas political party, by winning the election, took charge of Gaza, Israel imposed a land and sea blockade on the Strip, which effectively forced the area back into primitive poverty. The Golan Heights, which Israel declared to be a threatening overlooking attack waiting to happen, remained under Israeli occupation, despite a resolution in the United Nations Security Council to the effect that its annexation in 1981 was illegal and should be reversed. On January 6, 2013, Binyamin Netanyahu announced plans to build a huge steel fence along the boundary between the Golan and Syria, claiming fears that the civil war in Syria would spill over into Israel, bringing with it a flood of refugees. In the West Bank, meanwhile, the Israeli settlements have introduced a category in political geography that we might call “boundary creep.” Thus came into being the concept, and the fact, of Israeli Occupied Territories, which to this day exist in a legal limbo. International law, as represented by the United Nations Security Council, has refused to recognize this de facto arrangement. Israel itself disputes the use of the term “occupation,” which is, as we saw in Chronicle in Stone, so vague as to be capable of humorous misunderstanding. The Israeli High Court of Justice, however, accepts the term “occupation” by qualifying it as “belligerent.” This is the context, historical, political, 102

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and geographical, for the novel on which this chapter must rest: Wild Thorns, by Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian writer who has achieved quite a reputation. Her novel is set in Nablus, a great old Ottoman city in the West Bank, and it focuses on the struggles of Palestinians in the “territory” to make sense of their de facto servitude, to decide between resistance or resignation, and even to make a living. Khalifeh is a striking example of an international novelist. Having left Palestine and received a graduate education in the United States, she returned home to continue her writing and engage in feminist activism. In 1988 she founded a women’s center in Nablus. She has written nine novels, the first of which is said to have been confiscated by Israel. Wild Thorns is the second, and it has been translated into French, German, Dutch, English, Spanish, Italian, and Greek. In 2006 she received the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant. The award was established in 1996 by the American University of Cairo, named in honor of the Nobelist Egyptian novelist and annually bestowed on an appropriate successor on his birthday. Significantly, Wild Thorns itself pays tribute to Mahfouz by having one of the experienced inmates in an Israeli prison offer a volume of his short stories to a young newcomer to soften his shame at his comparative illiteracy (p. 132).5 We shall need to return to the prisons. It is unfortunate that not long after the receipt of this gift, the newcomer, Zuhdi, throws aside Mahfouz’s novel Midaq Alley in disgust when he realizes that it leads only to another Mahfouz novel, A Beginning and an End. So the tribute sputters out in another form of hopelessness and uselessness, the uselessness of novels! The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant is a more attractive book than Wild Thorns, but it could not serve our purposes, since its allusions to the struggle over Jerusalem are subordinated to a mysteriously unhappy love story, told by a male narrator who fled the Holy City after 103

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the Nakba, the first Arab-Israeli War, and then returned to search for both his homeland and the lover he had abandoned. In addition, I judge the narrator-protagonist as mesmerizingly stupid, a poor qualification for attracting our sympathetic attention. Wild Thorns, however, satisfies my most important criterion for an international novel—that the problems of nationality or national territory are at the center of the author’s focus. Although Khalifeh is honored as a major feminist writer in Arabic, Wild Thorns does not focus exclusively or even primarily on the plight of women in the occupied territories. Her protagonists are two young men, cousins, who have chosen opposite ways to handle their otherwise equal lots. One, Adil, is a pragmatist who believes that life can and must go on, however deplorable the conditions, and so gets a job in Jerusalem, which is both a necessity and an act of betrayal. He is racked by guilt, but trapped. He has nine mouths to feed. The other, Usama, has become a resistance fighter, trained abroad, and just returned with a mission to set fire to the buses in which people like Adil travel daily to the hostile cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, to get, as we say, their daily bread. Filling out the metaphor, the book offers an early scene between Usama and a bread-peddler, selling Jewish bread, and stale too (pp. 67–68). The time of the novel is clearly set as 1972, “five years, three months after the occupation started” (p. 13), and the date 1967, fatal to Palestinians, appears several times as a point of reference. It does not, therefore, have to deal with the two intifadas, the Palestinian wars of terror on their captors, nor on the huge problem of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which might not have been recognized as a growing threat until Menachem Begin was elected prime minister of Israel and embarked on a period of government-supported expansion. Wild Thorns, therefore, can simplify its relations to recent political history, and concentrate solely on the “occupation,” a word that occurs thirty-three times in rather a short book. 104

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Such obsessive focus on a word which is itself contested may be a forceful way to make a point, but it can become irritating. It may be that Khalifeh intends this repetition to sound like paranoia. But not all the repetitions are simply choric and habitual. One of her characters remembers with sharp irony how in 1967 Radio Israel addressed the now “liberated territories” (p. 79). When Usama first returns from Syria it dawns on him that “occupation” has at least two meanings, and one of them is a job. The relative prosperity he sees on the streets confounds his assumptions: There seemed to be a lot of money about. There were more sources of employment and wages had gone up. . . . But occupation is still occupation. Dignity excised was still lost. And yet something was different. The servant girls were servants no more, and the class ladder was less steep. (pp. 26–27) Apart from the niggling thought that this is rather a lot of sociology to accomplish on one’s first day back in Nablus, Usama’s insight is an early warning that one’s attitude to the occupation needs to be nuanced. “But” leads to “and yet.” And yet Usama will soon renounce his doubts, renounce complexity, and organize a guerrilla attack on the buses, a raid in which he will himself be killed. What kind of a novel is this? A kind we have not yet encountered. It is novel of complaint, one might almost say whining. If we were to look for precedents, we could consider the novel actually held up for admiration here—Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the “finest book ever written” (p. 155). Abu Sabir, the man of books inside Wild Thorns and something of a passive hero, lying in the ambulance with blood pouring from his amputated fingers, remembers reading Les Misérables in translation and taking from it the remarkable news that in the French Revolution, “the poor and the hungry took over [the Bastille]” (pp. 52–53). 105

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It is significant for Sabir’s value as a character that the amputated fingers are the result of an industrial accident, not a violent confrontation, and that, with Adil’s help, he seeks and will continue to seek legal compensation, fighting not men but red tape. I think, though, that Khalifeh might have done better to allude to Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), whose theme of political idealism born out of the black hardship of coal mining is a closer forebear for what she seems attempting to do; it was probably only the title of Les Misérables that caught her attention. What is complaint? More or less what it sounds like. The expression of hardship—the repeated expression of hardship—inflicted on the complainants by some other person or force. The shadow of complaint can sometimes be felt in Pamuk’s Snow when it dwells on the out-ofwork men and miserable teenage girls, but never in Chronicle in Stone, another novel about hostile occupation, unless you count Kako Pino’s repeated comment on everything: “It’s the end of the world.” Complaint is essentially passive. We are not to blame. What else can we do but wait? It’s the occupation. Even those who don’t technically complain are passive, and irritating, like Usama’s mother, who places responsibility for a solution in the hands of God. “Soon God will settle everything. Maybe the foreign journalists who visit your uncle will have some influence on America, and America will tell Israel to withdraw and she will. You see, things are not as hard as you think” (p. 32). Since the time Wild Thorns was written, and still more since its publication in English in 1985, expressions of hope like this for Palestine seem increasingly fatuous. In a late chapter—there are no chapter numbers in this novel—men “sat around a fire boiling a pot of sage tea” and listening to the news: The American Secretary of Defence had made a new statement about arms shipments to Israel. Phantom jets. More and more Phantoms. Billions of dollars flooding into Israel’s trea106

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sury. The old men muttered grim prayers, praising God. . . . The young men cursed and blasphemed Arab oil revenue turned into Phantoms! So much for Arab unity! (p. 179) Never mind about the generational difference, which is ubiquitous and tells us nothing. This must refer to the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, in which Egypt and Syria had tried to reverse the gains made by Israel in 1967. But there is no mention of the war itself in the novel, published three years later. Nor is there any acknowledgment of the fact that on October 18, 1973, Arab oil producers had met in Kuwait and decided to begin a complete embargo on oil to the United States. Thus the curses of these young Palestinians hang in the air unwarranted. The American Secretary of Defense at this point was James R. Schlesinger, yet it was not he but Henry Kissinger who promised to send Golda Meir “more Phantom jets and a military aid request totaling $2.2 billion.”6 Schlesinger and Kissinger had strong disagreements over supplying Israel with arms, and it could be argued that it was Kissinger, arming Israel to the teeth, who caused the military stalemate that ended the war and left Israel still in command of its commandeered territories. Kissinger features by name three times in Wild Thorns as an enigmatic figure to whom we must pay attention, and who each time claims to be just about to solve the Middle East situation. On the last page, “A newspaper boy passed by, crying . . . Kissinger announced solution to Middle East crisis! . . . People went about their business, buying vegetables, fruit, and bread” (p. 207). This is a good irony, and it helps to show how open-ended the novel must remain. But need it be factually foggy? Let us suppose that Khalifeh did in fact know all about the Yom Kippur War and left it only half-developed, foggy, for her own purposes. What purposes could they be? To insist on the immediate 107

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situation in the West Bank rather than its larger political context? Some obscure diminution of the claims of “real history” as “only stories that people invent” (p. 53)? But surely to fill in the situation in late October 1973—stalemate—would have added to the novel’s credibility and its emotional claims on its readers.7 Why not tackle the role of the United States of America in continuing to support Israel’s geopolitical claims? Is this the other elephant in the room? There is, however, another subcategory of the novel in which we might enter Wild Thorns as candidate. That is the novel of ideas. Through this lens we can see that Wild Thorns in part resembles The Bridge on the Drina, where the students meet on the kapia to argue about politics. The difference here is that the location of the arguments is an Israeli prison, a prison within a prison, a space which the prisoners have converted, at certain times of day, into a school, and, at certain times of the day, into a lecture hall. The chief instructor is Salih, another book man, who deals in terms like “pragmatism,” “demagogy,” “capitalism,” “communism,” “socialism,” “compradorism” (p. 124). As heard by a new young prisoner, these terms are self-satirizing, especially the last. Coined for use in the analysis of developing countries, such as South Africa, compradors are, “put crudely, turncoats, people who lose sight of their revolutionary ideals, ensnared by the drive for personal profit,”8 and the new young prisoner, Basil, while momentarily taken aback by the fancy abstractions, has no trouble applying the term, in his mind, to the father of one of his friends, who “is merely a means to channel in goods from the capitalist countries” (p. 124). The inside world of the prison, with its self-regulation, self-education, and food distribution, is purer than the outside and even a model of socialism, with all the compromises and flaws one would expect. The lecture of the day from Salih raises in exhortatory form the issue to which Wild Thorns addresses itself: Who is to blame for the 108

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present state of Palestine? To Usama, as we will have heard by the time we read the lecture, all the fault lies with the Palestinians themselves: their passivity, their unwillingness to fight back, even futilely, against Israeli domination and expansion. This, remember, precedes the first intifada. To Salih, the chief problem is the country’s lack of industrialization and the backwardness of its workers. This makes them not only incapable of true national feeling but underequipped to survive as a separate nation if and when the occupation is over. Salih places the responsibility for this collapse on “you, you and you, and her, and me above all others.” But instead of merely admitting responsibility, still less advocating resistance, he calls for social planning, for industrialization, and for equal distribution of wealth (p. 125). How any of this is to be achieved is never suggested. Is this incomplete position, then, also intended to be selfsatirizing? In this novel, one can never quite tell. Some of the other prisoners mock it, and bring the issue back to the present and its needs: “All we want is to eat chicken and onions” (p. 141). But another speaker, not clearly identified, lends dignity to these debates by observing that they may even influence the future: Israel should beware of what it’s created— a time bomb about to explode. Its prisons have become breeding grounds for ideas. . . . History will find it hard to judge whether the occupation was a blessing or a disaster. (pp. 146–47) And because history moves on, and the boundaries of Israel and Palestine are still being debated in the real world, the conversation changing somewhat with every electoral change inside Israel, this chapter, like the novel, must simply stop, miserably open-ended.

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The great powers had agreed for the time being not to wrangle over Africa, and as a result attitudes to Africa had changed. The very people who had said that the decade [the 1960s] was the decade of Africa . . . were now giving up on Africa.

Of all the areas in the world which have experienced the arbitrary drawing or redrawing of national boundaries, none has suffered as much as Africa. Any discussion of nationalism or internationalism in Africa has to begin with the “scramble for Africa” by European powers that took place between 1881 and World War I. By a process of exploration, invasion, and annexation, increasingly motivated by rivalry for international status and competing demand for new global markets, the leaders of European countries laid claim to one of the largest and least-known continents. British and French imperialism was of course well under way; but the unification of Germany and Italy created two more hungry dogs. Fearing that the scramble would lead to a world war, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck summoned fourteen Western powers to a conference in Berlin, in his own quarters, in 1884–85. Round a large table, in negotiations and on paper, without the presence of a single African, the Europeans divided Africa into fifty irregularly sized countries, influenced by the footholds that some of them had already established around the coast:

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This new map of the continent was superimposed over the one thousand indigenous cultures and regions of Africa. The new countries lacked rhyme or reason and divided coherent groups of people and merged together disparate groups who really did not get along.1 Later disgust and shame, not to mention the two world wars that came anyway, did not greatly alter this new map, though Germany, ironically, lost its four absurdly scattered colonies. The imperial map remained something that defied reason, even in such seeming details as to who owned the Ogaden region of Somalia or whether the Western Sahara “belonged” to Morocco, matters still in dispute. Even after independence, which was granted or demanded unevenly during the 1960s and early 1970s, the map of Africa retained its mysterious jigsaw appearance, although without the colors that had designated to which master nation the chunks of territory belonged. Of all the new “countries” devised in the Berlin Conference, none has suffered more by the particular way it was outlined and colonized than the space we now call the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC. In size, it is the third-largest country in Africa after Sudan and Algeria and the eighteenth most populous nation in the world. Its size and almost landlocked situation (after Berlin) made it originally a formidable challenge to exploration, and later, as its enormous riches in minerals and rubber were grasped, a challenge not to exploration but to exploitation. Berlin also decreed that the Congo River, which was the country’s main natural advantage and permitted travel, would be considered neutral and open to trade. Likewise the “Congo Free State,” as it was first called, was conceived as a neutral zone, to be run by an international association to bring civilization and Christianity to the natives. But this benign concept 112

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was quickly subverted by King Leopold II of Belgium, to whose oversight the Congo was entrusted. Leopold quickly made the region his personal kingdom and exploited it more ruthlessly than occurred elsewhere. So brutal was his administration that, in 1908, the Belgian government bowed to international pressure, mainly from Great Britain, and took the territory under its own jurisdiction, calling it the Belgian Congo. The condition of the Congo under Leopold was documented by Roger Casement in a report commissioned by the British House of Commons. The report appeared in 1904. But prior to that there had been a striking instance of how international relations can be interrogated by the novel, a work of fiction: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1902. Our provisional use of the terms “novel” and “fiction” will here again seem inadequate as categories for this most opaque and perhaps disingenuous book. Conrad was an aristocratic and adventurous Pole who liked to sail the seas and who landed up in Britain, taking out British citizenship and taking on English as his language of expression. His primary loyalties were with the small nation that had managed to paint red patches all over the world map. In 1889 he had partially fulfilled a childhood ambition to visit the Congo, that large empty space in the center of Africa, but in terms and under conditions that changed his life. Having been hired by the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut Congo to command the SAB steamer Florida up the Congo River, he met Roger Casement in the port of Matadi in June 1890. He found Casement “most intelligent and very sympathetic,” and no doubt already in the state of mind that led to his official report in 1904; that is, well-informed about the condition of the indigenous Congolese and their systematic brutalization by the Belgians under Leopold’s instructions. As Conrad was himself an employee of the 113

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SAB, his perspective was compromised; and the novel that he later wrote about the experience, using an avatar named Marlow, is guarded testimony to that sense of complicity. A letter that Conrad wrote to Casement in December 1903 makes no bones about his disgust at the “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks,” but also his indignation at the consequences for English commercial interests— “the monopoly [by] one small country [of the Congo’s wealth] established to the disadvantage of the rest of the civilized world in defiance of international treaties and in brazen disregard of humanitarian declarations.”2 In an earlier letter in December 1903 Conrad had described his novel to Casement as “an awful fudge.”3 This was surely not merely an admission that in turning personal experience into “fiction” he had altered facts, something any novelist must do with autobiographical material. For example, after the shipwreck of the Florida, Conrad himself went upriver only once, briefly, and was not in command of the replacement vessel; while the corrupt and crazed Kurtz was himself a complete invention, surely designed to deflect moral opprobrium from Conrad and his fictional self. The novel was a huge success at the time and is now a classic work, studied in universities; but perhaps Conrad’s admission that it is “an awful fudge” validates the endless debates it has caused, especially since “postcolonialism” became a fashionable mode of analysis. Was Conrad, as Chinua Achebe eventually charged, an overt racist?4 Or was the novel a subdued critique of colonial practice, which indicts both the imbecile rapacity (for ivory) of the Belgians and the hypocritical veneer of humanitarianism that enabled it? Can it be both? For me, the most revealing comment is made by Marlow as he contemplates the unindividuated blackness of the natives who wrestle his boat upstream: “You know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being 114

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inhuman.”5 The double negative shrieks both doubt and self-censorship. And there is no point in here insisting that Marlow is not Conrad. There is only the thinnest possible distinction between this remark and another passage in the letter of December 21, 1903, that Conrad wrote to Casement with a view to its publication: It seems to me that the black man— say, of Upoto—is deserving of as much humanitarian regard as any animal since he has nerves, feels pain, can be made physically miserable. But as a matter of fact his happiness and misery are much more complex than the misery or happiness of animals and deserving of greater regard. He shares with us the consciousness of the universe in which we live—no small burden. Barbarism per se is no crime deserving of a heavy visitation.6 You can force these sentences to support either the overconfident indictment of Chinua Achebe or the wishful thinking of Hunt Hawkins and other defenders of Conrad; but the novel remains, to use one of Conrad’s most brilliant phrases, “an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” This chapter is not, however, about Heart of Darkness, on which so much has been written as to produce satiety. It is, rather, a rereading of a novel which has, for some and even for the Nobel Prize Committee, established and crowned a successor to Conrad. This is V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant A Bend in the River, which deals with the same country after it had become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like Conrad, Naipaul was an outsider in Africa, a native Trinidadian of East Indian descent, and a permanent émigré to England. As of now, when searching for novels about the DRC, we have to make do with outsiders: unfortunately, there are as yet no novels written by 115

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indigenous authors. The much smaller Republic of the Congo, the DRC’s neighbor to the west, has produced several noted novelists, among them Sony Tanzou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Alan Mabanckou. Possibly this imbalance results from the more miserable political history of the DRC and the continuing violence, to this day, in the eastern part of the country. This must have made a literary culture impossible— except, perhaps, for a few years at the beginning the Mobutu regime. Mobutu himself had literary ambitions. Naipaul was an author twice displaced. He regarded India as the land of his childhood. His grandfather had been imported to Trinidad as an indentured estate laborer or coolie in 1894. The distinction between coolie and slave status was a small one. The grandfather was a Brahmin, from a village near Gorakhpur on the border between Nepal and India, who concealed his high caste in order to survive, but used his education to prosper. As soon as V. S. Naipaul acquired his own education—he was a child prodigy—he realized that he had to get out of Trinidad, away from his cumbersomely extended family. In a famous interview with Bernard Levin in England in 1983, on being asked whether he was born in Trinidad, Naipaul replied dryly, “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a great mistake.” But his own sense of intellectual caste, of being a Brahmin, survived.7 A Bend in the River had its genesis in two trips that Naipaul took to the DRC, at that time named Zaire by its new president, Mobutu Sese Seko. The first occurred in 1965, when he was writer in residence at Makere University in Uganda with no duties, and took the opportunity to travel south; he made a return visit in 1975, by which time he had decided to write the novel. By 1975 the emergence of Mobutu as a new kind of leader was a topic worth a serious investigation, not least because he was just unleashing his strange pattern of back-tothe-past “Africanism” combined with dashing European-style mod116

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ernization. Needless to say, this required dictatorial power. In his preparatory traveler’s notebook in 1975, Naipaul wrote in a mildly distressed tone of “the curious kingship” of Mobutu, who had just nationalized (in a different sense) all properties owned by Europeans: Like Leopold II of the Belgians, . . . much of whose despotic legislation . . . has passed down through the Belgian colonial administration to the present regime, and is now presented as a kind of ancestral African socialism—like Leopold II, Mobutu owns Zaire. (p. 361)8 Though he appears uninformed as to how precisely the powers of Mobutu’s regime had been acquired—no simple matter of passing down, which implies inheritance— and perhaps was just not interested in the political history, Naipaul would eventually arrive at a nuanced and even sympathetic account of Mobutu in A Bend in the River, a title so different in its symbolism from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that we must return to that symbolism later. The relation to Conrad, which the Nobel Prize Committee fastened on as a cause for praise in 2002, was surely one of the primary reasons that Naipaul decided to write about the Congo. His travel notes in 1975 were soon published under the title A Congo Diary, a direct imitation of Conrad’s Congo Diary. Yet in the novel, oddly, Naipaul does not name the country of his focus, nor the town, Kisangani, founded at the northern bend in the Congo River, in which most of the story is situated. What kind of disingenuity was this? We can soon decipher it by recognizing the unnamed “Big Man,” the “President,” by carefully distributed references: his “mother [who] had worked as a hotel maid,” (p. 249) and in whose honor he created his cult of the African woman; his signature leopard-skin cap (pp. 120, 125, 168), and 117

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“the long African name the President had given himself” (p. 195), which is also suppressed.9 The name which Mobutu had chosen in 1972 as part of his campaign to re-Africanize Zaire translates as “the Great Unstoppable Warrior Who Goes from Victory to Victory, Leaving Fire in His Trail,” too self-parodic, perhaps, for Naipaul’s purposes. By similar token, Naipaul seems to have obscured the time frame of the novel’s action, or even confused it. Eventually we learn, from a chance remark, that Salim, the primary narrator, arrived at the bend in the river in 1963 (p. 65). He has been there for six years, and “eight years” have passed since his first conversation on the coast with Indar (p. 112) which occurs in the novel’s opening pages. The story opens in Zanzibar, or so we are left to deduce. Zanzibar was for years East Africa’s main slave-trading port, and so was gradually subsumed within the British Empire in its endeavors to end the slave trade. Salim’s family owns dozens of slaves, who have no interest in emancipation, and who hang around the family compound like poor relatives. One of these, Metty, whose name of course means “mixture,” half African, half Indian, is sent by the family to stay with Salim at the bend in the river when affairs on the coast start to go very wrong. This is an allusion to what happened when Zanzibar received independence from Britain in 1963—the year that Salim arrived in what is clearly, though Naipaul doesn’t name it, Kisangani. In 1964 occurred the extremely bloody Zanzibar revolution, when Arabs and Indians were either massacred or expelled by black Africans. More annoyingly, if one cares about history, Naipaul never explains “the Second Rebellion,” the subject of the novel’s first part, but we can deduce what it must have been—the Simba rebellion of 1964 led by Pierre Mulele. Later, there is talk of “the coup in Uganda” which must be the 1967 uprising, when Uganda became a republic (pp. 95, 121). When Salim returns to the bend in the river after his trip 118

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to London, he discovers that “radicalization” has been ordered by the President, that is, nationalization of all foreign-owned businesses; when exactly this happened Salim does not tell us, but Naipaul does—in his Congo Diary. When Naipaul arrived in Kinshasa, “Everyone was tense: the newspapers are full of the nationalization decree of December 30 1974” (p. 4). Salim loses his shop and any prestige he has in the town, which begins to be once more threatened by violence from outside—by whom, exactly, is also unclear. As for confusion, the publication of Mobutu’s “little green book,” which actually appeared in 1968, is mentioned as part of the same demonstration—“the children were meant to hold up the President’s book as they marched and to shout the long African name the President had given himself ” (p. 195)—though in fact he did not assume that name until 1972. The little green book of Paroles (misleadingly referred to as Maximes in the novel) was an homage to the little red book of Mao Zedong, although one of Mobutu’s claims to legitimacy and international support was his refusal to have anything to do with communism. One can only assume that these veils were hung between history and the reader to the end of preserving a distinction between fiction and personal experience—again, rather like Conrad’s Marlow. But whereas Conrad’s velleities may have given him deniability on the issue of reform in the Congo, Naipaul’s seem designed rather to tease the reader, to establish a game of hide-and-seek—recognize the places, work out the dates, and figure out the relationship between the author and his narrators, for in this case, cagily, there are two: Salim and his friend Indar. Both, if we have read Patrick French’s brilliant biography, can be recognized as avatars of Naipaul himself. Both Salim and Indar, like Naipaul, were from families that originated in India. Indar’s grandfather had come from the Punjab to work on the railway. Salim tells us that his family came to the west 119

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coast of Africa from northwest India, and that though they were technically Muslim they felt closer to the Hindus of their place of origin. Then follows an amazing statement: The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-IndianPersian Portuguese place. . . . True Africa was at our back. . . . We looked east to the lands with which we traded—Arabia, India, Persia. These were lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians, Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa. (p. 11) We are thus put on warning that the themes of the novel will be those of identity (personal and group identity), miscegenation, and, of course, nationalism: What is true Africa? Who is an African? Who belongs in Africa? To whom does Africa belong?” The two narrators (or avatars) seem to follow diametrically different paths, yet they converge at the bend in the river. Indar leaves Africa to take a degree at Oxford. Eight years later he shows up in “Kisangani,” as a lecturer in the new Domain of State constructed by the Big Man for show, which contains a college for the education of the New Africans. The story that Indar tells Salim of the humiliations he endured when he graduated from Oxford, deeply disillusioned after his “three unamazed student years,” and attempted to find employment in England is manifestly Naipaul’s own, as now recounted by French (pp. 129–30). Salim, warned by the young Indar before he leaves that their coastal civilization is “washed up,” goes west to the center of Africa, to its heart, where he establishes himself in a rudimentary shop as a resident of the town, and settles down to being African on his own terms. In the second half of the novel he 120

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engages in a steamy adulterous liaison with Yvette, the young French wife of the Big Man’s mentor, Raymond. This too is manifestly Naipaul’s own story, of his doubly adulterous liaison with Margaret Gooding, an Argentinian, a part of the novel that Naipaul wrote with the help of his wife, Pat. Together he and Pat discussed the sexual violence, which climaxes in Salim’s hitting Yvette so hard that he damages his own hand: “The palm of my hand was stiff, swollen. The back of my hand, from little finger to wrist, was aching; bone had struck bone” (p. 219). In an interview Naipaul recalled this, with some complacency.10 Having two avatars complicates the readerly process of identification with or separation from the narrators, both of whom tell their stories in the first person. Neither Salim nor Indar seems even remotely admirable. But to them is handed the task of defining Africa and what it means to be African—not, let us note, Congolese. Perhaps this explains why the specific country remains anonymous; so that it may be synonymous with the continent. “Africa” is always the term used—as though the boundaries drawn by the colonial powers were in some fundamental way irrelevant. And even the question of who is a “true” African (that is, black) is increasingly seen as unanswerable, not only because different tribes tend to have different physical characteristics (some very tall, some short and skinny) but also because the only fully drawn representatives of black Africans, the ones whom Salim gets to know, are themselves as distinct as may be. The first is Zabeth, a real person mentioned in the Congo Diary (p. 22); the second is her son Ferdinand, who does not appear in the Diary (but whose name is borrowed from a figure in the Belgian Embassy who does; p. 6). Zabeth is a bush marchande (traveling saleswoman), who earns Salim’s respect by being one of his best customers, a woman who does complicated calculations in her head but returns to the bush in 121

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a dugout after every visit to town, but she has large ambitions for Ferdinand. He is to attend the reopened lycée, and at Zabeth’s request he becomes a protégé of Salim, like Metty. Ferdinand is himself a métis, having a father from a different tribe in the southeast, who took him as a child away from his mother and has now vanished. Now Ferdinand, aged sixteen, has been received back into his mother’s tribe. He is quite different from Zabeth in appearance: his skin is perfectly black, as compared to her rich copper color, and his face is “longer and more firmly modeled.” “In his face,” says Salim, “I felt I could see the starting point of certain kinds of African masks, in which features were simplified and strengthened” (p. 37); but this is not the remark of an anthropologist. “The idea came to me,” Salim continues, “that I was looking at Ferdinand with the eyes of an African.” Thus Salim becomes an African too. Zabeth and Ferdinand are the only “true” Africans with whom Salim establishes bonds, unless you count the ne’er-do-well Théophile, who is the beneficiary of Mobutu’s nationalization program and takes over Salim’s store at the end of the novel. His other friends are Father Huismans, the Belgian teacher at the lycée, collector of African masks, soon to be killed in the bush on one of his mask-hunting excursions; and a few Indian or Asian families. It is Ferdinand, with his European, even Shakespearean name, who bears the burden of representing the new Africa, a role into which he will grow awkwardly, one phase of education leading to another, culminating in his being sent back to “Kisangani” as the violence starts again, in the role of Supervisor, though of what is not clear. The thematic moment occurs early while he is still a lycée student: He said to me one day, “Salim, what do you think of the future of Africa.” I didn’t say; I wanted to know what he 122

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thought. I wondered whether, in spite of his mixed ancestry and his travels, he really had an idea of Africa; or whether the idea of Africa had come to him, and his friends at school, from the atlas. . . . Ferdinand could only tell me that the world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising. . . . In his lycée blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than a job he might do later on. (pp. 47–48) In this juvenile way, Ferdinand stands in for Mobutu and his grand program of reform, which was also monomania. But at the end of the novel Ferdinand delivers a terrifying elegy for the Africa that Mobutu has created, which now appears to be headed for selfdestruction, a return to absolute primitivism: They’re going to kill everybody who can read and write, everybody who ever put on a jacket and tie, everybody who put on a jacket de boy [the costume decreed by Mobutu for students]. They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. . . . They say this is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late. . . . They say it is better to kill for days than to die forever. It is going to be terrible when the President comes. (p. 275) This is a terrible prognosis for the Congo. One would have liked to think that Naipaul might have written an ending that contained some smattering of hope, something resembling Alihodja’s epitaph for 123

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the bridge on the Drina, some reflection on the fact that the Congo still flows, and that the water hyacinths still float down it, even as they have become a blasted nuisance to boats and agriculture. Instead, the novel ends in utter darkness, a tribute to its famous ancestor. A Bend in the River has sometimes suffered from the assumption that Naipaul, like Conrad, was contemptuous of the Congolese. So let me pause to consider his travel literature. For Naipaul, travel literature was part of an evident ambition to invade and conquer the world in words—literary imperialism, if you will. But “travel literature” is a faint-hearted term for the extraordinary mixture of minute observation and broad sociological analysis that he achieved. Naipaul was never a tourist. He usually made extended visits to the same countries twice, as with India and Iran, with years in between his visits, in order to correct his first impressions and take account of intervening developments. He took extensive and voracious notes, he wrote what he saw, and disparaged much. His first account of India was titled An Area of Darkness (1964), a shocking appropriation of Conrad’s title, and it is obsessed with the lack of sanitation. But what would you expect from a displaced Brahmin? One after another of his postcolonial rivals in the literary world, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, and, again, Chinua Achebe, has attacked him for a superficial and contemptuous rendering, not only of India and Iran, but of Africa too. The fact that these authors are or were his competitors should be taken into account; but their hostility has become part of the orthodoxy. That orthodoxy was established by the late Edward Said, the originator of postcolonial theory (and outrage). In 1986 Said wrote that “Naipaul’s account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and easiest of 124

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colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies.”11 In an Observer essay of October 2010 titled “Mr. Grumpy goes back to Africa,” Emily Witt still avers that in his Congo Diary Naipaul reveals little except crude biases left over from the colonial era. Part of the problem is that Naipaul cherishes his role as the man who must épater la bourgeoisie, whatever shape the bourgeoisie currently assumes, and offthe-cuff remarks that he makes for their shock value have been taken as signs of what he really thinks. Thus the way in which Elizabeth Hardwick chose to write up her 1979 interview with him— an interview both sympathetic and admiring—has stuck: Thinking of the Africa in “A Bend in the River,” I ask: What is the future, in Africa? His answer: “Africa has no future.”12 And there the interview ends. This is the statement that has hung about Naipaul’s neck ever since, shaping the views of those who read A Bend in the River. What they have not appeared to notice is that this is the very question that Ferdinand, the type of the New African, modern, educated and ambitious, had posed to Salim in the early stages of his education, and from which I have already cited the crucial question: Salim, what do you think of the future of Africa? (p. 47) The question, still crucial to us in the twenty-first century, will have no simple answer in the novel, and we have to read generously to discover what “idea of Africa” Naipaul had constructed for himself. It may be pessimistic, and as far as concerns the DRC this has proved prophetic. It is certainly not dismissive. 125

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As mentioned above, Naipaul published his traveler’s notes on Zaire under the title A Congo Diary, a clear homage to Conrad’s short book. But if in so doing he acknowledged Conrad’s legacy, in A Bend in the River he developed a subtle and unstated rejection of Conrad’s premises as he understood them. He produced a more complex and sympathetic account of the Congo, its history and its inhabitants. His bend in the river, and the river itself, have a grave beauty, whereas Conrad’s river has muddy water and muddy banks. And, most obviously, Naipaul distinguished between a range of African personalities and options. Not all Naipaul’s Africans are backward tribal nitwits or savages, though some are capable of savagery. His several African protagonists, including Ferdinand and his mother, Zabeth, whom we are clearly meant to admire, have consciousness and political awareness. Their President evolves from a canny bringer of peace and stability to monomania, the inexorable development of the dictator figure all over the world. Towards the end of the novel, Salim reports the remark of one of Raymond’s visitors, perhaps from the United States. Raymond had applied for a job there, and had been rejected. The visitor applied his own cynicism as a salve to Raymond’s hurt feelings: Times had changed since the early 1960s. . . . Africanists were not so rare now, and people who had given their life to the continent were being passed over. The great powers had agreed for the time being not to wrangle over Africa, and as a result attitudes to Africa had changed. The very people who had said that the decade was the decade of Africa, and had scrambled after its great men, were now giving up on Africa. (p. 189)

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The use of “scrambled” in this academic context, a hollow echo of the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa and now denoting “Africa” as merely of passing interest, a fashion, is a deeper cynicism than the visitor perhaps intended, but Naipaul certainly intended it. It serves as reminder that the timespan of the novel, however partially obscured, is brief. If we are trying to decide what Naipaul really thought of the future of Africa, we should remember that the novel ends just before his second visit in 1975. If Ferdinand, now a Commissioner, signs off in despair—“We’re all going to hell”— even Salim has a longer view: This piece of earth—how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab Settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of dead civilization, and now this. (p. 260) “The world is what it is”: those are the famous opening words of A Bend in the River, taken by Patrick French for the title of his biography of Naipaul. They could imply every attitude along the scale between resignation and cynicism. But taken together with the lines I have just quoted, they imply a sense of world history, of the longue durée, which makes cynicism a childish gesture. And so it seems wise to return to an early moment in the novel, where Naipaul surveys the ruins of at least one civilization, implying that the passage from one civilization to the next is, so to speak, all in due order. This occurs as Salim’s meditation on a monument in “Kisangani,” “put up only a few years before, almost at the end of colonial time, to mark sixty years of the steamer ser vice from the capital,” a monument that had been destroyed by newly unleashed

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African rage “almost as soon as it had been put up” (p. 26). But it is the words carved on the granite block that, way beyond Salim’s understanding at first, invoke a more ancient civilization that would also go to ruin: Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi, Latin words of whose meaning Salim had at first no idea. In fact they are a misquotation of lines from Vergil’s Aeneid, book 4, ll. 110–12, where Venus, the patron deity of Aeneas and the Trojans, rejects an offer from Dido, the patron of Carthage, to join forces and allow Dido, queen of Carthage, to marry Aeneas, who is fated to found Rome. What Venus actually says is this: Sed fatis incerta feror, si Juppiter unam Esse velit Tyriis urbem Troiaque profectis Miscerive probet populos et foedera iungi. That is, it is unclear if the Father of the Gods approves the mixing of peoples and treaties that join nations. Carthage, of course, was ancient Africa, eventually to be conquered by Rome and its land sown with salt. The makers of the monument calmly ignored the original meaning of the Latin, and substituted their own paean to colonialism. Shortly afterwards, Salim is put straight about the monument and its distortion of the “very old words, from the days of ancient Rome,” by Father Huismans, priest and schoolteacher (p. 62). Salim is shocked by the desecration, and sees the monument’s destruction as punishment for its hubris. But Father Huismans is unoffended. He “saw himself as part of an immense flow of history,” (p. 63). For him the destruction of the monument “was only a temporary setback”: “Such things happened when something big and new was being set up, when the course of history was being altered” (p. 63). This is obviously a better take on Africa’s development than Salim’s, at least 128

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until the end of the novel. Ironically, it is the distorted version of the Latin quotation that has entered modern culture as if it were Vergil’s original. It is what you get when you Google. But more ironically still, it was the distorted version that became the motto of Naipaul’s original homeland, Trinidad and Tobago, where it used to appear, until independence in 1962, on the national flag. It is required of us to follow up on Naipaul’s pessimism about Africa, which has been more than fulfilled. Ignited by the ethnic feud between Rwandan Hutu and Tutsis, there developed a coalition between Rwandan and Ugandan armies to invade Zaire and expel Mobutu, the motive being control of the country’s mineral resources. There occurred the First and Second Congo Wars, with rebel group after rebel group forming and disintegrating, but only after creating havoc. Most recently, the rebel group M23 captured the provincial capital Goma, in November 2012, where their behavior substantiated the U.N. claim that the motive was to rape the mineral resources of the DRC, not to mention its women. Where do we stand now? Helpless on the sidelines. These wars, the First and Second Congo Wars, are sometimes referred to as the African World War, involving nine African nations and multiple random semiprivate armies, self-dignified by the title of “rebels.” Thus the fourth most populous nation in Africa continues to squander its primary resource: its people, whose deaths range in estimate from 900,000 to 5.4 million. Unlike other bad places in the world, the causes here are not religious or ethnic difference but a material greed which directly results from Africa’s empty spaces on the map having been opened up, in more senses than one. Greed is endemic, but sometimes, in some places, violence is self-gratifying and self-perpetuating. King Leopold II had taught his Congolese lessons about how to get what you want which it may take another century to unlearn. 129

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“And so we come to the map, which is the spatial representation of humanity’s divisions—the subject of realist writings in the first place. Maps don’t always tell the truth. They are often as subjective as any fragment of prose.” So wrote Robert Kaplan in his compelling The Revenge of Geography, published in 2012. It is hard to believe that this book, so recent and so wise, does not owe something to a novel that is actually titled Maps, written by Nuruddin Farah, a Somalian, and published in 1986. Farah’s name is not mentioned in The Revenge of Geography, despite the fact that in a chapter of Maps devoted to a discussion of maps between an intelligent boy and his professorial uncle the two reach the conclusion that Kaplan puts with such gnomic force. It will be thought-provoking to continue Kaplan’s thought a little further: European names for large swaths of Africa show . . . how cartography can be a “discourse of power,” in this case of latent imperialism. . . . Maps are materialistic, and therefore morally neutral. . . . Maps, in other words, can be dangerous tools. And yet they are crucial to any understanding of world politics. . . . A state’s position on the map is the first thing that defines it. . . . Geography, like realism itself, is hard to accept. For maps are a rebuke to the very notions of the equality and unity of humankind, since they remind us of all the different environments of the earth that make men profoundly unequal and disunited in so many ways, leading to conflict, on which realism almost exclusively dwells.1 131

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Yet this spatial and topographical determinism, however bracing (and however interesting to literary theory in its concept of realism), is just what Farah, in his novel, declines. Farah is, for the purposes of this book, the exemplary international novelist. His sixth novel, Maps, fulfills the criteria outlined in my introduction, especially the self-conscious interrogation of national boundaries. Maps is at this stage regarded as his masterpiece; in it Farah invents an art form of political theory, represented as a boy’s mental growth, whereas Close Sesame (1983), the third of his anti-dictator novels, delivers its critique, through its aged protagonist, as if from the rostrum. After Maps, Farah appears to have withdrawn his analysis from the public sphere to focus on the family, but there is no question where his novels are set: Somalia, that part of northeast Africa locatable on a map by the Horn of Africa, but that has constantly changed its size and its borders since the nineteenth-century struggle for Africa. Farah spent his childhood in a part of Somalia which had, for the second time, been cut off from its motherland by fiat (otherwise known as an international treaty) during the horse-trading that followed World War II. The part in question was, is, the Ogaden region, mostly half-arid desert, just west of southern Somalia. After the war, in 1948, the Ogaden was ceded to neighboring Ethiopia on the grounds that Ethiopia had brilliantly won the Battle of Adwa for the Allies. The dubious legal justification for this was an ill-informed 1897 treaty between Britain and Ethiopia (then Abyssinia). In the early 1940s Ernest Bevin, as the British minister of foreign affairs, trying to right a nineteenth-century wrong, had campaigned for a reunited greater Somalia but was opposed in the 1946 meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers by Vyacheslav Molotov, a voice difficult to ignore, and the proposal died. Bevin, however, became a hero to Nuruddin Farah, and in Maps his photograph becomes a talis132

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man. It travels with Armadio, a now aged freedom fighter, who returns from one of Haile Selassie’s prisons to die in the Ogaden, and it is passed on to Askar, the young protagonist. We meet this photograph several times. The condition of the Ogaden, as disposable property, is a crucial issue in Somali nationalism. When returned to Ethiopia in 1948, its population was, and still is, more than 90 percent Somali, if judged by the language they speak. Amazingly, until 1972 Somali had no script, other than a very ancient one that is now indecipherable. Nevertheless, as Farah himself declared in Maps, the way “nationality” is felt and perceived in Somalia, as distinct from how it is adjudicated, is by language—not ethnicity. A recent study of his work agrees: [Despite dialectical differences] it is true . . . that Somalia is a land united by language to a degree unmatched by any other sub-Saharan African country of its size. One or another dialect of Somali is the first language of virtually all people born in Greater Somalia (comprising the Somali Democratic Republic, Djibouti, the Ogaden region . . . and the Somali-speaking region of northern Kenya).2 This important summary is accompanied by a convincing account of how a language without a script could stay alive and dominate a culture, how it made up for literacy by a powerful oral system producing great poetry, always attached to the name of its author and thus as it were copyrighted, a system not to be found elsewhere in Africa. But the language problem was only one aspect of the costs of the 1948 redrawing of boundaries (largely by straight lines on the map) in deference to prewar and wartime patterns of “ownership.” Britain 133

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took northern Somalia along the Gulf of Aden (conveniently near to Middle East oil deposits), Italy received southern Somalia, but only in a trusteeship, and France got the smaller prize of Djibouti. Thus once again partition was decreed by Western powers, the rationale being not the existence of divisive ethnic forces, as in India, but possessive and precautionary— a holdover of the British belief that smaller units were easier to control. In Somalia, the spoils were not ivory or rubber or vast mineral deposits, as in the Congo; the country’s wealth consists largely in agricultural products, livestock, fish, and bananas, and its long coastline, which allowed for the trading that created Mogadishu, but also created a problem with pirates. In 1960 Britain, finding the spoils too few and the costs of administration too great, gave its colony independence, and it joined southern Somalia in a new nation, the Somali Republic. Djibouti, however, did not get its independence from France until 1977. As we have observed in other parts of the world that have generated nationally conscious or nationally skeptical novels, independence was only the beginning of the new nation’s troubles. In 1969, Somalia’s first president, Absirashi Ali Sharmake, was shot dead, permitting a military takeover by General Mohamed Siad Barre, who would rule as a military dictator until 1991. At that time the country self-divided, with the northern part that had been the British colony declaring itself an independent nation, Somaliland, which has not as yet been recognized by any foreign country. In the south, where once the Italians had run their “protectorate” with as much ferocity as a dictatorship, chaos prevailed and continues. The most popular Western explanation for this prolonged infighting is clan rivalry and competition for basic resources, such as water and pasturage. But clan rivalry was itself partly a product of the Italian policy of “pacification”; by appointing and stipending a few tribal chieftains, the 134

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Italians had ensured that the clan would be seen as the only unit of organization. This point was made by Farah in Close Sesame, a painful study of Siad Barre’s dictatorship, although in fact Siad Barre did as much as he could to eradicate clan rule and replace it with selfconscious nationalism. Siad Barre himself promoted Bevin’s idea of a Greater Somalia, and embarked on a program of modernization and public works. He sponsored a Somali writing script, which was installed in 1972 as the official national means of communication, and started a campaign to improve urban and rural literacy. In 1976, however, Siad Barre established the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party, whose overall direction was Marxist. In the Ogaden, language had been a political issue since the region’s absorption by Ethiopia. In 1956 Haile Selassie, the emperor, delivered a speech to the inhabitants of the Ogaden, requiring them to learn Amharic, the official Ethiopian language. As Farah describes this policy in Maps, Nomadic camps were rounded up and their children taken away to schools in Upper Ethiopia—boys and girls who were barely six years old. They were sent to different schools in the non-Somali speaking regions of the country, so they would lose contact with other Somalis and with one another. Amharic—the language of a minority imposed upon a majority. (p. 88)3 In 1974, Selassie was overthrown by his military council, the Derg, who then fell out among themselves. Given this perceived weakness in its owner state, there seemed an opportunity to reclaim the Ogaden for Somalia. Hence the birth of a separatist, pro-Somali group in the Ogaden calling itself the Western Somali Liberation Front 135

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(WSLF; Western Somali Liberation Movement in the novel). From 1976 to 1977 this group was supplied with arms by Somalia, and on July 13, 1977, under Siad Barre’s leadership, Somalia invaded the Ogaden. Much of this was enabled by the odd fact that Somalia was receiving military aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States, a satire on Cold War strategy that ended when the Soviets abandoned Somalia and turned instead to massively supplying Ethiopia. And Ethiopia also received military support—11,000 soldiers—from Cuba, an unexpected blow from below that might remind us of Cuba’s intervention in the Congo. All this was because the Derg was Communist. By 1978 the Ogaden War was effectively over, leaving only small bands of guerrillas to continue the insurgency, or fight for liberation, as you choose. It is this war that forms the most important and thrilling context for Maps, which ends sometime after 1978, its protagonist still hesitating between joining the WSLF or going to university. There are clear but imperfect resemblances between that protagonist, Askar (whose name means “guardian” or “soldier” in Arabic), and Nuruddin Farah himself. Both, most importantly, spent their childhood in a small but real Ogaden town, Kalafo (Kallafo in the novel), which can (eventually) be found on a map of the Ogaden region, now in the southeast corner of Ethiopia. This gives the novel the same direct and passionate connection with realism that operated in Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, whose Albanian city of Gjirokastër is now a tourist wonder, or Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, whose miserable Kars can be easily located on a map in the northeast corner of Turkey. All three are border towns, whose location has been fateful because of their strategic importance, or at least their liminality. The same can be said for the ghastly northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, though hiding under the lovely false name of Santa Teresa, on the border 136

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between Mexico and the United States, the subject of our next-tolast chapter. Askar was born an orphan into an already scary Kallafo, his dead mother lying beside him, and his father, a member of the WSLF, dead in one of Haile Selassie’s prisons (p. 7). When was this birth, precisely? This novel not only moves deliberately back and forth in time, but eschews any clear chronology such as marks most nineteenth-century novels. It appears that the decision to send the child Askar to live in Mogadiscio (Mogadishu) with his maternal uncle coincided with the outbreak of the Ogaden war, and since he was sent away at the age of seven, this means that he was born in 1969 or 1970. That would compute with his knowledge, as a young boy, of the death of Haile Selassie in 1974 (p. 104), but he had been trying to shave before he left! If by the end of the novel he is really ready either to join the freedom fighters or to fill out the application form for the National University of Somalia (p. 255), he must be at least seventeen, as he is on page 48. Note that this unmade choice offers two ways for Askar to live as a Somali nationalist: one as the warrior his name denotes, the other as a scholar or writer, “one who can impart enlightened opinions about the cause” as his uncle puts it (p. 21)—that very old choice between sword and pen. Maps, like Chronicle in Stone, makes use of the child’s perspective on dreadful events to sharpen their dreadfulness, because that form of innocence is the strongest indictment of wars fought over territory. In this novel, however, the child’s perspective is soon submerged in the educational process, so that the novel becomes not a lamb’s view of the world of wolves, but a political bildungsroman, where the difficult questions of international justice are talked through. Askar is lucky to have been transferred to the care of an uncle who teaches at the National University, and who sees to it that he learns 137

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the history and politics of his new country, which is now Somalia proper, not a contested Ethiopian outcrop. One of his uncle’s happiest moments is when he brings home Askar’s new carta d’ identità (an allusion to the Italian bureaucratic past of Mogadishu), and Askar receives the first clear answer to his frequent question, “Who am I?” He is now a Somalian citizen, a member of a Somalispeaking family, and a person capable of making informed choices. But note Farah’s quiet cleverness. The choice of language allows a serious pun on carta, “map” in Italian, and the titular word of the entire novel. This is perhaps the moment to explain that Farah has adopted, for this novel, a highly unsettling fluctuation between three ways of telling the story: first in the second person, where a grown Askar addresses himself as “you”; secondly, in the first person, a strategy with which we are more likely to be comfortable; and thirdly, in the third person, so that “you” and “I” become “he.” These referents rotate, changing with every chapter, and the point only emerges, as it were, between the pronouns. Rather obviously, this strategy focuses the reader’s mind on the problem of personal identity (“Who am I?”). Need it be said that this is a major theme in this novel, as it was also in A Bend in the River, though conveyed by more conventional means? In Maps, the strategy is never explained. One might infer that the first person stands for intimacy with the self, the second person for some degree of separation (as in the older Askar addressing his child self), and the third person for a necessary degree of detachment. But I doubt that the different sections uphold this distinction. One of the answers to Askar’s “Who am I?” is a disconcerting recognition: the young Nuruddin Farah himself. It is impossible not to notice the both the similarities and differences between Farah’s 138

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protagonist and the author. The differences are personal, the similarities are political. Farah was born in Somalia in 1945, but he had a father and a mother, both educated. His father was a merchant who worked as a translator for the British in Badoia, in what had been Italian Somaliland. Soon after Farah’s birth his father was transferred to work for the governor in the Ogaden. Unwilling to allow his son to grow up in the educational desert that the Ogaden became when ceded to Ethiopia, his father organized the setting up of some Somali schools in the area. For a few years Farah was sent to an American mission school in the morning and an Arabic school in the afternoon. So too Askar spent the morning in a tyrannical Koranic school, and the afternoon at Kallafo Public School, where he had access to geography, history, and mathematics (p. 105). Farah learned Somali, Arabic, Amharic, and English—but when he became a writer he quickly decided to write in English, a smart career move but one that complicates his assumed connection between language and nationhood. In 1963 (before Askar’s “birth”), when he himself was eighteen, Farah was forced to leave the Ogaden because of border conflicts. Like Askar, he moved to Mogadishu, where he studied at the Istituto di Magistrale, and then to Panjab University in Chandighar, India, where he pursued a degree in philosophy, sociology, and literature. In 1974 he had to flee Somalia because Siad Barre’s regime banned his second novel, A Naked Needle, and he spent twenty-two years in exile. He has held teaching positions in the United States, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Sudan, and Gambia, and lived for several years in Rome. One might say that he had acquired all the qualifications for being an international novelist on the grand scale. Yet all of his novels so far have been set in Somalia, and in an interview with Fred de Vries on Book Chat he stated that it was his mission to “keep the 139

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country alive by writing about it.” None of his novels is more committed to the theory of Somalia than is Maps, and much of this chapter will be devoted to setting out that theory, as conveyed in conversations between Hilaal, the benevolent uncle, and Askar, the prodigy child. These scenes correspond in expository function to the student debates that took place on the kapia in The Bridge on the Drina about the future of the Balkans, and less obviously to the arguments in Snow about a Muslim versus a secular state. Before embarking on that rather lengthy demonstration, however, it is necessary to deal with an aspect of Maps that appeals to a different audience, and might indeed dismay the political theorist. That is, the obsessive emphasis on the body, on blood, and on menstruation. This theme begins when the infant Askar is found by Misra, a servant woman who comes from the north of Ethiopia, and is immediately taken as her own child, and washed clean of his helmet of blood. Given this preemptive act of possession, he is made her ward, presumably by his paternal uncle. Askar’s relation to this foster “mother” is constantly expressed in terms of blood, and the blood bond between them, which denies their lack of shared DNA, is asserted not only in the closest of bodily connections (she sleeps with him in her arms or between her legs until he is about five), but especially by her spontaneously menstruating when she first sets eyes on him— or rather, since it is his unusually mature gaze that seems to have caused this, when he first sets eyes on her. There are so many references to blood (doubly valent because this is wartime) that, I am sorry to say, I felt obliged to count. I counted 133 references to blood in what is quite a short novel (259 pages), and 20 references to menstruation, not counting all too many notations of a woman’s “season.” Of course there is a some justification for this in the argument that a child is initially and primarily an extension of 140

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the maternal body, which will properly give place to the body of the mother country (see pp. 100–101). But it is not clear why Farah has to push this cliché to the extreme by having Askar frequently experience the taste of blood in his mouth, even when he is a young man, and once as a child experience his own menstruation, a bizarre event which he then insists on recounting to his uncle. It does appear that Farah was influenced by the Western academic craze for writing about the Body that might have been the fallout of Freudianism and that seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s. Hilaal lectures his adoptive son about “Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss,” “body poetesses” like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and “body novelists” like Toni Morrison and Günter Grass (p. 233). Unfortunately this has affected some of the criticism of the novel, which has been obsessed with Misra, her sex life, her group-induced abortion, and her eventual mastectomy, and has even led to a debate as to whether Askar “really” menstruated, on which there are at least four different opinions. The other justification for making Maps a “Body novel,” is, of course, the plot. The story of Maps, more subtle than mere bildungsroman, is about how Misra, an Ethiopian, becomes an alien in the Ogaden once she has served her useful purpose of raising the orphan Somalian. During the Ogaden war, she is accused of having betrayed a camp of the WSLF to her Ethiopian lover, which results in the massacre of the troops. This is not an allegory. Instead it links the two stages of Askar’s life, childhood and adolescence, in a believable tale of political and ethnic hatreds. When Askar is seventeen, he learns that Misra, in fear for her own life, has traveled to Mogadiscio under an assumed identity, and he has to battle his own revulsion at meeting, after so long, not his “mother,” but a traitor to the cause. Mind trumps Body, and even his new uncle and aunt are shocked by his coldness to the woman who saved his life and made 141

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him what he is. It is they who take her to the hospital where she can be treated for her breast cancer, and they who try to find her after she has been abducted from the hospital by men from Kallafo who have tracked her down to exact the town’s revenge. To marry a Mind novel to a Body novel is something of a tour de force. Farah achieves this through the theme of the “map,” or “maps,” words which appear fifty-six times in the novel, about half as frequently as “blood,” but still ubiquitous, and more justifiably so, to my taste. I think we can assume that this is something else that Farah and Askar have in common. After Askar’s circumcision, when his uncle asks him what ritual gift he would like to mark his transition to manhood, he asks for a pen (aha!), but Misra, knowing him better than he himself does, suggests an atlas and a map of the seas and oceans. Once he has them, the cosmic aspect of seas and oceans gives place to wartime specifics. People sat next to the radio and names like Jigjiga, Harar, Iimey and Dire Dawa occurred frequently in their exchanges—which was when the atlases Uncle had given me became very useful to own. Most of the women were illiterate and had never seen or owned a map. And our room was turned into something like a war-room. We spread the maps on the tables and calculated how long it would take the Somali army to capture a given town and how far this was from us or from Mogadiscio, or, for that matter, Addis Abeba [sic]. (p. 98) Later Askar tries to imagine what effect this war will have on “the cartographer’s view of the Horn of Africa”:

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And so, with his felt pen, using his own body, he redrew the map of the Somali-speaking territories, copied it curve by curve, depression by depression. (p. 101–2) So body merges with map, map with body. But the statement is not yet analytic. A few days later, he reveals, to us at least, how far from comprehension he is. Asking Misra where “precisely” Somalia is—the novel’s overriding question—she replies, “Haven’t you seen it on the map?” To which Askar in turn replies, “No one has ever explained how to read maps, you see, and I have difficulty deciphering all the messages” (p. 116). One can read this literally, as a child’s view of an unfamiliar form of representation, or as a metaphysical statement that applies far more widely. When Askar is sent, at seven, to Mogadiscio, to be adopted by his maternal uncle and his wife, he takes with him the photograph of Ernest Bevin which has been deeded to him by the wife of Armadio, the freedom fighter who carried it back from one of Haile Selassie’s prisons to Kallafo. This talisman tells the reader that Askar will not only be physically safe during the war but that he will inherit Bevin’s idea of a united Somalia. When he arrives in his new and welcoming home, there are both sheets on the bed and maps on the wall of his room. This is how Askar describes the beginning of his further education in Hilaal and Salaado’s house: Salaado made you work harder at being yourself. She would give you a map so you could identify where you were born and would insist that you saw yourself in that context— a young boy from the Ogaden, one whose world was in turmoil. And so, nailed next to the map which indicated where

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you were born, there was a calendar. There, if you wished, you could follow the progress of the war in the Ogaden. Nailed next to the calendar, there was a mirror. Here, you could register your bodily changes, see how much taller you were. (p. 152) Map, Calendar, and Mirror! This overdetermined stack of symbols has attracted critics, but not always helpfully. If “mirror” suggests to some the theories of Jacques Lacan, this one registers not the coming to self-consciousness of a very young child but the fact of physical growth into young manhood. If “calendar” echoes the one Misra kept on the door of her room to remind herself (and others!) of the safe days in her menstrual cycle, this one charts the political fate of the Ogaden, in which no days are safe. And both are governed by the map which marks the place of Askar’s birth and the “context” (Salaado’s word) of his selfhood. In this list of sacred objects, to which we should also add the Pen, the Book, the carta d’identità, and the photograph of Bevin, it is the Map which comes to dominate Askar’s further education and the novel’s vocabulary; that is, until Misra reappears in Mogadiscio, bringing Blood with her on almost every page. This education soon becomes an excursion into political theory. The family were discussing the rhetorical question “Who’s an Ethiopian?” Hilaal answers his own question: Ethiopia is the generic name of an unclassified mass of different peoples, professing different religions, claiming to have descended from different ancestors. Therefore, “Ethiopia” becomes a generic notion, expansive, inclusive. Somali, if we

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come to it, is specific. That is, you are either a Somali or you aren’t. Pushed by Salaado to apply this theory to the historical moment, the war in the Horn of Africa, he actually itself makes the theory more generic rather than specific. “What is at war are the generic and the specific as concepts,” Hilaal says: The Soviet Union, the USA, the African countries who are members of the OAU support the generic as opposed to the specific. Obviously, they themselves belong to the generic kind. . . . The generification of Africa is a concept which the Ethiopian and other African governments whose peoples belong to different ethnic groupings and sources use, whenever it is challenged by secessionists and ethnic minorities living in their expansionist and inclusive boundaries. (p. 156) By creating a model more powerful than “postcolonialism” or “neocolonialism” whereby we might understand why the map of the world has changed so much and keeps on changing, and not least by evoking the Soviet Union and the United States, Hilaal universalizes the problem, as well as Africanizing it. The general opposes the specific, the large insists on subsuming the small, and individual nationalisms seem subversive of internationalism as currently conceived, as world blocs. But no sooner has Hilaal made this far-seeing point than he reverts to the specific Somali case. Citing the “generally accepted fear that if Somalis were allowed to get what they are after then the Biafrans will want to try it again, the Masai will want their own republic, and the people of southern Sudan their own

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‘generic’ state” (p. 156; a prophecy which has now come true!), Hilaal suggests that not all such cases should be seen as identical, and what makes the Somalis specific is that “they have fought and will fight for the realization of their nationalist goals” (p. 156). This was written, remember, in 1986, by which time the Greater Somalian moment of 1977–78, the attack on Ethiopia, had been blasted. It is thus encrusted with irony, although in the abstract the larger political analysis holds a commanding position we should do well to recuperate. Askar’s next and final education in cartography and cartology occurs after “The Tragic Weekend” in 1978 when “the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese generals (with a little help from the Ethiopians) masterminded the decisive blow which returned the destiny of the Ogaden and its people to Ethiopian hands” (p. 162). Significantly for our understanding of his character, Askar was ill with a fever at the time, and “when the nation mourned the loss of the Ogaden, [he] was preoccupied with the state of [his] health, [his] body, [his] skin” (p. 163). The fact that I have to alter the pronouns here is also significant in a vaguely philosophical way, because, as we shall see, the first-person singular, the pronoun “I,” must be able to include the body and the mind. As he recovers, he begins to redraw his map of the Ogaden, which he does not name as such but includes in Western Somalia, an instance of the general submerging the specific. There develops a subtle critique of maps as essentially relative to different eras and interests. Hilaal instances a map of colonialist Africa, “whose pinkish portions competed in terms of size and imagination with the green which represented the portions of the continent under the French” (p. 228). Askar picks up an old atlas (not very old, as it turns out), which showed the situation after World War II; and he remembers seeing a map “a German cartographer had drawn as his country invaded and conquered more and more of Europe” (that 146

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is, during World War II). Going one better, and much farther back, Hilaal cites Eduard Kremer’s map of 1567, in which Africa is smaller than Greenland, as befitted its global importance in the sixteenth century. “Truth” in maps, then, is merely a term in a Socratic dialogue, to be sliced apart and not reinstated in some higher form. The map that is missing, however, from this conversation is the one that Askar was trying to draw after his illness, showing the Ogaden briefly back in Somali hands (p. 256). The final message of Maps is that it may, sadly, never get drawn in authorized form. For Askar, this may be a truth, but it is not justice. I have not even touched on the subject of Askar’s vividly described dreams, which could attract a very different form of commentary, that which values magic realism or the surreal above basic painful realism. Despite what Farah learned from the modern or modernist European novel, Maps is not modernist, any more than it is a historical novel about Africa’s partitioning. Nor, for all its symbols, is it an allegorical novel, making Misra into an allegory of Somalia herself. It is a highly original solution to an impossible bind, a bind that Farah may be acknowledging in his turn to the domestic novel as a way to understand Somalia. Paradoxically, one can get closer to his characters in this novel than in those that precede or follow it, partly because there are fewer of them, partly because we sense that Askar and Nuruddin Farah are rather closely related. There is an intimacy here (perhaps too much intimacy) which is not found in most of our novels, except, perhaps, A Bend in the River, which also has an autobiographical subtext. Farah has won a number of important prizes for his writing, including the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for literature. He is a perennial nominee for the Nobel, which he will almost certainly win soon. But Somalia itself has won the booby prize for 147

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being constantly denoted a “failed state,” a category not discussed in my Introduction. The country has been without an effective central government since 1991, and since 2006 has been held hostage by Al Shabab, a fearsome militant Islamist group with ties to Al Qaeda. This is the most extreme example of a moving target, and when this book appears something quite different may be in place. But it will almost surely not be good.

A Follower: Michael Ondaatje and The English Patient

I had originally intended to include a whole chapter on this wonderful novel, which carries on the debate about nationalism and internationalism in a language so subtle as to have made it my students’ favorite, enamored as they were of the tragic love story that overrides any other message and softens the ideology. Part of that subtlety is Ondaatje’s ability to give philosophical and political freight to the words “map,” “maps,” and “mapping,” as well as “charts” and “cartography,” which are scattered through the novel seemingly at random. Some of them apply to its hero’s phenomenal ability to map the Saharan desert (he discovered the lost oasis of Zerzura), some to the skill of the young Sikh sapper, Kip, who has to read the internal map of an enemy bomb. Sometimes the maps are purely metaphysical or metaphorical. “It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller” (p. 246).4 The “he” here is the English Patient, who will turn out not to be English at all but an aristocratic Hungarian explorer, who has moved between nations as if their boundaries and contests were irrelevant. He is based on a real person, Count Ladislaus de Almásy, whose biography and discoveries are on 148

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record; but Ondaatje has altered his story so that it hovers between legend and historical fact. One of Almásy’s colleagues has a word for this interspace, “geomorphology.” Another word would be “internationalism,” but at a level of abstraction that eschews any reorganization of the world. Unlike the rivers of desert tribes, who flow unrestricted across the sand, Almásy has renounced nations, an ethical position which enables him to work for the Germans with a clear conscience. “Gradually,” he tells us, “we [desert explorers] became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. . . . Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert” (pp. 138–39). These keywords— our keywords— occur in The English Patient about fifty times, about as frequently as they do in Maps. It seems inconceivable that Ondaatje did not read Farah’s Maps before making the theme of his own novel the artificial and selfish organization of the world’s spaces. (Maps was published in 1986 and The English Patient in 1992.) As an émigré to Canada (he was born in Sri Lanka), who makes the second hero-figure of his novel a young Sikh who joins the British to help dismantle German mines and his heroine a young Canadian nurse who landed with the British at the beginning of the Sicilian campaign, Ondaatje would seem to be suggesting that international bonds can be forged at the local level. But lest we become sentimental, this charming group is shattered by the news of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which drives Kip mad with rage. Suddenly we are back in stark anti-colonialism: “American, French, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English” (p. 286).

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RHEA GALANAKI, THE LIFE OF I S M A I L F E R I K PAS H A THE TROUBLE WITH CRETE

I had joined an entire nation in seeking an outlet, be it only minimal, from its frozen sanctity; some way of becoming attuned to the rush of new ideas animating the nations of Europe.

This quotation, from late in The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, crystallizes his role as a representative of the birth of nationalism in states subject to the Ottoman Empire, a huge and “frozen” block of territory seemingly impervious to change. Though he has come in contact with what he calls modern liberal ideas, Ismail is desperately divided, since he also represents that old empire as it struggled, militarily, to retain its territory. The nation Ismail has joined, or in this statement is rejoining, was actually his own nation, his place of birth, until he was sucked up by the Ottomans, who took him unto themselves and gave him a new Muslim identity. The nation of which he speaks is the island of Crete, a part of whose terrible story is told in this remarkable novel; but it will take a long time for him to refer to it as a nation. Usually his word for that entity would be “homeland” or “country.” This novel, written by a woman in her native modern Greek, has been translated into English, French, Turkish, Bulgarian, Dutch, and German. It was the first Greek novel to be listed in UNESCO’s 151

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Collection of Representative Works. Thus Rhea Galanaki, born in Crete and educated at the University of Athens, has laid secure claim to have written an international novel as I have defined that genre. She is one of the very few women writers I encountered who is not constrained by the traditions of women’s fiction as they evolved in Eastern Europe and the Middle East—that is, women writers whose main, if not only, subject is the oppression of women. Galanaki does not, if I dare put it like this, write like a woman. Her protagonist is a man, a military man, and women are only shadowy background figures in his story. The novel hides its adventurousness under a neutral title that misleads, by suggesting that it is not a novel, which implies some degree of fictionality, but a biography of a person of some historical importance, if not a name we would recognize outside Crete; in fact, it is both. The story of Ismail Ferik Pasha is based on historical facts, but, as Galanaki tells us in her “Author’s Note,” the lacunae in the records leave “interstices in which literature may take over” (p. 8).1 The chief liberty taken here is the invention of a mind, an interior, for the Egyptian general whose name it bears. Is it then, a historical novel somewhat resembling Ivo Andrić’s Bridge on the Drina, but with a shorter historical reach? Indeed, both books begin with a culturally identical phenomenon, the capture of young boys by the Ottomans as trainees for eventual positions of power, or at least use, in the regime. In this instance it is two young boys from Crete, brothers, who are separated, one taken to Constantinople, the other, our protagonist, to Egypt. Their father has been killed by the soldiers of Hassan Pasha, the son-in-law of Mohammed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt. Their mother has died, but there are at least three different legends of the manner of her death. Our boy, the younger, carries with him the knife he found in the cave into which his vil152

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lagers fled to escape the Ottoman soldiers, and so he enters “the orbit of knives,” keeping his find always under his robes as a talisman. We learn from the foreword provided by the translator, Kay Cicellis, that this episode occurred during the Cretan revolt of 1821, a sideshow of the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule. The Ottomans had taken over from Venice, which had ruled Crete for four centuries, resulting in its widespread Christianization. In 1669, after the siege of Candia, the island became Ottoman property, resulting in large-scale conversions to the Muslim faith, similar to what happened in Bosnia. In 1924, Greece and Turkey engaged in a population exchange, sorting out their peoples by religion, a modern solution to religious diversity that was infinitely preferable to Turkey’s treatment of its Armenians. But the main historic event which stands at the center of Galanaki’s narrative, and generates its emotional power, was the second Cretan revolt of 1868, which unites the brothers by separating them still farther, Ismail being sent back to Crete to suppress the rebels who, it turns out, have been supported and funded by his brother, Antonis. Antonis had been, astonishingly, rescued from the Turks by members of the Russian embassy, successfully hiding in an empty fish barrel on a ship bound for Odessa, and taken in as a protégé by the Sturtzas family in that city. After the death of his patron he moved to Athens and amassed a fortune, by buying corn cheap in Russia and selling it “sky-high” in Greece. This information is imparted to Ismail by his cousin Ioannis, sent by Antonis to Egypt to make contact with him; but contact consists in learning how far apart they have grown, Antonis having acquired “kinsmen” of a different kind: “the conspirators, and the persecuted” (p. 59). Ismail, meanwhile, has grown close to the Turkish court in Egypt, to the TurkoAlbanian ruler Mohammed Ali, his patron, and especially to Ali’s 153

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beloved son, Ibrahim, by whose side he has learned to be a great Turkish warrior. He has converted to Islam and acquired an Ottoman family, with several wives. Thus the soldier and the businessman, tied by blood but divided by personal history and geography, meet again only by way of a venerable convention of the novel, the exchange of letters; and, as we shall see later, a vision from the underworld. So now that I have mentioned conventions of the novel, it is time to discuss what sort of a novel this really is, as distinct from its misleading title, which is misleading only if one lets the title govern all our expectations. I take it to be an intentional mongrel. First, it is a historical novel brought disturbingly close to us by our intimacy with its hero Ismail, whereas in The Bridge on the Drina we never get intimate with any of the figures who pass by on the river of time. This intimacy is created by reversing what one would expect, by having the first part of Ismail’s life, subtitled “Myth,” told in the third person, yet with a subjectivity that defies the impersonality of that narrative mode, while the second part, subtitled “The History,” is told in the first person. “Myth” deals with Ismail’s personal history from his capture through his rise to become a great Ottoman general and Egypt’s minister of war. “The History” deals with the Cretan campaign of 1868, during which Ismail becomes so distressed by the brutality of the Turkish irregulars that he actually orders the regular army to fire on them, an order which is carried out. In other words, he has come to doubt the second identity that he had so successfully built for himself in Egypt, and, in technical terms, has become a traitor to his adopted nation. Shortly after that personal revolt, he dies, probably poisoned by the Turkish commander-in-chief. But Galanaki also informs us that this novel is somehow governed by Homer’s Odyssey, by the concept of nostos, or homecoming. 154

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This claim needs very careful assessment. There are almost no features of the Odyssey alluded to other than the homecoming, the nostos itself. Ismail has no son, there is no Penelope figure, no obviously bad men, the suitors, to be slaughtered. There is one annoyingly fictional detail—the tiny birthmark on his neck that allows Ismail to be recognized in the village of his birth by an old priest (p. 130). This has to be a loose imitation of the scar on Odysseus’s ankle that is recognized by his old nurse Eurycleia when he returns to Ithaca in disguise, but it seems a rather forced sign of the romance aspects of the novel, for romance aspects there are, despite its basis in historical fact. But there is, toward the end, a clear imitation of Odysseus’s descent into the underworld, where Ismail summons up the shades of his mother and father, by digging a hole in the earth in the exact center of his old house and filling it with sacrificial blood—his own: I dug a small hole in the floor of beaten earth. But I lacked all that was required; nor could I offer any other blood than my own. I slashed the frail wrist with my yataghan and let a few drops of blood trickle into the hole. Then I sat back waiting, uttering the words. I waited a long time, as if the shades were resisting my entreaties. (p. 146) But of course they do come, the shades, not the ghosts, of his mother and father, and from his father he receives not only his Christian name, Emmanuel, but also forgiveness for what he has become. Finally, the remembered image of his brother, Antonis, appears to him, “though his being still among the living should not have permitted it.” He too offers forgiveness: “His hand was extended over a heap of apples. After a moment’s hesitation he picked up an apple and handed it to me” (p. 149). 155

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This descent into Hades, explicitly so named, blends the historical novel with its own father, the epic. In book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus, after carrying out the required blood ritual, summons up the shades of, among others, his mother, Anticlea, the prophet Tiresias, and the souls of heroes killed in the first recorded Greek war. Here especially the subtitle of this section, “The History,” is challenged by the unmistakable presence of myth, supposedly the province of the first part. But if this book leans on the Odyssey, it does so in order to complicate the idea of nostos to fit a harsher story. Nostos, so consoling a concept over time, and so regarded by James Joyce in his vast rewriting of the Odyssey in Ulysses, has here been converted into tragedy. The Odyssey can be seen as a comic epic to balance its tragic twin, the Iliad, in which an invading army of Greeks destroys part of what is now Turkey, in the classical celebration of unrestrained military violence. The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha represents, historically, a later stage in that age-old conflict between Greece and Turkey in which Turkey, for the moment, gets its revenge. To do so, it needs memories of both the original epics to orchestrate its more complex set of values and feelings. Whereas the Odyssey recalls the Iliad in the slaughter of the suitors, the Life imitates the Iliad more gravely and consistently. It is not just literary cleverness that governs this complex form of imitation. There is a certain rightness to it. After all, Homer had included a description of Crete in the Odyssey as part of the lie that Odysseus tells Penelope to overcomplicate his return. Pretending to be himself from Crete, he says: There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair land and a rich, begirt with water and therein are 156

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many men innumerable, and ninety cities. And all have not the same speech, but there is confusion of tongues. (book 19, ll. 172–75)2 The beauty and richness of ancient Crete may not have been in Homer’s mind damaged by the confusion of tongues, but the island’s subsequent history under the Ottomans was, of course, compromised by the mixture of Greek and Muslim populations, with their linguistic and religious differences a cause of endless friction. There were more Greek Christians than Turkish Muslims, but the empire naturally favored the latter in the conditions of the island’s governance. The situation was further enflamed by the Greek War of Independence, between 1821 and 1828. But while there was growing demand for integration with the Greek mainland, Cretans had earned a reputation for extreme independence of character. Before the great Cretan revolt of 1868 with which our novel is concerned, there had been revolts by the Christians in 1841 and 1858 against the empire’s support of the island’s Muslim community, which gained the Christians some administrative concessions but did not answer their demand for political union with Greece. During the later revolt, they received more concessions, such as equal control of local administration under what was called the Organic Law. But, or therefore, by 1869, after Ismail’s death, the rebellion had failed and Crete was back under Ottoman control. Beyond that, of course, the history was known to Rhea Galanaki, but for contemporary Greek readers its miserable series of setbacks could shed a retrospective dignity on the events here singled out for commemoration. In 1878 there was a further rebellion, during and perhaps inflamed by the Congress of Berlin, but intervention by the British expanded the Organic Law into an actual constitutional settlement, the Pact 157

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of Halepa. Under this pact, Crete became a semi-independent parliamentary state within the Ottoman Empire. Such a seemingly forward step did not, however, prevent a further rebellion in 1889, during which the Great Powers allowed the Ottomans to first send in troops and then rule by martial law, thus completely subverting the new constitution. This in turn led to the rebellions of 1895 and 1897, the last of which drove the Ottomans to declare war on Greece. This reactionary development led the Great Powers, whose own conduct had sparked it, to themselves take over control of the island, ruling it through a committee of four admirals in preparation for the arrival of Prince George of Greece, who on December 1898 became Crete’s first governor-general. Now at last freed from the Ottomans, the final step in the evolution of Crete as a nation was, ironically, its unification with Greece, as recognized by the Treaty of London in 1913. This did not give it autonomy, or protect it in the Second World War, when it suffered the inevitable invasion by the Germans, and the native Cretan tendency to rebellion became, in an interesting verbal shift, transformed into “resistance.” Galanaki chose to write about this miserable tale in its latenineteenth-century phase. In this stage, it is possible for Ismail, though officially an Ottoman general, to see both sides. As he explains to the Greek consul on the island, “Strictly from the rebels’ point of view, they could put forward a number of rightful claims; besides, responsibility for the misgovernment of the island . . . devolved almost exclusively upon the Porte,” the Turkish central authority (p. 87): However, war did not have to do with justice, or rather it did not have to do only with justice, and therein lies the 158

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alpha and omega of diplomacy, I said in a bantering tone; upon which I immediately added, in utmost seriousness, that I would fight this war on the side that I was committed to, and that I would do so in strict adherence to the rules. . . . I would be truly happy if the situation did not deteriorate any further. But I doubted whether this was possible, for it takes time for the enthusiasm of a rebellion to dwindle into despair. Moreover it was common knowledge that European diplomacy, practically in its entirety, was opposed to the rebellion. Nevertheless, I concluded, I could well understand that a long accumulation of grievances had led the islanders to rise in arms once again; this had always been the trouble here, as far as I could remember. (p. 87) The reference to “European diplomacy,” about which Galanaki is appropriately cynical, is one of many ironic remarks about the role of the Great Powers in shaping or stultifying Crete’s emergence into the modern world, a subtheme which it would take too many quotations to establish. At this point we should return to the quotation that stands at the head of this chapter, since its reference to Crete as a nation is actually an oversimplification of Ismail’s conversion. He himself is aware that, while the then current European diplomacy was on the wrong side of the struggle for Crete, his own perception of the rightness of the rebellion stemmed from the new European political thought to which he had been exposed while traveling abroad with Ibrahim: I was amazed at the extent to which the European way of thinking had won over my sun-bred soul, as if such things had more to do with nations than with individual souls. . . . 159

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At some point I glimpsed the reflection of the revolution on the island (yes, I finally agreed to name it revolution) entrapping me in its radiance. . . . I had recourse to the most progressive political ideas prevalent; they alone could free me of the secret, sacrilegious urge that poisoned my spirit; for they were the ideas that all the revolutions of our epoch invoked . . . in their endeavour to overthrow the world order. I thus found myself on the side of the revolutionaries. I asked myself—and trembled at my own question—whether I had no choice but to abandon everything and join them openly. But I did not really wish it. (p. 113) To fully understand Ismail’s internal conflict we have to work our way through the first part of the novel, which spends some time in detailing the history of Egypt, then an Ottoman province, from Napoleon’s occupation through the accession of Mohammed Ali as viceroy, followed by “the annihilation of the prestigious Egyptian fleet by the European Powers at Navarino and the signing of the London Protocol” (p. 35), and on to the Syrian war in which Ibrahim was prevented by the Great Powers from taking Constantinople and had to make do with the minor trophy of the pashalik of Adana. This part of the novel compresses almost fifty years of Egyptian history (1798–1841) into so few pages that it is difficult for a reader not already familiar with it to follow the narrative, let alone the political issues. The contact with European progressive ideas in France and Italy, then, follows defeat and disillusion, much of which has been caused by the interference of “the Great Powers” in flagrant contradiction to those ideas. It is not surprising, then, that Ismail’s education in modern political thought is only one strand of his intellectual growth, and that 160

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his loyalty to Egypt is genuine. Indeed, the disciplined role of the Egyptian army in suppressing the revolt was, according to Ismail, a rebuke to the Turkish commander, Omar Pasha, whose “conception of the world— and of the army in particular—reduced it to a mindless horde, not to say a collective carnivorous brute. Egypt’s official policy was explicitly opposed to such practices” (p. 121). Ismail had also observed to Omar that the European and American presses kept publishing reports of the “Porte’s brutal ill-treatment of its subjects, naturally omitting any reference to the dubious role played by their countries in this part of the world” (p. 121). This last clause deftly incriminates the Great Powers along with the Porte, the former being skewered by witty understatement. In comparison, then, to both uncivilized brutality and Western hypocrisy, in the holocaust that took place in the Arcadi monastery, where women and children as well as rebels had taken refuge, Ismail’s Egyptian troops had removed the bullets from their cartridges and fired only blanks (p. 102). Ismail, too, though as an officer not supposed to actually fight, had performed the same saving trick: “I had removed the bullets from my cartridges . . . and I had let them roll to the ground surreptitiously—dragon’s seed in the ploughed soil” (p. 103). A learned reader will realize that this one phrase rewrites and partially reverses the Greek myth of Cadmon, founder of Thebes, who sowed dragon’s teeth in the earth and saw them spring up armed men. With history and myth inseparably remixed, then, Galanaki offers us a new kind of novel, whose closest relative in our international novels is, after all, not The Bridge on the Drina but The Autumn of the Patriarch, itself a result of the mating of Latin American history with the fantastic. And the most nonrealistic aspect of The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha is its late negotiation with the ghost story, as Ismail not only summons up the shades of his parents but is also, 161

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involuntarily, visited again and again by the ghost of his beloved companion-at-arms, Ibrahim, which, even more fantastically, ages. In his penultimate appearance they converse about their shared past, and at the conversation’s end Ismail realizes he had been speaking in “his long-lost language,” Greek (p. 135). And after the last battle, in what will be his final statement, Ismail knew “that on returning to the camp at Kastelli, [he] would find Ibrahim, crumpled under the weight of extreme old age” (p. 151). Thus, with still one more generic twist, the novel reveals itself to be “about” intense male friendship, the Turkish adopted brother replacing the lost Greek natural brother, Antonis. Is it sentimental folly to suggest that Galanaki is here holding up for imaginative exploration (without preaching) the brotherhood of man? The pre-appearance of this theme in A Passage to India may be only a coincidence, but the two novels, so far apart geopolitically, reinforce each other ethically, using the tools—a sympathetic focus on individuals—that only the novel can use.

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Mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, . . . sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, . . . untranslatable jokes, . . . the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.

Is a knighthood better than a Nobel Prize? This is the kind of question incited by the career of Salman Rushdie, a provocateur in the literary world and far beyond. When he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on June 16, 2007, a pinnacle of his Anglo-Indian career, Iraq and Pakistan called in their British envoys in formal protest, and many nations with Muslim majorities condemned the award. Mass demonstrations took place in Pakistan and Malaysia to show that Rushdie had not been forgiven for The Satanic Verses, published nearly ten years earlier. But Rushdie has been the recipient of multiple awards from European countries, including Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Austria, and of course England and the United States, which gave him the India Abroad Lifetime Achievement award. This chapter, then, explores a different kind of international novel, one whose theme of intercontinental exchange prefigured its own flight on the wide wings of Fame/Notoriety. The Satanic Verses, though not Rushdie’s first literary success, drew international attention the instant it was published in 1988.

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Whereas Midnight’s Children (1981) had won the Booker Prize for its slightly fantastic representation of India and Pakistan after independence and partition, eventually taking aim at the regime of Indira Gandhi, The Satanic Verses raised the stakes of internationalism by tackling the basis of the great world religions, especially Islam. The novel’s fame and notoriety stem from an event outside the novel which in normal circumstances we would call part of its reception, but which in this case was its extremist censorship by the Muslim world. The fatwa, or sentence of death, pronounced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on its author has never been canceled, on the grounds that such extreme sentences have to be rescinded by those who ordered them, and Khomeini died in June 1989. The threat, though never carried out on Rushdie himself, made him a celebrity he might not otherwise have become. His crime, as trumpeted across the world, was blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad (whom Rushdie calls by his pejorative nickname Mahound) by way of an ironic rewriting of his biography. In Rushdie’s retelling, Muhammad is all too human and there are grave doubts about the famous revelations supposedly delivered by the archangel Gibreel. Blasphemy is a religious sin; Rushdie’s real offense, however, was political: the recovery for international inspection of the long-suppressed episode of the Satanic Verses which Muhammad said he received from the archangel and which, had he not recanted, would have allowed a moderate form of polytheism within Islam, thereby ruining its reputation for rigor. It probably did not help that the novel contains a scarifying portrait of Khomeini in exile—that is, prior to his masterly rebellion against the Shah of Iran in 1979. That victory changed the contours of the Arab world in favor of Islam. The book caused a breach in diplomatic relations between Iran and Great Britain, riots in Muslim communities everywhere, and several deaths. 164

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For those who have not yet read the novel, I should explain that there are actually two sets of Satanic Verses, one ancient, the other modern. The ancient ones were by tradition dictated to the Prophet on Mount Cone by the archangel in response to a request from the Prophet to the effect that the revolutionary monotheism he was promoting be slightly modified by adding to the One God three female deities, Lat, Uzza, and Manat. “They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed” (p. 117).1 This concession was revealed to the rulers of Jahilia by Mahound as the climax of a poem about vision and revelation. But after a brief period of manic celebration in Jahilia, Mahound returns to the mountain and receives a counterrevelation. He realizes “he has been tricked, that the devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic” (p. 126). Back in a hurry to Jahilia to “expunge the foul verses . . . to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story” (p. 126)! The second set of satanic verses consists merely of human tricks, and they cannot be unwritten. They are part of the scheme by one of Rushdie’s protagonists to undo the other: that is, the plot by Saladin Chamcha to destroy the love relationship between Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia Cone, the mountain climber, by provoking Gibreel’s unwarranted jealousy of her. That this modern Gibreel believes he is the archangel (and hence the source of the old Satanic Verses), that Allie’s name echoes the name of the mountain on which they were delivered, creates an almost unbearably complicated zigzag between past and present, between history and fiction; and no doubt this dizzying effect was designed to insulate, as it were, the chapters dedicated to 165

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Mahound from the demands of historical accuracy, as also of blind belief. That Rushdie issued a disclaimer, to the effect that his book was only a novel and hence not to be taken seriously, did nothing to mollify his accusers, many of whom had not even read the book, and most of whom were unlikely to be sophisticated about the purposes and boundaries of fiction. That in 1990 Rushdie stated in public that he had renewed his Muslim faith, and reneged on that as soon as he saw it did nothing to protect him from the fatwa, did not endear him to those writers who had stuck out their own necks to defend him. The Satanic Verses, however, remains a monumental achievement, even though, or because, it frequently seems to be pulling one’s leg. It has a huge subject or subjects: the origins of the Muslim faith in the personal history of the Prophet; the state of India in the postcolonial period; how Britain was treating its immigrants, especially those of the “tinted persuasion” (p. 295) under Margaret Thatcher; the new globalization; racial miscegenation and/or dark men marrying white women; and the nature of God, Satan, and the supernatural generally. Lesser topics include an inquiry into the possibility of miracles, metamorphosis (via Ovid and Lucretius), sexual jealousy (via Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello), and the Indian film industry, or Bollywood. Any one of these might have sufficed to carry and motivate a serious work of literature, but Rushdie evidently aimed at outdoing his predecessors, who included the titans John Milton, Shakespeare, and James Joyce, in the scope of his book. A Passage to India may also have been in the back of his mind, with its interest in different faiths and its central theme of a difficult friendship between men of different races. The Satanic Verses has by now received more than two decades’ worth of critical attention, and its difficulties (for it is a challenge to 166

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the ordinary reader) have been elucidated, its many, many allusions to other works of literature tracked down. But some general questions still need to be asked in order to explain why it qualifies here as an international novel. When is it set? You can work out the historical moment with some precision. Its events are those of Rushdie’s own time, when both Margaret Thatcher and Rajiv Gandhi are in power, and after the Meerut Massacre of 1987 in northern India, a reference to which must have been added very close to the novel’s appearance; it occurs in the final chapter (p. 552). But, by using the pretext of dreams as a vehicle, Rushdie swoons back to the early seventh century and gives his own version of the origins of Islam, up to but not including the hegira (the migration of Muhammad’s followers) to Medina in 632. Whose dreams? Those of the modern Indian film star Gibreel Farishta, and we are never sure if he too is inspired, or merely insane. Where is it set? Primarily in London and Bombay (not yet renamed Mumbai), but also in Mecca (Jahilia) in what is now Saudi Arabia, and in small towns on the eastern edge of the Arabian Sea, near Karachi, in Pakistan: three primary sites, with a brief and inexplicable excursion into Argentina. (Visually mapping this terrain for this book with a modern map has been deemed impossible and unnecessary.) And one of the most important sites of the action is within the body of a huge modern airplane. The importance of air travel in changing perception is a major subtheme of The Satanic Verses, which echoes on the grand scale a similar insight in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. This technological feat, a miracle in its own way, is the most obvious sign of how internationalism becomes both possible and unavoidable for the individual in the late twentieth century. As Salim says in A Bend in the River, “I was in Africa one day; I was in Europe the next morning. It was more than travelling fast. 167

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It was like being in two places at once. . . . Both places were real; both places were unreal” (p. 229). In The Satanic Verses the two unreal cities are London and Bombay, and the two main protagonists make several fateful journeys between them. The most fateful, of course, is the trip on the jumbo jet Bostan which, blown apart by terrorists, precipitates Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha into free fall. What kind of novel is it? Comic, tragic, epic, satirical, philosophical, a novel of ideas, a novel specifically aimed at revising most of the great old ideas. On the first page Rushdie challenges one of the assumptions of the old theories of genre, that comedy and tragedy should not mix. From the start the novel is, Rushdie tells us, like Gibreel and Chamcha in their fall from the sky, “pitting levity against gravity” (pun intended), that is, humor against seriousness. Up for witty review, then, is the old myth of the fall of the rebel angels from heaven, most brilliantly conceived by John Milton in Paradise Lost. In this new myth, however, the “two brown men” do not fall into a burning lake, but onto a chilly English beach, miraculously saved from harm. They also begin a disturbing metamorphosis which will undermine the Christian myth far more radically. Embracing head to tail, a position that Rushdie politely refrains from calling sixty-nine, they begin to acquire, respectively, the symbolic manifestations of absolute goodness and badness. The “angelicdevilish fall” (p. 5) works the magic which supplies Chamcha with the horns, hair, and hooves that an extremely crude religious imagination associates with the devil, and less ostentatiously plants a halo on the head of Gibreel. The halo can be hidden under a hat, but the more threatening gift that Gibreel acquires is the firm belief that he is actually an archangel. The very presence of this Christian dualism conflicts with the fact that both Chamcha and Gibreel are Muslim 168

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Indians. But the remainder of the novel will attempt to suggest that dualism has always been a device to veil the fear that God and the devil are equal partners in control of the world, if not one and the same. But to further address the question of genre, Rushdie leaves open until the end whether the novel is a tragedy or a comedy; that is to say, will the main plot, the stories of Chamcha and Gibreel, have a nihilistic or a moderately happy ending? In the event, because it has two main protagonists, it can have and be both. Chamcha, who has abandoned his white British wife, resolves his tortured indecision between nations—English or Indian—in favor of the latter and a beautiful dark Indian woman, and Gibreel throws his adored white British lover, Allie the snow queen, the mountain climber, from the top floor of the multi-story apartment building Everest Vilas, echoing in a darker key his own fall from the sky. That Allie climbed Everest successfully and then is thrown to her death from Everest Vilas in Bombay adds a fateful (or tricksy) symmetry to this love plot, the one that leans on Othello for its seriousness. Then Gibreel commits suicide in Bombay in front of his compadre, Chamcha, who will stay in India to marry his beautiful and politically activist Zeenat Vakil. At this level of genre, Rushdie is fairly obvious. At this level, the novel satisfies some mysterious demands of its readers as to how love stories should end. As a philosophical novel, however, or a novel of ideas, which is not quite the same thing, The Satanic Verses is more of a tease than a serious challenge to traditional concepts of religion. At the heart of the tease is Rushdie’s mischievous distortion of an old device of the novel: the omniscient narrator, used by nineteenth-century novelists to tell the stories of a sometimes vast cast, including their unspoken motivations, without actually pretending to get into their brains. 169

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The sign of the omniscient narrator, as observed in the cases of A Passage to India and The Bridge on the Drina, is the absence of an “I,” a designated first-person speaker. Critics have often said that the omniscient narrator takes the position of God ruling his universe according to his own immutable design. Rushdie takes this by now outdated convention to its logical conclusion. His omniscient narrator is in fact either God or Satan or, in Manichaean fashion, both at once. On the very second page of the novel he says to himself and us, “I mustn’t interfere,” which is, of course, precisely what an omniscient narrator must do. At the end of this first chapter, the narrator asks us which of Chamcha and Gibreel was responsible for their incredible landing safely on the ground, because, we are supposed to believe, Gibreel sang and Chamcha, in default of wings, flapped his arms: Which was the miracle worker? Of what type—angelic-satanic—was Farishta’s song. Who am I? Let’s put it this way, who has the best tunes? (p. 10) “Who am I?” the very question asked by the human protagonists in Maps and The Autumn of the Patriarch as they struggled with that most modern of problems, self-identification. But for Rushdie’s “I,” it is a theological joke. Eventually this “I” will reveal himself. Gibreel, now deep in his madness, sees the Supernatural in person: Gibreel’s vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in the least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close to the jaw. . . . The 170

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apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses. (p. 329) This is taking to its ludicrous extreme that human habit of anthropomorphism, of creating deities as human as ourselves, and, in the case of the Christian god, letting our creation inform us we were created in his image. For Gibreel’s description of this all-too-human Supreme Being is a self-portrait of Salman Rushdie as he appears in many photographs. Not content with this joke, Rushdie has his protagonist engage the Supreme Being in theological debate: “Who are you?” He asked with interest. . . . “Ooparvala,” the apparition answered. “The Fellow Upstairs.” “How do I know you’re not the other One,” Gibreel asked craftily, “Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?” A daring question, eliciting a snappish reply. . . . “We’re losing patience with you, Gibreel Farishta. You’ve doubted Us just about long enough . . . We are not obliged to explain Our nature to you . . . Whether We be multiform, plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay, or whether We be pure, stark, extreme, will not be resolved here.” (p. 329) Nor will it be resolved in this novel. For Rushdie is here taking the grave ontological problem of the existence and nature of god or gods by the throat, and then tossing it over his shoulder. At stake is the rigorous monotheism of Judaism and Islam versus the intricate theory of the Trinity in Christianity, which tries to have it both (or three) 171

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ways, versus the unabashed and exuberant polytheism of Hinduism. It is, of course, no coincidence that the polytheism of Hinduism was celebrated in the “theologicals” in which Gibreel had made his name in Bollywood, impersonating the various Hindu gods: the elephant god Ganesh, the monkey god Hanuman, and the “muchmetamorphosed Vishnu”: For over a decade and a half he had represented to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. (p. 17) Small wonder, then, when Gibreel confronts the Supreme Being in Allie’s bedroom he sees an image of—himself. As a small finesse, the terms “Oopar” (up) and “Neechay” (down) are derived from a patriotic song in Hindi, “Mera Joota hai Japani,” which was launched in the movie Shree 420 in 1955 and instantly became a hit, speaking to the newly sovereign nation of India, and to the theme of globalization generally. It was this song that Gibreel translated in his fall from heaven at the novel’s beginning: “O, my shoes are Japanese. . . . My heart’s Indian, for all that” (p. 5). Through its teasing premise of a godlike or devilish narrator, the novel introduces one of its most serious inquiries: the nature and origin of evil. This age-old conundrum was the motive for Milton’s Paradise Lost, which attempted to remove all blame from the Creator for the imperfect and often merciless world we inhabit. Despite constructing the most persuasive embodiment of evil in literature, a version of Satan as eminently human, leader of a lost rebellion, a military commander in human shape except for his vast size and 172

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dark wings, Milton failed to vindicate his God from being logically the first cause, the genesis of badness. This point was made by Daniel Defoe in his early-eighteenth-century History of the Devil, a rationalist critique of, among many other things, Paradise Lost. Rushdie cites Defoe as a prologue to his novel, though without clarifying what he learned from him. Defoe’s iconoclastic book was primarily intended to demystify the idea of the devil, claiming him to be only a human fabrication, needed by humans to account for their own wickedness. Rushdie, however, is not interested in this simple solution, which, of course, fails to account for wickedness in humans. His Supreme Being is apparently both god and devil simultaneously. This is a more radical heresy than even Manichaeanism, which posits that good and evil are separate forces always in equilibrium in the world—no final victory over evil being possible. As the spirit of Rekha Merchant, Gibreel’s first victim, insidiously suggests: This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam . . . but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century b c asks, “Shall there be evil in a city and Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted in DeuteroIsaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century b c, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God. (p. 334) But Rushdie then seems to preempt any supernatural clarification by having the battle between good and evil fought out in his two main characters. Chamcha, the visible sign of the fiendish in its 173

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most vulgar form, becomes actually bad when he is consumed by rage at his abandonment by Gibreel after they first land in England, left to be hauled away and humiliated in a police van. The more his rage heats up, the more fiendish his outward appearance grows; and then, confusingly, he is returned to his human shape “by the fearsome concentration of his hate” (p. 304). We would have thought that the logic of the supernatural would make him grow more bestial and monstrous. But Rushdie needed him back in his human form, not in order to enable his final happiness with Zeeny, but in order to make plausible his truly evil phase, his self-insinuation into the romance between Gibreel and Allie. Chamcha, Rushdie carefully informs us, keeping his literary allusions coming, is Iago to Gibreel’s Othello. Chamcha discovers an obscene way to use his professional talent for speaking in multiple voices, delivering by phone accusations and insinuations that imply Allie’s infidelity and even lewdness, and worst of all reciting the “little satanic verses” (p. 460) that because of their songlike character, their rhymes, bore into Gibreel’s brain like maggots. Like its Shakespearean precedent, the story of Gibreel (dark man) and Allie (translucently white woman) is a tragedy, of madness and murder, and of racial and national difference. There is also here, as there was in A Bend in the River, the temptation offered to the reader to assume an autobiographical (sexual) subtext which runs athwart the theoretical issue of racial difference. Rushdie himself has three times married white women, all of whom are still alive; but his fourth wife was the American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, a marriage that ended in 2007. Yet his marital career more closely matches the story of Saladin Chamcha than of Gibreel Farishta, one is glad to note. So too the delicate problem faced by the secular Muslim intellectual of defending and explain-

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ing nonbelief is one that Rushdie himself obviously experienced, and shared with the Orhan Pamuk of Snow. There is a sense of grave relief when, as the novel draws to its close, Changez Chamchawala, Chamcha’s father, who had always been an unbeliever, dies a dignified death secure in his nonfaith, without once speaking the name of God (p. 545). “I know,” he tells his son, “I am not going anywhere after this” (p. 543). Later, Rushdie would clarify his position on religion, or at least Islam, in an opinion piece printed in the Washington Post and the London Times on August 7, 2005. The piece was written in the context of Tony Blair’s controversial bill to criminalize the expression of religious hatred, whose effect, to Rushdie, would be to outlaw any critique of religion: What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age. . . . It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it. . . . It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose origins are recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend but in fact. . . . However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible.2 Such a reform would correspond to the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible in the nineteenth century, which identified the stages in

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which the Hebrew scriptures had been collected and canonized, the historical books along with the prophetic, literary, and visionary ones, the whole medley jump-started by the brilliant fable of the Fall in Genesis. The higher critical method is just beginning to develop in relation to the Koran, questioning traditional claims about its composition and content, on the assumption that, like the Bible which it often echoes, it was written, in stages, by human beings. This assumption is clearly implied in The Satanic Verses, not only in its treatment of Muhammad as the fallible Messenger, but also in the role of Salman the Persian, who as the Prophet’s secretary, having become skeptical of the revelation process, surreptitiously makes changes in what is dictated to him (pp. 379–80). But before we attribute to Rushdie the significant feat of having included, along with so much else, some early higher criticism of the Koran, that is to say, studying it as product of the seventh century in order to enable its adjustment to the twenty-first, it must be admitted that he finally hedges on the role of the supernatural in even modern life. For in part VIII, “The Parting of the Arabian Sea,” he sets against each other the rationalizing, modern, secular, position of Mirza Saeed the Samindar and that of Ayesha the self-appointed second messenger, who communicates with Gibreel and persuades the villagers of Titlipur to follow her to the edge of the Arabian Sea, promising that the waters will part as they did for the Israelites in the Red Sea, and that they will all cross over on dry land to complete a pilgrimage to Mecca. Mirza Saeed tries desperately to persuade the villagers and his wife, who is dying of cancer, that the trip is insane and will kill them all. But Ayesha wins this battle of wills. She wins primarily because of the miraculous cloud of butterflies that fly around her, clothe her nakedness, provide her only nourishment, and finally coalesce into the vision of a giant archangel float176

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ing above the sea. When the pilgrims under these auspices enter the water and disappear from view, all but one of the survivors declare that they saw the waters open and the villagers walk safely through, “among the dying fish.” That one was Mirza Saeed; and his version of events would seem to be confirmed by the fact that drowned bodies keep washing ashore, as pointed out by the police. But at last, in what may or may not be a dream, he is offered a second chance at transcendence, and despite his own intellect his body opens to the world of miracles. And thus he dies—in total antithesis to the stoic, nonbelieving death of Chamcha’s father. However rationalist the reader, he or she will probably be seduced by the butterflies, whose sheer beauty would seem to authenticate Ayesha’s claims. Thus Rushdie lets back into his story the huge question that his comments about Islam would seem to have answered: Do we need a belief in the supernatural to have a world religion? But this compromise is not a tease, and certainly not a joke. It is, in my view, a cheat. The reason for this harsh judgment is that Rushdie distorted a real event that, if taken on its own terms, would have greatly illuminated the central conflict in Islam, the division between Sunni and Shia sects. This problem is not mentioned in The Satanic Verses, but it is addressed with considerable sophistication in a scholarly article that describes and analyzes the event on which Rushdie builds. The event took place in February 1983 at Hawkes Bay in Karachi, when thirty-eight people, all Shiites, entered the sea, the men walking, the women and children enclosed in locked wooden and metal trucks, which the men pushed into the water. The event was motivated by the original of Rushdie’s Ayesha, a young woman, Naseem Fatima, who was, like Ayesha, subject to fits. When her father, Willayet Shah, returned home after several years working in Saudi Arabia, newly inspired in his religion by the victory of 177

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Khomeini, she informed him that she heard a voice through the wall of the house. Her father encouraged her to develop this experience. The voice was first attributed to Bibi Roqaya, the stepsister of the grandson of the Prophet, but later to the twelfth Imam, Imam Mahdi, who according to the girl began to instruct her in all sorts of village matters, including the distribution of property, and was supposedly responsible for a number of obviously pseudo-miracles. Her father, meanwhile, gained in status in the village. Eventually Naseem asked her father, on behalf of the Imam, whether the believers in the village would plunge into the sea as an expression of their faith. It was not at all clear whether the impulse was to be selfsacrifice in behalf of holiness or whether the faithful would be rewarded by being miraculously transported to Karbala. Not only did her father approve the plan; he financed it. This story was told in a scholarly article by Akbar S. Ahmed, published in March 1986, three years before the appearance of The Satanic Verses.3 It is quite obvious that Rushdie read it, for the attitude of the Sunni community has been transferred to Saeed (a name that, coincidently, appears in Ahmed’s footnotes). I quote from Ahmed: “The Sunnis condemned the entire episode as ‘bizarre’ and dismissed it as ‘insanity.’ This, they argued was mumbo-jumbo and quackery and not in keeping with the logic and rationality which is Islam” (p. 132). And Rushdie’s Saeed, trying to persuade Srinivas the toy-merchant to resist the call, cries out: “We must open a secular front against this mumbo jumbo” (p. 490). But unlike Ahmed, Rushdie makes no attempt to explain the credibility gap in terms of the modern sociology of the Sunni-Shiite division. In Pakistan today only about 20 percent of the 90 million Muslims are Shiites. The rest are Sunnis. Understandably Shiites feel in the ideological minority, and their response is to intensify the 178

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emphasis on sacrifice that underlies Islamic culture (as in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac), identifying with, deifying, those whom they regarded as the Prophet’s true successors. If you add to that some psychological sensitivity, not only to those, usually women, who feel the need to hear voices to acquire some authority, but to those in peasant cultures who desperately need the idea of eternal life to make the everyday bearable, it should have been possible to bring The Satanic Verses to a rational ending, back to realism and its roots in comparative sociology. Gibreel’s madness is caused by very bad dreams, for whose content no supernatural force is responsible; and the magic lamp inherited by Saladin Chamcha brings no jinn. The magic instead is the appearance of a loving, modern, socially active, and beautiful Indian woman, who has been shaped by the Bhopal disaster and the Meerut Massacre, neither of which was the slightest bit supernatural, merely real life at its worst. Finally, however, readers can take their pick. Rushdie’s messages about the kind of world we live in contradict each other, but they are separable. Some of them become pertinent again as history moves on. So let us close this chapter with a quotation from the novel that balances the elegiac tone of the opening (gravity) with the comic voice of resistance (levity) as it might again be needed in the twentyfirst century, especially in the Amrika for which Rushdie has no time at all: Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-whendem-make-insinuation-we-no part-a-de-nation. (p. 301)

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“What nation was it you were talking about?” “It’s a way of fighting against nationalism, of fighting the rhetoric of Us against Them.” —Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors

Like Nuruddin Farah’s terse title, Maps, which epitomized the plight of Somalia in northeast Africa, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow makes one word stand for the problems of his own country, Turkey. Like Farah, both Pamuk and his hero, Ka, have spent some time in political exile, the author for having expressed outrage at his country’s not-so-long-ago violent expulsion of all its Armenian citizens and also for its continuing oppression of its Kurds; the character for “a hastily printed political article he had not even written” (p. 33).1 In Turkish, kar means “snow,” a linguistic fact convenient for Pamuk, since it mysteriously links Kars, the border city, and Ka, the poet returning to his birthplace there. (Ka must also be related in literary terms to Kafka’s K., who was a version of Kafka.) How deep the snow is in this novel! In its opening chapter the phrase “the silence of snow,” appearing twice in three lines, introduces what is about to happen (p. 3), but also stands in, probably, for the enforced silence of the Turkish state about its genocidal past and ethnically exclusionist present.

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Pamuk makes no secret of the fact that one of the themes of the novel is political censorship. As Ka relates to his would-be beloved, Ipek, the girl he has come home to marry: In the small political newspapers of the late seventies, considerable freedom of expression had been exercised, much more than the penal code allowed. Anyone tried and found guilty of insulting the state tended to feel rather proud of it. But no one ended up in prison, as the police made no serious effort to pursue the editors, the writers, or the translators in their ever-shifting whereabouts. (p. 33) Still according to Ka, this temporary liberalization by neglect ceased completely after the military coup of 1980, when he (the protagonist) had fled to Frankfurt. “Insulting the state” was the charge against Pamuk himself in 2005, when he was put on trial for his insistence in talking about the Armenian massacre. Although the trial was stopped by means of a technical maneuver as Turkey came under immense pressure from writers all over the world, this later violence against Pamuk gives Snow, published four years earlier, an eerie sense of foreboding. The heart of Snow, however (if one can call it a heart), is not political censorship. It is an old-fashioned romance plot: the relationship between Ka, now back in Kars, and Ipek, not his childhood sweetheart but a divorcée about whom he has been fantasizing while in exile and who is part of his motive for return. After a few days Ka proposes to Ipek that she return with him to Frankfurt to escape the dreariness of Kars (and perhaps also her former lover, the terrorist Blue). She agrees, but at the last moment retracts, having learned that Ka has betrayed Blue’s hiding place. Like Humphrey Bogart in 182

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Casablanca, he gets on the train alone. This romance plot is a dry (deliberately) and anemic rerun of the plot of the movie, in which, of course, Bogart himself retracts his agreement to fly off with Ingrid Bergman, thus saving her husband from the Germans. Both versions, the noble and the demeaning, take place against a backdrop of political danger: in Casablanca, the danger that the Germans will capture the brave resistance fighter, Bergman’s husband; in Snow the scuffling (fighting is too strong a word, though several people are killed) among the old secular republicans, a few Communists, the Islamist fundamentalists, the local Kurds, the army, and the secret police. Against this central ironic plot Pamuk plays out three others: first, the plot of Ka the poet, whose arrival in Kars is seen as more demanding of attention than the miniature military coup that occurs while he is there; that we never see a single poem of his leads eventually to the reader’s realization that, however Ka believes in his own greatness, he is really no poet at all. Second, the plot of the head scarves, the symbol of Muslim resistance to the secular state, and epitomized by Kadife, Ipek’s less beautiful but much braver sister; and third, the plot of the play put on by Sunay, an old republican, tellingly titled My Fatherland or My Head Scarf, which ties the second and third plots together, and initiates the mini-revolution in Kars. Th is play adds an air of metatheatrical absurdity to events, which, if told in another tone of voice, would be Jacobean tragedy and which connect to the rash of local female suicides, deaths that Ka originally suggests are his motive for being in Kars as a reporter. But the tone of the whole novel is lightly ironic, or sometimes heavily so. And our distance from the story is increased by a narratalogical pirouette. In Snow, Pamuk splits himself into two personae, the 183

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tiresome and mendacious Ka, who seems on the whole unintelligent, and a wickedly omniscient narrator, who speaks in the first person, claims to have been a childhood friend of Ka’s, and returns to Kars four years after Ka’s death to collect information for his novel—in fact, relating Pamuk’s own journey of February 2002. This omniscient narrator eventually reveals himself as Pamuk—that is to say, himself, perhaps in imitation of Rushdie’s joke about the Supreme Being. But Pamuk gives the old device a different satiric twist, and there is nothing theological about it. His narrator knows far more than can be rationally explained by that other narratorial device, his own fact-gathering trip to Kars, and the still other wellworn convention of finding Ka’s notebook in his sad little room in Frankfurt. His omniscience is itself a source of dark, even cruel, irony as he foretells with comic exactness that young Necip will have one of his beautiful eyes shot out “twenty-six minutes” after his conversation with Ka in chapter 16. And his own fascination with the beautiful Ipek, to whom he too proposes marriage only a few days after his arrival in Kars, makes himself a subject of his own mockery. This suggests that the narrator and his protagonist are more closely related than the premise of a very long friendship can quite explain. Eventually we realize that there is still a fourth plot, the story of the writing of Snow, an act of both personal loyalty and reportorial responsibility. Pamuk became a successful novelist in Turkey in part by choosing to write about historical subjects set far in the past. In 1995 he had his first brush with state censorship when he with a group of other authors was tried in court for writing essays criticizing Turkey’s treatment of the Kurdish minority. Ka’s phrase “insulting the state” acquires intensified meaning from the fact that in June 2005 184

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Turkey introduced a new penal code, of which Article 301 stated that any Turk “who explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly” will suffer “imprisonment of between six months to three years.” This clause was applied retroactively by an ultranationalist lawyer, Kemal Kerincsiz, to remarks that Pamuk had made in the Swiss publication Das Magazin in February 2005 about both the Armenian massacre during World War I and the contemporary violent repression of the Kurds. Pamuk was prosecuted, and rallies were held to burn his books. But after a counter-campaign by famous international writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Turkey evidently realized that its attack on Pamuk would be a deterrent in its own campaign for membership in the European Union. On January 22, 2006, the justice minister refused to issue an approval of the prosecution, and the charges were dropped— on a technicality, rather than on principle. The announcement was made in the very week that the European Union was scheduled to begin a review of the Turkish justice system. Just as well, since Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in 2006. It would have been embarrassing for Turkey to have its first Nobelist in prison. It is both strange and not strange at all that nobody seems to have noticed the more damaging critique of contemporary Turkey that Pamuk accomplished in Snow, which he dates at its end 1999–2001—a book for the new millennium— and published in Turkish the following year. As John Updike, another of the international defenders of Pamuk, wrote in his review in the New Yorker, “To produce a work so frankly troubled . . . and against the grain of the author’s usual antiquarian bent, entirely contemporary in its setting and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners.”2 Why did the authorities show little concern over the book’s description of the lamentable, multi-causal situation 185

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in eastern Turkey, a region more marked by ethnic and religious conflict than westernized Istanbul, scarred by the multiple suicides of young girls in the town of Batman and the almost ubiquitous unemployment of the men? What sort of modern state, clamoring for recognition by Europe, could allow (or advertise) this backwardness? And why does Snow stage (and the stage is a significant metaphor for the state) so many conversations about politics, about the republican principles introduced by Kemel Atatürk, about Islam, about secularism, and about what constitutes a nation? In the notebook he published about his return to Kars in February 2002 to ground his novel (which was three-fifths written) more firmly in sociological truth, Pamuk admits that the Kars of the novel “does not resemble the real city,” which is both more beautiful and less troubled by political Islamicism.3 In other words, he exaggerated the troubles of Kars to make it a darker paradigm of Turkey as a whole. Why locate the story in Kars? Because it is a border city, like Andrić’s Višegrad on the eastern edge of Bosnia, and hence a reminder of the fractious status of borders. Pamuk’s Kars, moreover, is on the frontier between Turkey and Armenia, and thus a permanent reminder of Turkey’s forced evacuation of the Armenians during World War I. In its longer history Kars and its region were a trouble spot. In 1878 the city was transferred to Russia; in 1919 it came under the administration of the Armenian Republic; and it was not until 1921 that the Treaty of Kars returned it to Turkish control, just in time for the establishment of the new republic. In 1945 the Soviet Union annulled the Treaty of Kars and demanded that the city and its region be handed back. “To the Russians, Kars was a gateway to the south and to the Mediterranean,” our narrator observes (p. 20). And it was only because both Winston Churchill and Harry Tru-

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man opposed the scheme that the Soviet Union abandoned its claims. And the final reason for choosing Kars (rather than, say Batman, where the suicides started) is because of its evocative name. One obvious answer to the question of why the Turkish government seemed unperturbed by Snow— and the answer invoked by Salman Rushdie, who is mentioned in Snow (p. 299) as an author who was charged with insulting Muhammad—is that the work is only a novel. As such, as fiction, it should command the immunity that interviews and essays, which report an author’s own views, do not. But this is not quite the case with Pamuk, who has talked rather forthrightly about the relation of his novels to his political views. Having shelved an earlier political novel, in 1980, because he realized he “would not be able to publish it for five or six years because the military would not allow it,” 4 in the mid-1990s, when he was famous, he decided to write another, to respond to the demand from leftists and liberals that he show his hand and his courage. But it would not be your ordinary political novel—if there ever is such a thing. “What if I wrote a political novel,” he asked the interviewer from the Paris Review rhetorically, “in which I explored my own spiritual dilemmas—coming from an upper middle-class family and feeling responsible for those who had no political representation?”5 One would have expected from this design a novel told in the first person, more like The Museum of Innocence (2009). What sort of a political novel is this, then? The answer I am disposed to give is also the answer to the questions raised above as to what has protected it from Turkish nationalist retribution and also, perhaps, deceived its Western critics. It is one of the funniest political novels ever written. In this, I differ from John Updike, who saw the work as “frankly troubled.” The tone of Snow is almost impossible to

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define. If we must categorize it, it is black comedy—black in the sense that people do get killed, but nobody seems to care. With the exception of the slaughter of Blue, the Islamist terrorist, whose whereabouts have been betrayed by Ka, the deaths of persons in the tiny local coup which begins in the theater are hard to distinguish from the vaudeville that precedes them: The fifth bullet hit a grandfather sitting just behind the Islamist students; . . . after the bullet shattered the left lens of his spectacles, it entered his brain, but the old man, luckily asleep at the time, died silently, never knowing what had happened to him. The bullet then exited from his neck and, passing through the back of his seat, pierced the bag belonging to a twelve-year-old Kurdish egg and bread vendor. The . . . bullet was recovered later inside one of his boiled eggs. (p. 158) This insouciance is simultaneously a reflection on the insignificance of “the little revolution of Kars,” and a stylistic match to the unconcern with which its citizens go about their business the next day. Another writer might have dwelt on how they had been inured to violence over the generations, but I am told this is exactly how the majority of Turkish citizens behaved the day after a coup. Pamuk noted drily that “Ka found the general lack of interest liberating” (p. 218). This is a city in which the Border City Gazette publishes the news before it occurs. This is a city which is swept by paranoia when a popular sharbat drink brewed by a Kurdish granny seems to make some people sick but not others, leading to a full-scale secret investigation: 188

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The detective who was drinking five or six carafes a day suffered no ill effects whatsoever. The experts sent in from Ankara lost faith in this detective because he was a Kurd. They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds. However, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves. (p. 210) And finally, this is a city in which a nobody from outside is celebrated as a great national poet, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. The fiction of Ka’s poetry is maintained as the greatest joke of all. We never see a word of a single poem, except the four scabrous lines he copies from a wall in a tea house which he intends to incorporate into his next poem (p. 102). He calmly plagiarizes from his friend Necip for the poem he recites in public (p. 145). The green notebook in which the revised versions of the Kars poems were supposed to have been recorded—the only textual witness—has conveniently disappeared from his Frankfurt apartment. He is only inspired, it seems, when he has had a good deal of raki. And the repeated premise that he feels a poem coming on, so respected by his friends and acquaintances, is surely satirical, not least because of the analogy drawn with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a poem supposedly written in a state of opiate ecstasy that was fatally truncated by the arrival of “the man from Porlock” (p. 143). It is also, apparently, a satire on Turkish poets and writers of the older generation who would frequently plagiarize, and were likely to be under the influence of raki if and when they produced anything of their own. Very well. Snow is a comic-political novel whose protagonist is a liar and a cheat. Its author, however, has said that he wrote it to give voice to those who had no political representation. To this 189

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end, comedy is no disadvantage. We should take note of how catholic his representation actually is. Snow introduces every variant of the available ideological positions: old style republicanism or Kemalism (Sunay), theoretical Marxism (Turgut Bey), Kurdish nationalism (most vocal among students), Islamic religious fundamentalism (the nameless assassin who murders the Director of the Institute of Education), political Islamism (Blue), intellectual atheism (Ka’s own early position), and passive or militant feminism. Most of the holders of these views are treated genially by the narrator, and whatever comedy can be extracted from this diversity is well on view. See, for instance, the slapstick version of commitment articulated by Turgut Bey, the kindly father of Ipek and Kadife: The question is this: Speaking as the Communist modernizing secularist democratic patriot I now am, what should I put first, the enlightenment or the will of the people? If I believe first and foremost in the European enlightenment, I am obliged to see the Islamists as my enemies and support this military coup. If, however, my first commitment is to the will of the people—if, in other words, I’ve become an unadulterated democrat—I have no choice but to ahead and sign that statement. (p. 242) The statement in question is a joint one to be made to the European press explaining the recent coup, to be signed by persons of all political persuasions. Th is is in order to satisfy the journalistic standards of the Frankfurter Rundschau, the newspaper (which does exist, and has a venerable left-wing reputation) at which Ka has quite falsely claimed to have a connection. The meeting in the Hotel Asia called for this purpose is itself a finely observed satire of any 190

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political meeting at which a document must be drafted, and we will return to it shortly. But now it would be best to talk Turkey. Turkey, as Pamuk several times noted in his essays, avoided the fate of all the other regions whose novelists we have followed, or soon will. It was never colonized by a Western power, and the brief invasion by the Allies after its defeat in World War I merely served as the incentive for a highly successful nationalist revolution, one which never disintegrated into tribal conflict. It was never partitioned, like Bosnia or Somalia, and when the Great Powers did intervene in its borders it was to add, not remove, territory. Headed by Mustafa Kemal, now known as Atatürk, the new republic, proclaimed in October 1923, had an extremely clear program: secularization, the purging of the Ottoman ruling elites, the separation of politics from religion, a concerted effort to spread literacy and education more generally, aided by the creation of a new Turkish alphabet based on the Latin alphabet, and increased rights and opportunities for women to enter the professions. In 1932 Turkey became a member of the League of Nations, and thereafter constantly looked westward for its allegiances. In other words, the foundations of a modern secular democracy were laid, thanks to astonishing leadership, a single-party system, and a certain amount of ruthlessness. Nationalist economic policy created a new middle class and eventually, after the liberalization of the economy during the 1980s, prosperity. The country profited from the Truman doctrine of 1947 designed to keep out Soviet influence, and received massive U.S. aid. Its candidacy for full membership in the European Union is still being negotiated. How then did it become the Turkey of the millennium, represented, according to this view of Snow, by Kars and its unresolved if 191

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absurdist ethnic and religious conflicts? The most obvious answer is that successive governments, fearing creeping Islamicism on the one hand and violent Kurdish nationalism on the other, have become more repressive. One-party government was replaced by a dizzying number of parties whose acronyms tell us little about their goals, resulting in a law that a party must get 10 percent of the vote in order to have any seats in Parliament. The most obvious sign of instability is the large number of coups that the military resorted to whenever there were major areas of disagreement, usually ideological: coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980—the one explicitly mentioned in Snow—and a later “soft coup” in 1997. The mini-coup in Snow is evidently a parody of the principle that the military is the guardian of Turkey’s secular constitution. The Kurdish problem is not entirely Turkey’s fault. It was caused by the Kurdish diaspora after World War I, when the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire led to the forcible division of Kurdishinhabited regions between several newly created states, primarily Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. The Kurds were nomads, to whom national boundaries meant serious disruption of their ancient way of life. The results were predictable: a campaign to reintegrate the original Kurdistan (never formally a state), which led to separatist and secessionist rebellions. In Turkey the Kurds were met with uncompromising ethnic monism. The Kurdish language was outlawed and Kurdish cultural activities banned. Turkish Kurds, in turn, formed a militant separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s they fought a violent guerrilla war against the national government, hideously destructive to both sides. However, in 2000, before Pamuk published Snow, the PKK changed its strategy, announcing a self-imposed cease-fire and the 192

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intention to use only political means to improve the situation of Kurds in Turkey. There is no explicit mention of this shift in Snow, but the three young Kurds who attend the “secret” meeting to sign a multi-party manifesto (p. 269) are still afraid of the guerrillas in the mountains while doing, in comic miniature, what the PKK would at that exact point in time have approved: participating in a political discussion. They are treated by Pamuk with a certain tenderness, and the episode has the effect of interrogating the word “nation” (pp. 276– 77) without making an intellectual fuss. The issue that features more centrally and flamboyantly in Snow, however, is entirely Turkey’s fault: the head-scarf issue. It is ironic that Atatürk was the primal cause of this dissension, banning the wearing of head scarves by women as constituting a religious statement. Originally this ban was intended to apply only to women working in the civil ser vice and teachers, lawyers, and the like, Turkey being above all a civil state. Even there it was in conflict with other Kemalist objectives, the professionalization of women and the spread of education. In the early 1980s, however, in response to an increase in head-scarf use among university students, the wearing of head scarves became an impediment both to registration and to graduation. By 1997, the ban had been extended to the wearing of head scarves in all universities. In 1998, a Turkish female student was banned from Istanbul University for wearing a head scarf. And in 2000, Nuray Bezirgan wore a head scarf at her final exams. A Turkish court sentenced her to six months in jail for “obstructing the education of others.” The more strict the enforcement, the more scarves appeared. It need hardly be said that this was a perfect issue for a novelist by which to explore a political culture, being essentially symbolic. Snow stages repeated conversations or debates on the head-scarf issue, 193

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among them the tape-recorded argument between the Director of the Institute of Education charged with enforcing the ban and the fanatic Islamist who has come to Kars to shoot him (pp. 38–48). Ka is interested in the connection, if any, between the suicides of girls and young women and the head-scarf ban, but the only certain connection is one Teslime, who had been a truly religious girl, and was instructed by her father to remove her head scarf. As a threat he contracted her in marriage to a forty-five-year-old policeman who had lost his wife, and Teslime’s distaste for this union complicates her motives, as does the fact that her friends gave her conflicting advice (pp. 119–120), and at least one recommended suicide. Later this adviser protested, “But I was just saying it for the sake of conversation.” The central head-scarf girl, however, is Kadife, the sister of Ka’s beloved Ipek, who tells Ka that she put on a head scarf one day to make a political statement: I just did it for a laugh. . . . But the state, the police and the local press came down on me so hard I could scarcely think of it as joke anymore—I had painted myself into a corner and couldn’t get out. (p. 114) By now Kadife’s wearing of the head scarf has become a point of principle—though whether it is religious or political principle Pamuk leaves unclear. The mixture of seriousness and silliness here is surely intended to bemuse the reader, as well as leaving Pamuk himself some protection. Coming from a secular Muslim family (as did Ka), Pamuk would scarcely support the deliberate misrepresentation of the Koran that required all girls to cover their hair, but he also sees them as victims of a political system that has chosen the wrong issue on 194

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which to take a stand, and of a society, moving backward rather than forward, that denies women self-determination. Within the novel most of the suicide girls have chosen that escape from miserable lives of slavery to older men. Soon it will become evident that the head-scarf issue is, in Snow, the paradigmatic Turkish problem, trumping, for example, unemployment or the plight of the Kurds. Kadife gradually becomes the central figure in both the plot and the dialectic, ousting her more beautiful but weaker sister, Ipek. Literally in the spotlight, Kadife is persuaded to play the female lead in a drama to be broadcast live on television. What sort of a play? Well, actually, it’s only one incident in a carnival mishmash, mostly one-man improvisations by Sunay Zaim, the Kemalist theatrical entrepreneur (who, by the way, is based on a “real” actor who personified Atatürk in a television serial about the war of Turkish independence). The mishmash consists in scenes from Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and Brecht, along with soliloquies on city traffic, the virtues of cooking, condoms, and raki. All of this was to lead up to a two-person confrontation, in which, as part of a political deal arranged by Ka, Kadife would bare her head onstage. (In order to keep at least part of the plot a secret for readers, I will leave the terms of the deal unstated; I am thus falling into the trope/trap of critical omniscience.) This scene had been billed as the “play within a play,” a notion derived from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, but in fact it was a replay of a replay of a 1930s piece, My Fatherland or My Head Scarf, another quite recognizable parody: My Fatherland or Sisilistre was the title of a nineteenth-century play, the staging of which had triggered a patriotic, anti-sultan riot, which in turn led to the exile of its nationalist author, Namik Kemal, to exile in Cyprus. This version had been restaged by Sunay three days earlier, and had been the occasion of the little military coup in which 195

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more than a few persons were killed. The question of tone is paramount. To the reader, the title alone suggests farce; but the centerpiece was also billed as The Tragedy of Kars, and such indeed it turned out to be. But what is mimicry and what is life? When Ka puts his proposal to Kadife, he urges, “Th is is just a play, Kadife. And because it’s just a play, it shouldn’t be a problem to take off your scarf.” That is to say, “You won’t really be taking off your scarf.” To which Kadife replies, “I see now what they want from me. But even if it’s a play, even if it’s a play within a play, I’m still not baring my head” (p. 312). That is to say, “The double shield between fiction and real life is not an adequate excuse for giving up my conviction.” “Just a play.” The phrase mimics the excuse Rushdie gave, that his work was “only a novel”; a perfect device for a novelist who keeps inserting himself into the text to comment on the fact that what we are reading is a novel, of whose development he is in total off-stage control. I must partially ruin the suspense in order to continue the metatheatrical, metaliterary conversation. For Kadife, after agreeing to participate, grows more serious as the play progresses, debating internally whether to bare her head or commit suicide. As the audience grows more and more impressed by her dramatic stature, she spars intellectually with Sunay on the second issue, at last explaining firmly, “A woman doesn’t commit suicide because she’s lost her pride, she does it to show her pride,” (p. 397). One thinks the drama is being transformed into real tragedy, not Jacobean but Greek. But at the critical moment, she does in fact pull off her head scarf (presumably never to replace it off-stage), and using a gun which she has been assured is not loaded, kills not herself but Sunay. Thereupon, to change the tone instantaneously, “two soldiers, running toward each other with clownish steps, pulled the curtain shut” (p. 404). 196

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The death had already been announced in the Border City Gazette, which continually printed the news before it occurred, an especially absurdist feature of Kars culture. The main trouble with writing a book about contemporary literature in political and historical context is that one is aiming at a moving target. Pamuk probably did not foresee the coming to power of a Muslim prime minister with pragmatic views. In 2003 Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had himself been the victim of extreme Kemalism, spending four months in prison for reciting a poem deemed anti-nationalist, was elected as the head of a moderate new Justice and Development Party (AKP). In 2009 Erdogan announced a plan, supported by the European Union, to help resolve the Kurdish problem by allowing public use of the Kurdish language and restoring Kurdish names to cities and towns where Kurds predominated. His economic reforms were equally far-reaching, and in 2007 he began campaigning for constitutional reform, with terms that the West would recognize as generally enlightened. A vast majority of the voters supported these changes, but the main opposition party, CHP (the secularist Republican People’s Party), was opposed, requiring a referendum, which Erdogan’s party won. Then there was a constitutional referendum in 2010 which Erdogan won by 58 percent over 42 percent. In the matter of the head scarves, however, the outcome was less satisfactory. In 2007 Erdogan had campaigned with a promise of lifting the ban on head scarves in public institutions. On February 7, 2008, the Turkish Parliament passed an amendment to the constitution, allowing women to wear the head scarf in Turkish universities. Erdogan’s own party and a key opposition party, the Nationalist Movement Party, argued that it was an issue of human rights. Massive demonstrations and refusals by numerous universities to accept 197

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the new law culminated on June 5 with a decision by Turkey’s Constitutional Court that the lifting of the ban was unconstitutional, a decree that cannot be appealed. But Erdogan’s party vowed to support any student who was disciplined for wearing the head scarf on a university campus, and the head of the Turkish Higher Educational Council announced that instructors may no longer take action against head-scarf-wearing students, thereby inciting civil disobedience. What does this stalemate offer the women like Kadife today, the ones who agonize over their choices and their duties? More confusion, surely, but also a sense of the limitless folly of politicians, which if Pamuk had written his novel today would have offered him matter for more dark comedy. The only hope for redress would seem to be widespread national agreement to say one thing and do another, to forbid the head scarves by law but to overlook their presence in everyday life. On the other hand, one would like to think that Erdogan had read Snow. But is the head-scarf issue really part of the worldwide debate about nationalism and national boundaries, about ethnic and religious challenges to those boundaries? Pamuk seems to suggest that it is, by winding it as a strong thread throughout the novel, and intertwining it with moments where “nationalism” as a concept is addressed directly. The first of these is during the debate at the Hotel Asia where the term is used, without irony, by the idealistic Kurdish teenagers, and challenged, ironically, by an old Azeri journalist (p. 277). The second is during the television advertisement for Sunay Zaim’s multi-genre performance to promote his old Jacobin concept of Turkish nationalism, in which My Fatherland or My Head Scarf will play a central role. Watching the television screen, Turgut Bey, Kadife’s father, sees another rival symbol:

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Eighty years earlier, when the Ottoman and Russian armies had abandoned [Kars], leaving the Turks and the Armenians to massacre each other, the Turks had somehow devised a brand-new flag to announce the birth of a nation: Seeing this same standard now, now stained and moth-eaten but defiantly displayed on the screen, Turgut Bey decided that something terrible was about to happen. (pp. 366– 67) Taken together, these passages come as close as we will get within the novel to Pamuk’s own position on Turkish nationalism. The idealistic young Kurds are striving for a new, inclusive concept of the nation— one that Sunay’s obsolete version of republicanism cannot incorporate, not least because it requires coups. But Sunay’s “stained and moth-eaten” flag, stained in part by the massacres committed in the name of ethnocentrism, has been replaced by the head scarf, flamboyantly removed by Kadife in a gesture towards a negotiated settlement—the release of Blue. That Blue is killed anyway, that Sunay is shot by Kadife, only reinforce Pamut’s grim analysis of the power and powerlessness of we as a principle upon which to run a country. But that Kadife decides not to commit the suicide that was part of her role protects us, after all, from such seriousness as could have been expressed in personal tragedy. Fortunately, we can get at Pamuk’s theory of nationalism from his own statements. In the interview with the Paris Review cited above, conducted in two stages in 2004 and 2005, Pamuk stated that his vision of Turkey is that it should not “have one consistent soul”— that it should belong to neither “the East or the West or be nationalistic.” Monism is unnecessary, impossible to sustain, and usually cruel. The only solution for a modern country is a generous pluralism.

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“The more the idea of a democratic, liberal Turkey is established, the more my thinking is accepted. Turkey can join the European Union only with this vision. It’s a way of fighting against nationalism, of fighting the rhetoric of Us against Them.” 6 Another word for pluralism, obviously, is internationalism, on which Pamuk has a distinctive take: Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself . . . Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined internationally, then your Turkishness is underlined by Turks themselves, who reclaim you. . . . Now they are more worried about the international representation of Turkey than about my art. This causes more and more problems in my country.7 Unavowedly, then, Snow is a novel of ideas, or of competing ideas on display. The debate in the Hotel Asia, particularly, is analogous to the student debates on the kapia in The Bridge on the Drina, though more muddled and less theoretical. At its heart is the question we have been following: What is meant when people refer to “the nation,” or use the pronoun “we”? A man from the back of the room asks the idealistic young Kurd, “who do you mean, my son, when you say we? . . . Do you mean the Turks? The Kurds? The Circassians? The people of Kars?” (p. 275). An old Azeri journalist keeps asking, “What nation was it you were talking about?” Obviously the reader is meant to reply, “All of the above.” And watching the Kars Border Television archive videotape of the fateful last performance of My Country or My Head Scarf, the narrator, or Pamuk as we now know him, tells us that he, even at that distance in time and medium, “was not immune to the power of that shimmering fiction that 200

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any citizen of an oppressive and aggressively nationalist country will understand only too well: the magical unity conjured by the word we” (p. 393). But Snow also, despite being, in Updike’s terms, “entirely contemporary,” is an historical novel of some reach and power, the past of Kars being introduced by the magical phrase “Once upon a time” (p. 19). This introduces a beautiful passage that both explains the city’s geostrategic importance, “being on the border between two empires now defunct,” and sweeps through the eras: first the Ottoman period with its multiethnicity, then the incursion of the Russians in 1878, then the founding of the republic and the city’s westernizing years, beginning in 1920 when the Turkish army arrived. The novel is studded with real historical dates, all of which pull it back into the far or the recent past; but it also parades a series of pseudo-dates, mainly, it seems, to tease. We are forced to deduce, backward, from the final authorial dating of 1999–2001, when the author revisited Kars (2001?) which is supposed to be four years after Ka came back and left again four days later (1996?). In fact, the Kars notebooks that Pamuk wrote in preparation for his novel date that visit February 24, 2002.8 The life of Ka is retold in a series of groups of years rather than by dates—four years, eight years, twelve years, sixteen years (when he bought the pajamas he took with him to Frankfurt!), whereas other events are timed with ridiculous precision: “Ka slept for exactly ten hours and twenty minutes” (p. 169). I take this to be an oblique meditation on the difference between historical time and novelistic time. It scarcely needs to be said that in Snow, both these kinds of novel, the novel of ideas and the historical novel, shelter under the wing of a romance, an old, old marketing device of the novelist, which, interestingly, is eschewed by all our international novelists 201

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except Rushdie, Naipaul, and Hosseini; and in none of those three is the romance a worthy support for the main agenda or the goal towards which the novel strives. In the case of Ka and Ipek, the idea of romance is undermined by Ka’s insincerity and Ipek’s indecisiveness; but it is even more eviscerated by the response that Ipek gives to “Pamuk” on his proposal of marriage. Ipek, of course, refuses, saying tellingly, “I’d like to thank you anyway, even though I can’t take you seriously” (p. 420). And there, on the previous page, is another metaliterary, generic statement: “As I supped Zahide’s lentil soup,” the narrator tells us, “I began to image myself as a character in a provincial novel from the 1940s” (p. 419). But that would be quite another story. Within the premise of a moving target, there is one last footnote, and correction, from the very recent past. In 2006, four years after Snow was published, the issue of female suicides in Turkey became a subject of international concern. It is a huge irony that an attempt to restrain the so-called honor killings (brothers and fathers killing women for perceived acts of dishonor) had the reverse effect. When Turkey revised its penal code in 2005, under pressure from the European Union, it increased the deterrent for honor killings to a life sentence. Consequently the number of suicides grew exponentially. Previously families had delegated the honor killings of girls to a younger brother who, because of his tender age, would be likely to receive a shorter sentence; after the change in the law the government required life sentences for all honor killers. As a result, families changed their policies, and put intense pressure on the girls to commit suicide, thus sparing the younger sons. It is reported that “dishonored” girls are locked in a room for days with an instrument of their death: rat poison, a pistol, or a rope. A United Nations factfinding mission concluded that, while some suicides were authentic, 202

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others appeared to be “honor killings disguised as a suicide.” Or they are suicides enforced. Needless to say, this is a rural problem, and the girls are often uneducated, illiterate, and hence unaware of their rights.9 One feels that, had Snow come later, Pamuk would have embraced the irony, while deploring the facts.

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A Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Italian, and an Englishwoman meet at a German Literature conference held in Bremen in 1994. This sounds like the beginning of a joke, updated to meet equal opportunity assumptions; although the ratio of men to women is scarcely equal. One’s intuition that this international coincidence is meant to be comic is confirmed a few pages later, when the Italian, whose name is Morini, “indulged in a silly joke that [Liz] Norton [the Englishwoman in the case] didn’t understand”: A joke on Italians. An Italian, a Frenchman, and an Englishman are in a plane with only two parachutes. Norton thought it was a political joke. Actually, it was a children’s joke, although because of the way Morini told it, the Italian in the plane (which lost one engine then the other and then went into a tailspin) resembled Berlusconi. (p. 107)1 As is typical of 2666, the punch line is never delivered. This is a novel that collects a series of what might in another world be thought of as short stories, including interpolated narratives within those stories, and leaves almost all of them hanging, without a conclusion. All of them, however, are subsidiary to the huge block of dreadful “facts” about which no jokes can be told, 280 pages of detailed “reportage” about the scandal of the femicides in northern Mexico, in the city of Ciudad Juárez, renamed by Bolaño Santa

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Teresa. And whereas the inconclusion of the surrounding narratives is frustrating merely of readerly preconceptions, the main point about 2666 is that the mystery of who is committing these murders of women cannot be solved. Their cases, 106 of them by Bolaño’s count, which is far less than other reports estimated, will never be closed. Outside the novel, we know, the murders of women continue, and indeed have spread to other Mexican cities, although murder in Mexico has ceased to be gender-specific. I use the words “facts” and “reportage” here to highlight and destabilize our customary distinction between the novel and the nonfiction novel, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), also about terrible murder. This convention implies that the novelist will color the story as reported in the press and coax out its storylike aspects, but use real names and refrain from inventing anything, including conversations. It has been said that Capote invented the nonfiction novel; it might also be said that Bolaño reinvented it— with the help of a journalist, Sergio González Rodríguez. González Rodríguez covered the Juárez murders of women from 1993 to 1995 for the newspaper Reforma, writing many articles and eventually a book, Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert), which was published in Spain in 2002, taking the story up to that year and the count of victims to 189. Towards the end of that book González Rodríguez listed the femicides under the telling title “La Vida Inconclusa,” which covers both the lives cut short and the inconclusion of their cases from a forensic and judicial point of view. Here we read the details of each dead woman or child: her age, the date she was found, her hair color and length (many had long dark hair), the clothes she was found in, the cause of death (many were strangled), and the multiple signs of sexual violation—vaginal and anal rape—and torture. Several

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had bite marks, even a nipple bitten off. Bolaño borrowed from the actual reportage of González Rodríguez not the facts but the method of description, changing not only the names but also the dates of discovery, and inventing his own details, especially of clothing. As we say all too casually, the devil is in the details. The effect is even more appalling than that of “La Vida Inconclusa,” which gives us no time between cases to absorb what we have read. It goes without saying, then, that this novel is not like our other international novels. Its very contemporaneity—its central events take place in the 1990s— bereaves us of the sense of chronological distance that makes reading other novels about graphic violence bearable, as, for example, in the story of the impaling of a saboteur in The Bridge on the Drina or the 1940s internecine killings that bring Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone to its stony end. The other main difference is the division of 2666 into five parts, whose relationship to each other is not at first intelligible. Bolaño, as he approached death from liver disease in 2003, handed over to his literary agent, Jorge Herraldo, a massive manuscript, directing that it should be published in five separate books, appearing a year apart to maximize the financial benefits to his heirs. These deathbed instructions were overruled by his literary executor, Ignacio Echeverría, who arranged for the work to be published intact and in toto, all 898 pages of it. Bolaño’s plan would have meant ignoring the frail connections between the parts, and indeed one wonders what frustrations serial publication might have caused his readers, who would realize only five years after the “Part About the Critics” appeared that it was the first of two bookends, each of which focuses on an imaginary novelist with the improbable name of Benno von Archimboldi. And whereas several of our international novelists have received the Nobel

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Prize, hence drawing them to our attention, Bolaño’s tease is that his imaginary novelist is continually being nominated for one, but, naturally, never receives it. Moreover, the division into parts permits the reader to realize that each represents a different literary genre. In part 1, we follow our four literary critics, a Frenchman (Pelletier), a Spaniard (Espinoza), a crippled Italian (Morini), and a beautiful Englishwoman (Liz Norton), from European conference to European conference. This kind of internationalism is entirely frivolous, and Bolaño’s tone is lightly satiric, not least about their sexual/romantic ménage à trois or quatre, which is finally resolved in favor of Morini, perhaps made special by his wheelchair. Desolated by Liz’s desertion of them, Pelletier and Espinoza turn to whores, but it is Espinoza who does, as it were, a world tour: He never saw the same girl twice. He was with a Dominican, three Andulasians, a Catalan woman. . . . He met a Chilean who advertised herself as a Chilean and a Colombian who advertised herself as a Colombian, as if the two nationalities held a special fascination. He did it with a Frenchwoman, two Poles, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a German. One night he slept with a Mexican and that was the best. (p. 84) So much for the United Nations. Yet this foursome is united in a quest to which Bolaño himself was attracted and made the basis of his prize-winning earlier novel, The Savage Detectives. That quest was the search for a missing writer, the aforementioned Archimboldi, whose novels they have all read with passionate intensity, and indeed lectured upon, but who seems to have left no visible trace of himself in the world except for the novels themselves. The last phase 208

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of this quest takes them to Santa Teresa, where he is rumored to have touched down. The “Part About Amalfitano” features another academic, an unsuccessful professor of philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa which, naturally, does not exist. Amalfitano is an exile from Pinochet’s Chile, and therefore, as we shall see, an offshoot of Bolaño’s politics. This was where Bolaño started, telling a friend in 1995 that he had already written a huge, inchoate manuscript to be called “The Woes of the True Policeman,” with a professor as its hero. Separating out the “Part About Amalfitano” from the mass was a good idea, not least because Amalfitano has no qualifications for police work. He believes he is going mad, hears voices, and is terrified for the safety of his beautiful daughter Rosa, who has become socially involved in the drug scene. Apart from the Rosa subplot, this section might be called an essay on the futility of intellectual endeavor, of which philosophy is the most abstract form. But unlike the first part, it is not a satire. The stakes are too high. At the center of Amalfitano’s story are two emblems: the first is a geometry textbook by a “real” writer, Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geometrico, published in 1975, which Amalfitano, in imitation of Marcel Duchamp, hangs on his clothesline, so that a “book full of principles,” in its long-term exposure to the elements, will instead experience the facts of life (p. 191). The second emblem, or rather set of emblems, comprises the geometrical diagrams Amalfitano draws or doodles, which might or might not express the relationships between the philosophical systems of European philosophers from Heraclitus to Harold and Allan Bloom. “All the names, it could be said, were of philosophers who concerned themselves with ontological questions” (p. 193). But the fact that there are so many implies that those first principle questions (appropriately for this novel) have never been answered, while the 209

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yoking of the two Bloom professors, one still alive at Yale, is clearly another joke. Drawing diagrams was one of the behaviors of academics in the Humanities when structuralism was the flavor of the day. Yet the tone of part 2 is the opposite of satiric or even comic. It is deeply sad. Part 3, “The Part About Fate,” is different again, but less innovative generically. “Fate” is the nickname of an African American journalist whom serendipity brings to Santa Teresa to report on a boxing match when the regular sports reporter “got whacked.” You could call this fate. Before accepting this commission, which will tie him loosely to parts 1 and 2, Fate is the vehicle for introducing us to Barry Seaman, an absurdly flimsy veil for Bobby Seale, a retired Black Panther who spent many years in prison. Like his 2666 counterpart, Seale had in 1987 published a cookbook, Barbecuing with Bobby. The sermon Seaman delivers is almost the only part of 2666 which articulates a positive code of conduct, in this case the conduct of the black community, poor or on the rise; the other example is the lecture by the seer–wise woman in part 4: “The Part About the Crimes.” But now that Fate has arrived in Santa Teresa, he is available to rescue Amalfitano’s daughter and take her back across the border to the United States. What happens to her there we shall never know. Generically, therefore, we should probably classify part 3 as an unconsummated romance, in which the rescuer doesn’t fit the conventional profile of a knight on a white horse, and even if there were a conclusion it would not be marriage. Part 5, which we must describe out of order, finally identifies the writer for whom the four professors have been searching and explains how he chose his pseudonym. In “real” life (for of course this writer is himself a fiction) he was an unremarkable German named Hans Reiter (pun presumably intended), unremarkable except for his great height, who was drafted into the German army in 1939, 210

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and whose education was self-inflicted, being largely the experience of an ordinary soldier, a brave one, who received the Iron Cross. The genre of this part is a simple, old-fashioned bildungsroman, an appropriately German word, for Reiter’s adventures during and after the war gave him the material and impetus to become a writer of considerable fame. Part of his growth is his old-fashioned and chivalric attachment to a sick young woman, sick in the head and the lungs. His care for her until she dies establishes him as a good person, one who will listen to the confession of a mass killer of Jews and then take society’s revenge on him, quietly, alone. Significantly, we hear that he saw writing novels “as a game and also a business, a game insofar as he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer” (p. 817). Eventually he will connect to the killings in Santa Teresa, thanks to the fact that it is his nephew who had been accused of the crimes, and at his sister’s behest he visits the scene, to what avail we will never know. Part 4, “The Part About the Crimes,” is an almost unremitting epic of criminal investigation. What emphatically it is not is a Britishstyle murder mystery. In fact, it is a formal rejection of all detective fiction, to which Bolaño was addicted. At the end of “The Last Interview” with Monica Maristain for Playboy in July 2003, Bolaño said: I should like to have been a homicide detective much better than being a writer. I am absolutely sure of that. A string of homicides. . . . Perhaps then I might really have become crazy. But being a detective, that could easily be resolved with a bullet to the mouth.2 One could say that in writing the “Part About the Crimes” Bolaño fulfilled that dream of an alternative career, in the process changing 211

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for ever his and our conceptions of criminal detection as an activity. Having heard reports of the killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, Bolaño apparently started with the premise that there was a serial killer at work. Finding it difficult to get details from a distance—the newspaper accounts were insufficiently graphic—-he was eventually put in touch with Sergio González Rodríguez. González Rodríguez had gradually arrived at the conclusion that “the killings in Juárez were connected to the local police and politicians and to the mercenary gangs maintained by the drug cartels.” In other words, a huge slice of the governing and law enforcement community was either directly or indirectly complicit, which is why the cases were not getting solved. Bolaño and González Rodríguez began a correspondence, in which Bolaño learned of González Rodríguez’s theory of a culture of corruption, in which murderers could kill with impunity. “Impunity” becomes a word inseparable from comments on Ciudad Juárez. González Rodríguez thought there must be a least two serial killers (to account for the similarity between some of the murders), and that the police and the drug cartels were involved; so Bolaño had to abandon his own theory, and with it the notion that “there was a rational power that could conquer the criminal.”3 Bolaño tapped González Rodríguez for forensic details, especially the language in which the crimes were documented. When the two met in November 2002 to celebrate the appearance of Huesos en el desierto, Bolaño had an almost complete manuscript, which had benefited from his seeing Huesos in the process of composition. But into 2666 Bolaño had inserted González Rodríguez as a “real” character, who is recruited by a congresswoman to continue his search, with her behind-the-scenes support, and to write up his analysis to expose those in high places who were responsible, including members of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, of which she 212

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was a member. While the identity of this congresswoman is well hidden or well imagined, the real González Rodríguez was naturally horrified to learn that his role and his identity would thus be broadcast in print. He feared for his life. In 2004, when 2666 appeared, five investigative reporters were killed or disappeared in Mexico.4 How true to the “facts” is Bolaño’s account of the murders? This requires a slippery answer. Bolaño’s dedication to detail, and a seeming commitment to facts above all, gives the terrible list of corpses the impression of actual reportage; this then spreads credibility to the accounts of lax or callous policemen, the ignoring of basic police procedure, such as the protection of crime scenes, the safekeeping and transit of DNA swabs, which were almost nonex istent, and the frequent incarceration, with torture, of suspects who were totally innocent. Such “suspects” included two hapless bus drivers, who also appear in Huesos. In The Killing Fields, a vast reportorial account that appeared in 2006, Diana Washington Valdez details the police cover-up of their torture by the publication of doctored photographs, which the men’s wives were able to show were not of their husbands.5 The existence of these parallel studies, Huesos and The Killing Fields, that in part corroborate 2666 complicates our concept of the “real.” So do the stories Bolaño interpolated out of his own imagination, such as the romance between the director of the local lunatic asylum and the policeman Juan de Dios Martínez and the completely unrelated tale of the defiler of churches. Yet he also inserted a few “real” characters, in flimsy disguise. One is González Rodríguez. One is Robert Ressler, the FBI agent who invented the concept “serial killer” and who comes to Juárez in 1998 at the invitation of the police. In 2666 he is immediately recognizable under the name of Albert Kessler, who is totally out of his depth, intimidated by the 213

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authorities, and followed by an unmarked police car wherever he goes. Bolaño does not bother to relate his ignominious return to the United States. Another easily recognizable character is the young woman named Kelly, the friend whose disappearance draws the congresswoman to engage González Rodríguez. Kelly is an easy match for Heidi Slaquet Armengol, who used to set up parties for the drug lords with young women she had procured for them.6 Finally there is the mysterious character the authorities imprison, claiming he was responsible for the murders, who in real life was the Egyptian Sharif Sharif. Sharif Sharif actually had a prior history of sexual abuse; but in Bolaño’s version he is played by the entirely innocent German Klaus Haas, who will turn out to be Archimboldi’s nephew. The story of Haas is one of the most distressingly incomplete subnarratives in 2666, and we have to leave him in prison, with his trial perpetually postponed. In real life, however, in 2006, Sharif Sharif was found by prison guards in a pool of blood in his cell. Transported to a medical facility for “internal bleeding” he supposedly died of a heart attack, shortly before his lawyer expected he would have had to be released.7 This practice of scattered and deflected reference sets up the expectation that more “real” persons are there to be found in 2666, albeit in slight disguise, and inspires the reader to become a detective as well, though of a very different kind. But now, some information about Bolaño himself is in order. Indeed, it is overdue. And this information and its larger context, Latin American history, is indubitably real. Bolaño was born in Chile, and moved to Mexico with his family just in time to experience from the sidelines the Tlatelolco Massacre of students on October 2, 1968. The occasion was a student protest against the regime of the PRI, the party that had governed Mexico since 1929 and would keep its hegemonic and often corrupt control of the country until the end 214

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of the century. The congresswoman in 2666 who recruits González Rodríguez to write about the murders in Santa Teresa herself had “a certain stake in the university Leftist movement” (pp. 600– 601), but claims to have joined the PRI hoping to reform it from within (p. 609). She soon realizes the fallacy of this notion. The Tlatelolco Massacre was reminiscent of the Amritsar Massacre in India in 1919, in that the police and government forces trapped the students inside the plaza so that none could escape; and when in 2001 Mexican president Vicente Fox finally had the incident investigated, it was discovered, as had long been suspected, that the shooting was provoked by government snipers firing from nearby apartment towers. In 1999 Bolaño issued Amulet, a novel about the massacre from the perspective of a woman trapped in the university by the police ambush. He himself, as a teenager, dropped out of school, started to work as a journalist, and became active in left-wing political causes. In September 1973 he traveled to Chile, his home country, to support the new socialist regime of Salvador Allende and saw firsthand Pinochet’s coup, which led to his arrest and brief imprisonment. This sent him back to Mexico City, and in 1977 he moved to Barcelona in a literary exile that lasted until his death and produced 2666. He never went back to Mexico. Why, then, return to Mexico in his imagination for the most demanding work of his career? The first and least helpful answer is that 2666 is only partly about Mexico, the first and last books being resolutely international in the sense of involving most of the big Western European cities, especially London, and the last section based in Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe, following the tracks of Hans Reiter as soldier and later as migratory writer. The second answer must be that Bolaño had always been fascinated by crime, violence, and the concept of detection; witness at 215

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least the title of The Savage Detectives. He was also evidently interested in the link, or the contrast, between detection as an activity of law enforcement and journalism as a discoverer/revealer of dark secrets. He must have heard by chance, as did his fictional professors, that Santa Teresa/Ciudad Juárez had a dark secret, a secret so horrible that it made Espinoza vomit: Espinoza remembered that the night before, one of the boys had told them the story of the women who were being killed. . . . The boy . . . told them that more than two hundred women had died. But not over a short period of time, thought Espinoza. From 1993 or 1994 to the present day. . . . And many more women might have been killed. Maybe two hundred and fifty or three hundred. No one will ever know, the boy said in French. (p. 137) Dark secrets are the very stuff of narrative, whether fiction or nonfiction. The third reason, I would like to believe, that sent Bolaño back to Mexico for his greatest work was more broadly political, his goal wider than making the world aware of the local scandal of the femicides. It was to continue the work of the dictator novelists and of Gabriel García Márquez in calling attention to the plight of Latin America in general, a region and a set of nations that have been under the thumb of the United States of America for at least the past one hundred years. Bolaño glances back momentarily to some of that history by making Amalfitano an exile from Chile after the coup by Augusto Pinochet (p. 117), the coup supported by U.S. interests, the coup during which Bolaño himself was imprisoned, and which led to the death of Salvador Allende. In 2666 Bolaño turns to the newest 216

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phase of Latin America’s domination by its huge neighbor, the phase of international trade across the border, which is widely assumed by Americans to be beneficial to both sides. Ciudad Juárez is, obviously, a border city, like Višegrad or Kars, whose physical location encapsulates long-term international problems. Unlike Višegrad and Kars, however, Ciudad Juárez stands on a border between two states totally unequal in power and wealth. The Mexican-American border has a long history of conflicts, most of which caused Mexico to lose large portions of its territory to its larger, voracious neighbor to the north. I will not relate that history here, not least since it has been meticulously told by Rachel St. John in Line in the Sand.8 Rather I will focus on the period that Bolaño chose for his Mexico sortie, the years from 1993 to 2000, a border year in another sense. It was in 1993 that the first victim of the femicides was found; the last, insofar as the novel pursues the issue, was found in 1997. It was in 1989 that the craze for Archimboldi began among Bolaño’s four critics, and although Bolaño stops dating their adventures when they reach Mexico, we can infer that this last phase of their quest took place in 1997 or 1998. There may be an interesting mistake in “The Part About Fate” where the novel crosses the millennial boundary and mentions “the attack on the Twin Towers” (p. 292), and at the very end Archimboldi’s sister embarks on her last visit to Santa Teresa in January 2001. But the main time period, the last decade of the twentieth century, has more than a fin-de-siècle resonance, which is underlined by the claim of the PRI congresswoman that she wanted to do her bit “to prepare Mexico to enter the twenty-first century” (p. 609); a hopeful note undermined by Bolaño’s apocalyptic title, which suggests the end not of a century, but of human time. It has been said of the Mexican-American border that it “united rather than divided” the two nations.9 This view is entirely based on 217

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modern trade relations between them, especially since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, coincidentally the year in which the first of the female victims showed up in Ciudad Juárez. This treaty added Mexico as a third party to the economic relationship between the United States and Canada, which in its earlier phases was alleged by Canadians to have turned Canada into a “branch-plant economy,” especially in the auto industry. In Mexico this phenomenon took the form of the maquiladoras, or large plants, U.S owned, built right on the border, that imported components and raw goods from the United States, assembled them, and then exported them back across the border for sale. This arrangement, made possible by the Border Industrialization Program in 1965, led to the enormous expansion of manufacturing in Ciudad Juárez, which provided almost full employment for at least its female citizens, albeit at criminally low wages. The owners of these plants made no secret of their preference for female workers, considered more dextrous and pliant as employees. Until 1998 none of the maquiladoras had an independent workers’ union, and Bolaño cites two cases of women who were fired for trying to start one (pp. 507, 577). In January 1998 the U.S. Labor Department reported that thousands of maquiladors administered pregnancy tests to women they were about to hire to avoid maternity leaves. But there is no direct connection between the maquiladoras and the killings. In 2666, about a third of the murdered women had worked in a maquiladora, but others were schoolgirls, shop assistants, waitresses, prostitutes, or simply the wives or girlfriends of violent men. Nevertheless, the desolate landscape of Santa Teresa created by the maquiladoras and the shacks that surround them, along with the notorious illegal dump nicknamed “El Chile,” a dark joke that Bolaño the Chilean must have enjoyed, creates the sensation that this is an evil city. The 218

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epigram which opens the novel is from Charles Baudelaire, “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,” which succinctly stands as a description of Santa Teresa. Evil is, however, a solecism here. It belongs, as we have seen, in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which deals in the supernatural. We know what Bolaño thinks of Salman Rushdie, since one of the most horrific descriptions of violence in action, as distinct from its forensic debris, is the scene where the French and Spanish professors beat up their Pakistani taxi driver, kicking him as he lies on the ground, shouting, “Shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good . . . )” (p. 74). There is no devil in 2666, and words that connote value judgments derived from religion are conspicuously absent. Indeed, the only possible name for what Bolaño deals in is “realism,” extreme realism, or, to slightly abuse the term he coined for his avant-garde poetry, “visceral realism.” Instead of Rushdie’s “believe it or not” marshaling of marvels, what Bolaño gives us are the details of life, life which is only not ordinary because it is improbably dreadful. This is true for all five sections, but most noticeable in “The Part About the Crimes,” where for each new corpse discovered we must pay attention to what the girl or woman was wearing when found, to the signs of rape or torture on her body, to her height, to her discoverable age, which ranges from eleven to the mid-thirties, not counting the outlier, the fifty-year-old who was killed at home by her crazy son (pp. 392– 93). If we eliminate the word “evil” from our vocabulary, and replace it with “horror,” as suggested by the epigraph from Baudelaire, the horror of Santa Teresa/Ciudad Juárez is obviously not only the industrial wasteland created by the U.S.-owned maquiladoras, nor their appalling exploitation of female workers, but also and especially the 219

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drug trade between the two countries, for which the United States bears major responsibility. Not only does that country provide the market for Mexican drugs (it is estimated that 65 percent of the cocaine used in the United States comes from Mexico), it has actually, though not of course intentionally, enabled the shipment of drugs in fleets of trucks that, with the enactment of NAFTA, pass more freely and with less inspection through the border points. To thoroughly inspect them would hold up traffic unacceptably, both for those waiting in line and for those awaiting their consignments of refrigerators. The early efforts by the United States to restrain the traffickers resulted in the disappearance of the smaller operators and hence the consolidation of the great narco cartels, three of which then divided up the border area among them. Ironically, goods, however toxic, pass freely over the border, but persons, constricted by immigration laws, may not. Open trade relations between Mexico and the United States were accompanied from 1993 on by the increasing use of tools to keep the border closed: high steel fences, sensors, video cameras, lighting at night and aerial surveillance, military sentries, the carceral tools of a country, the United States and its governors becoming fanatically determined to keep its partner separate. This is another story of which we do not know the ending, but we know, as Bolaño did not, that after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, U.S. politics became obsessed with national security, and that in 2001, the Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, vastly accelerating the attempts to seal the border in one direction. Of course its primary purpose was to restrict the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, and as such its political value probably surpassed its efficacy. 2666 is, however, a novel, however partly nonfictional. It is not a political tract. It has a self-effacing omniscient narrator, who appears 220

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briefly near the beginning and again near the end. Among Bolaño’s notes for the novel is a definitive statement that this narrator is “Arturo Belano,” that is, the protagonist of The Savage Detectives or Bolaño’s younger self. Although one of Bolaño’s favorite nouns is “abyss,” he continues to make jokes throughout the novel. Some of these are riffs, whose very extension is the point, as in the list of phobias recited, apparently impromptu, by the director of the lunatic asylum, which ends with the two worst—pantophobia, which is fear of everything, and phobophobia, fear of fear itself (pp. 382–83). And then there is the list of lapsus calami, or authorial lapses, the cause of merriment at the publishing house which publishes Archimboldi’s novels, of which the most charming to Archimboldi is one found in Balzac’s Béatrix: “I can hardly see any more, said the poor blind woman” (pp. 843–44). The darker the dark, the lighter its light side. And perhaps the biggest joke resides in the list of Archimboldi’s publications, all of them, like the never-found, never-read poems by Ka in Snow, mirages: Ludicke, The Endless Rose, The Leather Mask, Rivers of Europe, Bifurcaria Bifurcata, Inheritance, Saint Thomas (“the apocryphal biography of a biographer whose subject is a great writer of the Nazi regime,” p. 846), The Blind Woman (surprise, surprise), The Black Sea, Lethaea (“his most explicitly sexual novel,” p. 847), The Lottery Man, The Father, and The Return—thirteen novels: you may search for them in vain.

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KHALED HOSSEINI, A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS AND SOME CONCLUSIONS

“Class,” he said, “does Afghanistan have a bright future? Let’s discuss this.”

This unanswerable question, recently posed by an English teacher in the Niswan School for Girls in Kabul, is the open-ended end of a terrifying article in the New Yorker for July 9 and 16, 2012, by Dexter Filkins. The article is titled “After America,” and it serves as an indispensable supplement to Khaled Hosseini’s study of Afghanistan from the departure of the Soviets in 1989 to the arrival of the Americans in 2001. I call A Thousand Splendid Suns, published in 2007, a study of Afghanistan, because although it is one of the most novelistic of our international novels, it is also one that takes the most careful cognizance of the modern history of its country, supplying its readers with plenty of dates against which its domestic tale can be measured. It therefore makes a fine contrast with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, whose internal chronology and even geography require the reader to do detective work. Yet an uneasy likeness exists between what the English teacher in “After America” wants his pupils to consider and the question that was asked of Naipaul by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1979—“What is the future, in Africa?”—and answered, infamously, in the absolute negative: “Africa has no future.”1 Khaled 223

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Hosseini refuses to end his novel about Afghanistan with quite so grim a prognosis, although by 2007 the success of the American intervention was already being seen, at best, as extremely limited. By spring 2013, the date of Filkins’s essay, it was possible to see that intervention as having achieved almost nothing of permanence. Under Hamid Karzai, there is as yet no effective central government, no potent or well-supplied Afghan army, and, to put it mildly, reduced commitment in America to continuing to pay for the country’s imagined future. Many Afghans expect a return of civil war after the Americans leave. Many are afraid that, eleven years after its expulsion of the Taliban, that group will cut a deal which allows them some form of power or territorial division, and some commentators think that would be a plausible solution.2 The increasing boldness of the Taliban in next-door Pakistan, however, reminds us that spreading Islamicism makes national borders illusory. When the political and diplomatic history of a region has been unbearably complicated, there is a legitimate case to be made for some over-simplification on behalf of ordinary readers who wish to inform themselves about world affairs. This is what Hosseini supplies, by folding his political analysis and, yes, his appeals, his agenda, into a traditional literary envelope. Imagine the generic choice that a serious, historically minded novelist makes as staking out a position on a sliding scale, at one end of which (the left end) is chronicle (The Bridge on the Drina) and at the other end an engaging study of human character and development, set in a real time and place. A Thousand Splendid Suns is situated somewhere towards the right, along with A Passage to India, Chronicle in Stone, Maps, and Snow. The cleverness of Hosseini consists in blending the structure of a chronicle (real events in chronological order) with the texture of old literary forms, which are thus updated and revealed to be enduring 224

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facts of life. A Thousand Splendid Suns has two plots. One is a tragedy, dominated by the hateful but smart Rasheed, a middle-aged widower who acquires as his child bride an unwanted, illegitimate girl, Mariam, whom he treats with contempt and physical abuse when she fails to give him a son. Eventually his violence becomes so extreme that she kills him with a shovel, a crime for which she is executed by the Taliban. This plot bears some resemblance to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, whose heroine is also finally driven to kill her rapist and captor, and is also executed under English law. The second plot is a romance, the love story of Laila and Tariq, who are separated by the civil war in Afghanistan when Tariq’s family tries to flee Kabul to Pakistan. Hosseini tips his literary hand early in the lovers’ story, when they are still teenagers in Kabul, drawing attention to themselves by their inseparability. When Rasheed passes Laila and Tariq in the street he scornfully calls them Laili and Majnoon, “referring to the star-crossed lovers of Nezami’s popular romantic poem— a Farsi version of Romeo and Juliet, Babi said, though he added that Nezami had written his tale of ill-fated lovers four centuries before Shakespeare” (p. 148).3 The literary-historical reference does not come from Rasheed, but from Laila’s educated father, who believes above all in the education of girls. Rasheed would soon be part of the star-crossed-lovers plot machinery, grabbing the lovely Laila for himself as his second wife by arranging for her to hear a false tale of Tariq’s death in Peshawar. Of course, polygamy is normal in Afghanistan. This report is so circumstantial, the pretended eyewitness having been paid to tell a believable story, that Laila gives up hope and consents to marry Rasheed. The ancient plot in both its earlier forms was tragic, but here it is transformed from tragedy to tragicomedy by Tariq’s return, and their eventual marriage. 225

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Tragicomedy is ultimately a lightweight genre; so from a literary perspective it is interesting to see how brilliantly Hosseini interweaves it with the tragic plot of Mariam’s hard life and hard death, by binding the women together by affection as well as social fate. The most appealing parts of the novel show how Mariam, whose initial response to her supplantation by Laila was a mean-spirited jealousy, grows first into sympathy with and then into protective love for the girl, a love whose leverage is another illegitimate child, Laila’s baby by Tariq, Aziza. The description of how the baby girl captures the older woman’s heart and softens it somehow manages to avoid sentimentality (at least to my mind). Later Laila has another baby, a boy, Rasheed’s biological son, which complicates her future considerably. But even more brilliant is the way Hosseini deals with what a literary reader would call the historical “background,” but which here is deftly introduced, stage by terrible stage, as experienced and commented upon by the characters. Ironically, most of the comments are delivered by men, for there is no woman in the story educated enough to understand the international power plays by which her country is enthralled, first by the Soviets in 1973, then by the Mujahideen, “insurgents” against the Russians, then by the Taliban, and lastly by the Americans. Afghanistan, like Bosnia a landlocked country in a geostrategic position, has had a long history of invasion by its neighbors. But after World War II, in which it was neutral, the country was drawn into the vortex of the Cold War, and, for the inhabitants, into a new kind of war zone. Had the Reagan government not decided to arm the Mujahideen against the Soviets, driven by the remnants of Cold War paranoia, the CIA, and a drunken Texan Congressman, Afghanistan would not have suffered the complete breakdown of government that followed the withdrawal of the 226

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Russians, the bloody fighting between rival warlords, and the takeover of the country by the Taliban in 1994. Most Americans know of this episode, lightly titled“Charlie Wilson’s War,” by way of a jingoistic film, ornamented by the presence of Julia Roberts as a power behind the scene. The novel clearly identifies the four main stages of Afghanistan’s modern history, leaving unmentioned some of the more maddening or, to an outsider, incomprehensible details. Stage 1 was the removal of the monarchy. In the summer of 1973, Mariam’s father, Jalil, who would shortly abandon her, “told her that King Zahir Shah, who had ruled from Kabul for forty years, had been overthrown in a bloodless coup” by his cousin Daoud Khan, who established the country as a republic with socialist leanings (p. 21). Mariam at fourteen is unable to grasp what “socialist” means, and Hosseini wisely avoids narrating the political struggles that followed the coup, the rise of the PDPA (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan), which overthrew the Daoud regime in the fully Marxist revolution of April 1978, sparked by the assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber. This— Stage 2—is partially explained to Mariam by Rasheed, who in response to her question “What’s a communist?” replies scornfully that it is “someone who believe[s] in Karl Marxist” (p. 89)! This parody of knowledge, however, is filled out by the radio, which comes to serve as another narrator in the novel. It broadcasts the voice of Colonel Abdul Qader, who delivers a speech on the meaning of revolution: A revolutionary council of the armed forces has been established, and our watan will now be known as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. . . . The era of aristocracy, nepotism, and inequality is over, fellow hamwatans. . . . Power is 227

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now in the hands of the masses and freedom-loving people. A glorious new era in the history of our country is afoot. A new Afghanistan is born. (p. 92) Watan is Arabic for “country,” “nation,” or “homeland,” an interesting vagueness that veils the constitutional issues, particularly whether Afghanistan is still a sovereign and independent state, as had been declared by the then monarch in 1919. Stage 2, the Soviet administration, is a remarkably pleasant interlude for the civilian inhabitants of Kabul. Nine years after the Soviet takeover, our second heroine, Laila, is in school, absorbing more propaganda; but she is in school, with a female teacher. We gather that in the north Mujahideen are waging guerrilla warfare against the Soviet army, and that Laila’s two brothers have joined that cause, for which they will die. In class, her teacher declares that “the Soviet Union was the best nation in the world, along with Afghanistan,” and that the Soviets came “to help us defeat these brutes who want our country to be a backward, primitive nation” (p. 101), two striking applications of the word “nation,” which appears nowhere else in the novel. Laila knows that “no one, no one, dared to repeat in this teacher’s presence the rising rumors that, after eight years of fighting, the Soviets were losing this war. Particularly now that the American president, Reagan, had started shipping the Mujahideen Stinger Missiles to down the Soviet helicopters” (p. 102). Coercive ideas aside, the Communists have “sponsored literacy classes for all women” and Laila’s father wants her to understand that she is living at a good moment. “Almost two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were women now, Babi said, women who were studying law, medicine, engineering” (p. 121). And here follows a lecture to Laila and the reader on what will be the novel’s primary theme: 228

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Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but they’re probably more free now, under the communists, and have more rights than they’ve ever had before. . . . It’s a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan. . . . Of course, women’s freedom . . . is also one of the reasons people out there took up arms in the first place. By “out there” he didn’t mean Kabul, which had always been relatively liberal and progressive. Here in Kabul, women taught at the university, ran schools, held office in the government. No, Babi meant the tribal areas, especially the Pashtun regions in the south or in the east near the Pakistani border, where women were rarely seen on the streets and only then in burqa and accompanied by men. He meant those regions where men who lived by ancient tribal laws had rebelled against the communists and their decrees to liberate women, to abolish forced marriage, to raise the minimum marriage age to sixteen for girls. There, men saw it as an insult to their centuries-old tradition, Babi said, to be told by the government— and a godless one at that—that their daughters had to leave home, attend school, and work alongside men. (p. 121) This is an extremely important passage, first because it is itself an education for Laila; second, because it reveals Rasheed, though living in Kabul, as himself governed by “ancient tribal laws” in his treatment of Mariam; and third because it casts a different light on the Communists’ takeover and the motives of the insurgency against them. Had Reagan realized that the “freedom” for which the Mujahideen were fighting was for men only, perhaps he might not have assumed that they were allies; or perhaps he would not have cared. 229

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During Stage 2, Babi takes Laila and Tariq for an idyllic visit to the two great stone Buddhas carved out of the mountainside in the Bamiyan Valley, testimony to the ancient history of the region and the diversity of its culture. “The two Buddhas were enormous, soaring much higher than she had imagined. . . . Chiseled into a sunbleached rock cliff, they peered down at them, as they had nearly two thousand years before” (p. 133). The Buddhas, located in a beautiful fertile valley not in a museum, stood for something that transcends ethnic, religious, and political divisions and historical time itself. At a natural stopping point on the Silk Road, the statues and the caves that surround them sheltered travelers on the Silk Road and, like the great bridge on the Drina River, stood at a juncture between East and West. This theme is only lightly touched upon in the novel, as is their later destruction by the Taliban, in 2001. A less woman-centric novel might have made more of the international efforts to persuade the Taliban not to destroy the statues. Unesco sent the Taliban government thirty-six letters objecting to the proposed destruction. Money was offered by both India and Japan to transfer the statues to safety. Meanwhile, none was forthcoming from the international community to feed the starving Afghan children in the refugee camps, an irony of which the Taliban leaders were clearly aware, although they insisted that the demolition had only religious, iconoclastic, motives. A whole novel could possibly be written about this event, and not least on the discovery of caves previously hidden by the monuments, a dozen of which contained wall paintings: “It is believed that they are the oldest known surviving examples of oil painting, predating oil painting in Europe by as much as six centuries.” 4 Within the novel this information is conveyed to Laila and Tariq by Babi, whose knowledge seems to depend

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(another irony) on facts broadly known only after the statues were destroyed, sometime after his death. At any rate, Stage 3 was marked by the withdrawal of the Soviets, the unraveling of the Soviet Union, and the arrival of the Mujahideen in Kabul, ready with a plan to re-form the state. From her father, Laila has “learned the outline of it”: Afghanistan was now called the Islamic State of Afghanistan. An Islamic Jihad Council, formed in Peshawar [Pakistan] by several of the Mujahideen factions, would oversee things for two months, led by Sibghattullah Mojadidi. Th is would be followed then by a leadership council led by Rabbani, who would take over for four months. During those six months, a loya jirga would be held, a grand council of leaders and elders, who would form an interim government for two years, leading up to democratic elections. (p. 148) A loya jirga is a one-time grand council of tribal elders or leaders of factions, of course men only. The one planned here was never held because of what Babi calls “the troublesome marriage of guns and ego” (p. 154). The other factor, of course, was that the factions were divided by geographical origin and ethnic difference. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was Pashtun, Rabbani and Massoud were Tajik, Sayyaf was a Pashtun and a stout Muslim, and Mazari was a Hazara with Shia ties to Iran. Dostum was Izbek, but changed sides and then changed back. The factionalism was made worse by the behavior of other states in the ser vice of their own agenda. Hekmatyar received money and weapons from the United States conveyed through

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Pakistan, Saudi Arabia supported Sayyaf, and Iran was backing Mazari. As Hosseini wrote, presumably through Laila’s consciousness: It was dizzying how quickly everything unraveled. The leadership council was formed prematurely. It elected Rabbani president. The other faction cried nepotism. Massoud called for peace and patience. Hekmatyar, who had been excluded, was incensed. The Hazaras, with their long history of being oppressed and neglected, seethed. . . . The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other. (pp. 154–55) The civil war had begun. The Mujahideen, an honorific title, were now everywhere called simply warlords. Rockets rained down from the mountains. Houses were broken into and women raped. Noncombatants were blown apart on the streets. For the sake of the plot, Laila’s own house has to be pulverized, killing her mother and Babi, and burying the girl under the rubble, thus enabling her rescue by Rasheed, only to become his dependent second wife, and prisoner. With Babi gone from the narrative, information about politics has to come from Rasheed, which is a narratological problem of which Hosseini must surely have been conscious: a problem because Rasheed, whom the reader already hates, delivers the message to American readers that Hosseini surely intends. At supper, addressing himself to Laila, whom he wishes to impress, Rasheed remarks: If you ask me, the Americans armed the wrong man in Hekmatyar. All the guns the CIA handed him in the eighties to fight the Soviets. The Soviets are gone, but he still has the 232

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guns, and now he’s turning them on innocent people like your parents. And he calls this jihad. What a farce! What does jihad have to do with killing women and children? Better the CIA had armed Commander Massoud. (pp. 189–90) Never mind that these are not Rasheed’s real views, but designed to please Laila, whose family, like Massoud, were Tajiks. A Thousand Splendid Suns seems slightly to prefer Massoud to his rivals. And Rasheed’s next political analysis smacks even more clearly of Hosseini’s desire to educate his American audience: Not that they give a damn in America, mind you. What do they care that Pashtuns and Hazaras and Tajiks and Uzbeks are killing each other? How many Americans can even tell one from the other? Don’t expect help from them, I say. Now that the Soviets have collapsed, we’re no use to them. We served our purpose. To them Afghanistan is a kenerab, a shit hole. Excuse my language. (p. 190) There soon arrives Stage 3, the arrival of the Taliban in 1996, which ended the civil war. Welcomed at first for their moral “purity” and unity, the Taliban enacted their goals symbolically in their destruction of the contents of the Kabul Museum—books and paintings— and, in defiance of Western pleas for their survival, the explosion of the two huge ancient Buddhas in Bamiyan. But Hosseini is more interested in Taliban policies towards women, which were an extreme version of the reactionary rules already brought in from the hills. Although Massoud, her mother’s hero, remains Laila’s default choice, his alliance with Rabbani has produced a Supreme Court “filled with hard-liner mullahs who did away with the 233

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communist-era decrees that empowered women and instead passed rulings based on Shari’a, strict Islamic laws that ordered women to cover, forbade their travel without a male relative, punished adultery with stoning” (p. 232). Stoning has captured the attention and disapproval of the West, but it is the ban on women’s travel without a male relative that most immediately affects Mariam and Laila, who are turned off the bus to Peshawar and returned to Rasheed, who, unsurprisingly, subjects them to physical imprisonment and torture by thirst. The officer in charge of the border delivers the message of the then reigning culture: What a man does in his home is his business. . . . As a matter of policy, we do not interfere with private family matters, hamshira. (p. 238) The Taliban had arrived in Kabul on September 27, 1996. After being seen initially as rescuers because they at least stopped the violence in the streets, it soon dawned on the residents of Kabul that they had moved from one form of misery to a greater one. The streets were safe. But what sort of order did the Taliban bring? The scariest, yet irresistibly comic, moment in the novel is its replication of the Taliban rules for conduct. Here are some with which readers may not already be familiar. Singing is forbidden. Dancing is forbidden. Playing cards, playing chess, gambling, and kite flying are forbidden. Writing books, watching films, and painting pictures are forbidden. (p. 248) 234

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In short, culture was forbidden, including the game for boys for which Kabul was famous, and about which Hosseini had written his first novel, The Kite Runner. As for women, they were immediately ordered into permanent house arrest, forbidden from working, forbidden from walking, unless accompanied by a man. All the schools for girls were immediately closed. Hosseini is far too reticent about what was happening outside Kabul. The Taliban would never have succeeded in their takeover without massive military support from Pakistan and financial support from Saudi Arabia. The surviving warlords, of whom Massoud and Dostum were initially the chiefs, formed their National Alliance as a barrier to total takeover, but they were overrun by thousands of Pakistani troops fighting alongside the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. From 1996 to 2001 the Al Qaeda terrorist network became a virtual state inside Afghanistan. Most of this is barely mentioned in A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is silent on the insidious role of Pakistan, seen here as a pastoral refuge for Tariq and then his family. But the novelist continues to be interested in Massoud, in his trying to maintain a ghost of a government. In April 2001 Massoud visited the European Parliament and asked President George W. Bush for help against the Taliban, warning “about terrorist camps in Afghanistan” and that they intended to attack the U.S. “very soon” (p. 279). This Mariam has heard from an unnamed source, probably the radio, as she also learns from Tariq of Massoud’s assassination, most likely by Al Qaeda men posing as journalists, in September 2001 (p. 339). Two days later they watch on television the attacks on American soil and the fall of the Twin Towers (p. 340), and a few days later the announcement that President Bush has declared war on Afghanistan—for that is how the new American intervention was seen. Bombs, now American bombs, begin to fall in Afghanistan, 235

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and they hear from the television that “the Americans have armed the warlords once more” in their attempts to drive out the Taliban (p.342)! By this time “history” has become current news, and its presence in the novel is attenuated, as the domestic plot weaves quietly towards its end. For the reader “history” reappears briefly in July 2002 with the news of the expulsion of the Taliban, the establishment of ISAF, an international peacekeeping force, in Kabul, and the installation of Hamid Karzai as an interim president. So Laila and Tariq and the two children, Aziza and Zalmai, return to Kabul, to participate in its restoration. Happy ending? Only in the romance plot. Ending of any kind in the larger story of which it is an emblem? Of course not. Even as Laila returns to education as a teacher in the renovated orphanage where Aziza had been stowed there are “grumbles” that “the promised aid money to Afghanistan isn’t coming, that the rebuilding is going too slowly, that there is corruption, that the Taliban are regrouping already and will come back with a vengeance, that the world will forget once again about Afghanistan” (p. 365). The warlords are back in Kabul as “appointed minister of this and deputy minister of that, . . . they ride with impunity in shiny, bulletproof SUVs through neighborhoods that they demolished” (p. 363). But the novel, like Laila, refuses to be “crippled with resentment” (p. 363). It permits moving on. Skeptical readers who followed President Barack Obama’s “surge,” his plans for withdrawal of almost all troops by 2014, the focus on control of the new threat of the Haqqanis on the southeastern frontier (Operation Knife Edge), the U.S. obsession with its own safety from Al Qaeda, and now the obstructionism of President Karzai may not be appeased by Laila’s message, although of course there is nothing to do but move on. They may, however, have learned to be suspi236

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cious of shiny new titles for interventions, especially if they read “After America,” the indictment that opened this chapter. And they may make a promise to themselves not to forget about Afghanistan after the Americans leave. This would indeed be a tribute to the most up-to-date international novel with which, at the present time, I can deal. The case of Afghanistan is the clearest example of a moving target for analysis, and by the time this book is in print it may no longer be the most dangerous country in the world. Towards some conclusions, I want to express my relief at having been able to introduce a novel which takes seriously into account the issue of how women fit into a polity— an international polity. Finally able to find two novels written by women that met my criteria for eligibility, I also found one written by a man primarily about women, one that made the connection between a national culture and the abuse of women the central issue. The “woman question” has come up before, in Nuruddin’s Farah’s Maps, in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (the suicide girls and the head-scarf debate), and, of course, in Roberto Bolaño’s graphic account of the Mexican femicides. What Hosseini’s story makes explicit is something we all know but have mostly decided not to worry about. There is a clear connection between the maltreatment of women and rural life, lack of education (especially for girls), early and/or forced marriage, race or other ethnic divisors, tribal customs, religion (alas), and the kind of government a nation creates, permits, or endures. Some of these factors can be legislated against, but laws can be repealed, as the longer history of Afghanistan shows too clearly. Schools can be opened— and closed. Tribal customs may take generations to alter, and what will alter them eventually will be communication with the world elsewhere, which will not only inform women of their rights but also 237

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expose savage local cultures to shocked outsiders. One form of exposure is the writing of books, explicitly banned by the Taliban. One such book is the nonfiction novel by Freidoune Sahebjam, La Femme lapidée (1990). Sahebjam, himself an Iranian, not only exposed a particularly evil stoning in rural Iran, but also the attempts of the local mullah (with his thugs) to prevent him from departing, carrying a tape of the events recounted to him by the victim’s aunt. Since his book appeared, Iran removed the punishment of stoning from its legal code, though it banned the book. But a couple in Afghanistan were stoned to death in 2010 at the order of the Taliban. Governments come and go, and their capacity to succeed is often decided, financially or militarily, by other nations serving their own interests first, or always. Th is tends to make the world worse. As Harold Macmillan famously said, “The first rule of politics is: never invade Afghanistan.” (Or anywhere else, Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century theorist of nations, might have added.) The British broke that rule in 1839, 1878, and 1893. A second such rule would be: “Never draw boundaries in troubled regions without taking into account the inhabitants,” a rule the British also broke in 1893 by drawing the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which in 1893 was still part of British India. The line cuts through Pashtun tribal areas, dividing ethnic Pashtuns between what are now two nations. Pakistan is dominated by Punjabis. There is a growing sentiment, of course among Pashtuns, that the boundary should be withdrawn in such a way as to create an independent “Pashtunistan,” comprising over forty million people. The Taliban refuses to recognize the Durand Line, and the current president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, called it a “line of hatred that raised a wall between the two brothers.” My readers should recall the boundary issues in Africa, Somalia, and Mexico, not to mention the creation 238

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of Pakistan itself. These are all unalike, except in their having been imposed by outsiders. Given the constant military friction up and down the Durand Line, porous and legally debatable as it is, one can see why the British and U.S. governments have declared that the treaty on which it was based has not expired. It is too bad that there is no international will to fix the Durand Line problem. And it is disappointing that Hosseini chose not to engage in this dispute, leaving Pakistan out of his wide-ranging critique. He does, however, partially engage the ethnic problem, which has not only bedeviled would-be nations in the past but may increasingly do so in the future. This is Laila’s college-educated father (soon to be killed by the Mujahideen) explaining ethnic conflict to her, and to his American readers: Babi said that there were tensions between their people— the Tajiks, who were a minority, and Tariq’s people, the Pashtuns, who were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan: Tajiks have always felt slighted, Babi had said. Pashtun kings ruled this country for almost two hundred and fifty years . . . and Tajiks for all of nine months, back in 1929. . . . To me, it’s nonsense, and very dangerous nonsense at that— all this talk of I’m Tajik and you’re Pashtun and he’s Hazara and she’s Uzbek. We’re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter. But when one group rules over the others for so long . . . There’s contempt. Rivalry. There is. There always has been. (p. 117; final ellipsis in original). Thus does the most educated man in Hosseini’s novel understand the conflict between ethnic origin and the group consciousness of being, or becoming, a nation. He does not tackle the thorny question of 239

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why group consciousness of nationalism (an abstraction) should, or how it could, trump the more concrete group consciousness of ethnicity. Having Tariq, a Pashtun, marry Laila, a Tajik, scarcely counts as a political suggestion. Nor does Hosseini take serious count of the Hazaras, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan, who were decimated by Emir Abdur Rahman at the end of the nineteenth century, and in modern times have been massacred by the Taliban. Well, what do you expect? One novel cannot deal with everything. You have to pick your fights. A Thousand Splendid Suns was published in 2007. In 2009, a new law made violence against women illegal (rather than customary) and set new penalties for underage and forced marriage. Was the novel an influence? One would like to think so. On the other hand, as the New York Times reported in an editorial on August 15, 2012, “President Karzai has failed to vigorously enforce the violence against women law. In March he signed off on a decree from the country’s highest religious council stating that women were secondary to men.” There are several conclusions embedded or secreted in this chapter. The one I wish to bring to the surface is that writing and reading novels can be a serious business, an educational business. We can either say, with Naipaul, “The world is what it is,” or we can think of how it might be better, one nation at a time. Novels about countries of which we have been ignorant can make us more critical or supportive of international aid or military interventions. Novels make the statistics come alive, make old monuments like the bridge over the Drina far more than tourist attractions, give unfamiliar religions standing as religions, make us think about the lability of maps and boundaries, incorporate ideas into human beings and hear them 240

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debated, and actually grieve or rage at the destruction of the two enormous statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and at the meticulous individual descriptions of murdered girls and women in the barely fictional city of Santa Teresa, Mexico. Novels—international novels such as those represented here—make us want to know more, and what more can we want from a novel than that?

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Notes

Introduction 1. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 2. Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography (New York, 2012), p. 126; his quotation from Jakub Grygiel is from “The Power of Statelessness: The Withering Appeal of Governing,” Policy Review 154 (April–May 2009). All readers of my book should turn next to Kaplan’s, which illuminates every chapter. 3. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York and Oxford, 1996), pp. 41–55. 4. Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York, 2006), p. 159. 5. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London, 1985). 6. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York and London, 2005). E. M. Forster, A Passage to India 1. The text used for citations is the Penguin Classic edition (London, 1985, rpt. 2005). This edition has an excellent introduction by Pankaj Mishra which details Forster’s Indian travels and residences. 2. Forster, “Notes on the English Character,” in Abinger Harvest; cited in Pankaj Mishra’s introduction to A Passage to India, xiv. Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina 1. All quotations are from Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (1945), trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago, 1977). 2. Quoted in Radovan Popović, Ivo Andrić: A Writer’s Life (Belgrade, 1989), p. 11.

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Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone 1. All quotations are from Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone (1971), trans. Arshi Pipa, ed. David Bellos (New York, 2007). 2. See “Kadare Interview,” http://www.orbis-quintus.net/?page _id=1736. See also James Wood, “Chronicles and Fragments: The novels of Ismail Kadare, New Yorker (December 20 and 27, 2010), pp. 139 ff. But for a slashing review of Kadare’s career and alleged later hypocrisy, see “Kadare Is No Solzhenitsyn,” by Renata Dumitrascu, a Romanian writer in exile, published in MobyLives in July 2005 (http:// www.mobylives.com/Dumitrascu.html). 3. See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, Wisc., 1984), introduction. 4. Ismail Kadare, The Concert, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1994). 5. Ismail Kadare, The Successor, trans. David Bellos (New York, 2005). 6. See Refik Kadija, “William Shakespeare in Albania,” Linguistic and Communicative Performance Journal 2, no. 1 (2009): 42. As Kadija explains, Noli gave his interpretation of the play in his introduction, to the end of showing the affinity between ancient Scottish history and recent Albanian history: “Thus, the history of Scotland continued with internal turmoil, with bloody terrorism and with invading, mercenary foreign armies and treacheries, until this kingdom perished and definitely fell under the English yoke, where it still continues to be. The tragic irony . . . is that Malcolm, who usurps the throne of Scotland with the support of an English army, is hailed as a liberator by both the social elite and the people.” Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch 1. Kenneth J. Grieb, Guatemalan Caudillo: The Regime of Jorge Ubico (Athens, Ohio, 1979). 2. Mark Rosenfelder, “U.S. Interventions in Latin America,” available at www.zompist.com/latam.html. 3. Ibid. 4. William Kennedy, “A Stunning Portrait of a Monstrous Caribbean Tyrant,” New York Times (October 31, 1976), available at http://www.nytimes.com/books /97/06/15/reviews/marque-autumn.html. 5. Raymond L. Williams, Gabriel García Márquez (Boston, 1984), p. 111, citing El olor de la guayaba (The Fragrance of Guava). 6. Marlise Simons, “A Talk with Gabriel García Márquez,” New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1982. 244

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7. Enrique Lafourcade, King Ahab’s Feast, trans. Renate and Ray Morrison (New York, 1963). 8. This was pointed out by Claude L. Hulet in “Lafourcade’s Roman à Clef,” Hispania 45, no. 1 (March 1962): 67. Since the English translation did not appear until 1963, Hulet was unable to make the point that omission of this disclaimer is a form of self-censorship. 9. All quotations are from Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York, 1976). 10. Rubén Darío, “To Roosevelt” (1904), trans. Bonnie Frederick, at Casa Poema: Famous Poems, New Poetry, Photos, and Quotes, ed. Judith Grace Pordon, http://judithpordon.tripod.com/poetry/ruben _dario_a _roosevelt.html. 11. Quoted in Edward Waters Hood, “Gabriel García Márquez and Nicaragua: Writings on the Sandinista Revolution,” available at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu /~ewh/GGMREVOL .htm.

Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns 1. After two civil wars, from 1955 to 1972, and from 1983 to 2005, there was a border war between the newly independent South Sudan and Sudan over the oilrich regions loosely situated “between” them. On September 26, 2012, a new agreement was signed, with the assistance of the African Union. 2. See the chapter on Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, below. 3. This dispute dates from the late-nineteenth-century War of the Pacific, which Chile indisputably won, thereby depriving Bolivia, now the poorest nation in Latin America, of a coastline. In this case, the dispute was also about a natural resource, guano and caliche, from which were produced sodium nitrate, a source of conflict until natural nitrates could be replaced by synthetics. But the plight of Bolivia as a landlocked country remains, conceivably to be resolved in the future by an international orga nization like the United Nations. 4. Frank Jacobs, “The Elephant in the Map Room,” New York Times (December 8, 2007). 5. All quotations are from Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns (1976), trans. Trevor Le Gassick and Elizabeth Fernea (Northampton, Mass., 2011). 6. William Burr, “The October War and U.S. Policy,” The National Security Archive, October 7, 2003, Document 54, Memcon between Golda Meir and Henry Kissinger, October 22, 1973. 245

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7. The same question must apply to The Image, the Icon and the Covenant, which does bring the story forward to gesture at the problems of the Israeli settlements, but only to gesture. The protagonist, on his return, says that it is now the year 2000. This was the year of the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David, which failed. On September 28 the second intifada broke out in Jerusalem, probably in response to Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. Since the novel ends in a riot in September, a month insisted upon by the narrator, it may be vaguely gesturing also to those events. Rather than situating her story, then, in Palestinian history, which had become a focus of worldwide attention, Khalifeh seems to deliberately efface it. 8. Richard Calland, Anatomy of South Africa: Who Holds the Power? (Cape Town, 2006), p. 264. V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 1. Matt Rosenberg, “Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 to Divide Africa: The Colonization of the Continent by European Powers,” About.com: Geography, at http://geography.about.com/cs/politicalgeog/a /berlinconferenc.htm 2. Conrad’s relationship to Casement has been immaculately documented by Hunt Hawkins, “Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Movement,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981–82): 65–80. 3. Ibid., p. 68. 4. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (London, 1990). Originally presented as a Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1975, Achebe’s diatribe has itself achieved classic status, accompanying the text of his own novel, Things Fall Apart, in a Norton edition designed for the classroom. There is irony here, since Achebe was particularly incensed by the widespread teaching of Heart of Darkness in American colleges. 5. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902), electronic version of the Signet Classics edition, p. 105, available at http://web.archive.org /web/20050319095242 /http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=ConDark.sgm&images=images /modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all. 6. Hawkins, “Joseph Conrad,” p. 7. 7. The facts about Naipaul’s life are taken from Patrick French’s authorized biography, The World Is What It Is (New York, 2008). The quotation is found on page xv. 8. V. S. Naipaul, A Congo Diary (Los Angeles, 1975).

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9. All quotations are from V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York, 1979). 10. French, World Is What It Is, p. 348. 11. Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial world,” Salmagundi 70– 71 (1986): 44– 64, quotation on p. 53. 12. Elizabeth Hardwick, “Meeting V. S. Naipaul,” New York Times Book Review (May 13, 1979), available at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/specials /naipaul-meeting.html. Nuruddin Farah, Maps 1. Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography (New York, 2012), pp. 27–28. 2. Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine, Nuruddin Farah (New York, 1999), p. 2. Th is contradicts Derek Wright, the first critic to write a monograph on Farah, who stated, from the perspective of 1994, twelve years after Maps was published, that this linguistic nationalism is oversimplified since it does not take into account dispersion and intermarriage: “All the indicators suggest that the linguistic homogeneity and cultural exclusiveness of Greater Somalia are rapidly disintegrating.” Wright, The Novels of Nuruddin Farah (Bayreuth, 1994, 2004), p. 121. Perhaps; but this does not make it “shaky as a political proposition,” rather the reverse. 3. All quotations are from Nuruddin Farah, Maps (New York, 1986). 4. All quotations are from Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York, 2011). Rhea Galanaki, The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha 1. All quotations are from Rhea Galanaki, The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha (1989), trans. Kay Cicellis (London, 1996). 2. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1919), vol. 2, p. 241. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses 1. The edition used for reference is, on account of its availability, Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York, 2008), the Random House paperback. 2. Salman Rushdie, “The Right Time for an Islamic Reformation,” Washington Post, August 7, 2005.

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3. Akbar S. Ahmed, “ “Death in Islam: The Hawkes Bay Case,” Man, n.s.,21, no. 1 (March 1986):120–34. Orhan Pamuk, Snow 1. All quotations are from Orhan Pamuk, Snow (2002), trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2004). 2. John Updike, “Anatolian Arabesques: A Modernist Novel of Contemporary Turkey,” New Yorker (August 30, 2004). 3. Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2007), pp. 273, 274, 278. 4. Ibid., p. 364. 5. Ibid., p. 372. 6. Ibid., p. 369. 7. Ibid., p. 378. 8. Ibid., p. 273. 9. See Dan Bilefsky, “How to Avoid Honor Killing in Turkey? Honor Suicide,” New York Times, July 16, 2006; I owe this and other recent information to Resit Ergener, an old friend of Pamuk, and a superb guide to modern Turkey. Roberto Bolaño, 2666 1. All quotations are from Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004), trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York, 2008). 2. Reprinted in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, trans. Sybil Perez (New York, 2009), p. 122. 3. Ibid., pp. 32, 31. 4. Ibid., p. 37. 5. Diana Washington Valdez, The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women; The Truth About Mexico’s Bloody Border Legacy (Los Angeles, 2006), pp. 151–53. 6. Ibid., pp. 95– 96. 7. Ibid., p. 151. 8. Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border, (Princeton, 2011). 9. Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border into the TwentyFirst Century, 2nd ed., (Lanham, Md., 2008), p. 111.

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Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns 1. Elizabeth Hardwick, “Meeting V. S. Naipaul,” New York Times Book Review (May 13, 1979), available at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/specials /naipaul-meeting.html. 2. See Anatol Lieven, “Afghanistan: The Way to Peace,” New York Review of Books (April 4, 2013), pp. 24–30. 3. All quotations are from Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (New York, 2007). 4. There is a vast literature on the statues and the oil paintings. See Wikipedia and an article by the archaeologist W. L. Rathje, “Why the Taliban Are Destroying Buddhas,” USA Today (March 22, 2001), available at http://usatoday30.usato day.com/news/science/archaeology/2001-03-22-afghan-buddhas.htm.

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Index

Amritsar Massacre, 26, 27, 215 Amulet (Bolaño), 215 Anderson, Benedict, 14–15 Andrić, Ivo, 4, 6; activism of, 42–43; background of, 41–42; and Kadare, 57–59; Nobel Prize awarded to, 4, 39–40, 44. See also Bosnian Chronicle; Bridge on the Drina, The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, The, 59 Arab-Israeli War (1948), 101 Arbenz Guzmán, Jacobo, 82, 83 Area of Darkness, An (Naipaul), 124 Arellano, Sergio, 94 Armengol, Heidi Slaquet, 214 Armenians: expulsion of from Turkey of, 181, 186; massacre of, 182, 185, 199 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 85 Atatürk, Kemal, 186, 191 Austen, Jane, 24 Austria-Hungary, 40, 43, 50, 68 Autumn of the Patriarch, The (García Márquez), 7–8, 74, 79– 97, 161, 170; chronology of, 88; concept of nation in, 93– 94; as international novel, 79–80; stream-ofconsciousness in, 87–88

Achebe, Chinua, 114, 115, 124, 246n4 Aeneid (Vergil), 128 Afghanistan: factions within, 231–32; fiction set in, 9–10, 223–41; future of, 223–24; modern history of, 227–37; Soviet invasion of, 226–28; Soviet withdrawal from, 231; Taliban in, 224, 226, 230–31, 233, 234, 235–36 Africa: boundary issues in, 7, 100, 111–12, 131–34; ethnic turmoil in, 129; fiction set in, 7, 113–29, 131–49; Naipaul’s perspectives on, 125–29, 223; partitioning of, 111–12. See also Congo, Democratic Republic of the; Somalia Ahmed, Akbar S., 178 Albania: fiction set in, 57– 77; invasions of, 69– 70; national consciousness of, 67– 70; struggle for control over, 68– 70, 75– 76 Alden, Patricia, 247n2 Allende, Salvador, 82, 94, 95, 215, 216 Almásy, Ladislaus de, 148–49 Al Qaeda, 148, 235, 236 Al Shabab, 148

251

INDEX

219. See also Amulet; Savage Detectives, The; 2666 Bolívar, Simón, 81, 93 Bolivia, 99, 245n3 Booker Prize, winners of, 4, 164. See also Man Booker International Prize; Naipaul, V. S.; Rushdie, Salman border issues: in Africa, 7, 16, 100, 111–12, 131–34; in Bosnia, 48–49; in Israel, 99–102; in Mexico, 136–37, 216–18, 220; and Palestine, 99–102; in Somalia, 133–34, 139; in Turkey, 136, 186–87, 192, 200 borderologists, 100 Borges, Jorge Luis, 85 Bosnia: fiction set in, 6, 39–55; struggles for control of, 40, 43, 44, 47–52 Bosnian Chronicle (Andrić), 45 Braschi, Giannina, 10 Bridge on the Drina, The (Andrić), 4, 6, 39–55, 80, 108, 124, 140, 152, 154, 170, 200, 207, 224; and chronology of historical events, 47–51; the term “novel” as applied to, 44–47, 52–53 “Bridge on the Zepa, The” (Andrić), 42 Bush, George W., 235–36

Babel, Isaac, 53 Baeza, Ernesto, 95 Balkanization, 6 Balkans, 5– 6; fiction set in, 6, 39–55, 57– 77 Balkan Wars, 68 Balzac, Honoré de, 221 Batista, Fulgencio, 82 Baudelaire, Charles, 219 Béatrix (Balzac), 221 Begin, Menachim, 104 Beginning and an End, A (Mahfouz), 103 Belgian Congo, 113; Conrad’s travels to, 113–15. See also Congo, Democratic Republic of the Bellos, David, 62 Bend in the River, A (Naipaul), 4, 7, 80, 115–29, 167– 68, 174, 223; and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 126; narrators of, 120–23; themes of, 120, 138; time frame of, 118–19, 127 Ben-Gurion, David, 101 Berlin, Congress of (1878), 40, 49, 157 Berlin Conference (1884–85), 7, 16, 111–12 Bevin, Ernest, 132–33, 135, 143, 144 Bezirgan, Nuray, 193 Bible, “higher criticism” of, 175– 76 bin Laden, Osama, 235 Bismarck, Otto von, 40, 111 Blair, Tony, 175 Bolaño, Roberto, 4; background of, 214–15; crime and violence as interest of, 215–16; and Rushdie,

Cabrera, Manuel Estrada, 85, 91 Canada, and the United States, 218 Capote, Truman, 206 Carpentier, Alejo, 85 Carthage, 128

252

INDEX

Congo, Democratic Republic of the (DRC), 112–13; fiction set in, 115–29 Congo, Republic of the, 116 Congo Diary, A (Naipaul), 117, 119, 121, 125, 126 Congo Wars, 129 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 113–15, 117, 119 Cretan revolt of 1868, 153, 154 Crete: fiction set in, 151– 62; struggle for control of, 157– 61 Crusades, as depicted in fiction, 60 Cuba, 82, 83 Czechoslovak ia, 13

Casanova, Pascale, 3 Casement, Roger, 113–14, 115 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 82, 83 Castro, Fidel, 83 caudillismo, 81 Chile, 209, 214, 215, 216, 245n3; García Márquez’s views on, 94– 97; U.S. intervention in, 82, 94– 97 chronicle: as novel, 44–47, 58– 61. See also Bridge on the Drina, The; Chronicle in Stone Chronicle in Stone (Kadare), 6, 45, 57– 77, 80, 102, 106, 136, 207, 244n6; as chronicle, 59– 60; chronology of, 61– 62; narrator of, 60– 61, 63– 67; resistance as theme in, 71– 74. See also Albania Chronicle of a Death Foretold (García Márquez), 97 Churchill, Winston, 186–87 Cicellis, Kay, 153 Cipriano Castro, José, 88 Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 136–37; drug trade in, 220; fiction set in, 8– 9, 205–21; impact of border issues on, 217–18; manufacturing in, 218; murders in, 206– 7, 212–13, 216, 217, 218. See also 2666 Clinton, Bill, 44, 97 Close Sesame (Farah), 132, 135 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 189 Colombia, 79 colonialism, 5 Concert, The (Kadare), 70, 74, 75, 76– 77

Darío, Rubén, 91– 92, 93 Dayton Accord, 44 Defoe, Daniel, 173 de Vries, Fred, 139–40 Díaz, Adolfo, 82, 90 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 25 Dieste, Rafael, 209 Djibouti, 134 Dominican Republic, 85–87 Dongala, Emmanuel, 116 Dostum, Abdul Rashid, 231, 235 Drina, bridge over: historical significance of, 40–41. See also Bridge on the Drina, The Duchamp, Marcel, 209 Dumitrascu, Renata, 244n2 Durand Line, 238 Dyer, Reginald, 27

253

INDEX

García Márquez, Gabriel, 4, 7–8, 79, 83–84, 185, 216; Chile as viewed by, 94– 97. See also Autumn of the Patriarch, The; Chronicle of a Death Foretold; One Hundred Years of Solitude Gaza Strip, 102. See also Israel Gellner, Ernest, 14–15 George, prince of Greece, 158 Germinal (Zola), 106 Ghalib, 32 globalization: concept of, 19–20, 172; dangers of, 20 Golan Heights, 102. See also Israel Gómez, Juan Vicente, 83–84, 89, 92 González Rodríguez, Sergio, 206– 7, 212–13 Good Neighbor policy, 82, 89 Goulart, João, 96 Grass, Günter, 141 Greece, 57; and Albania, 68, 69; fiction set in, 151– 62; and Turkey, 153–54. See also Chronicle in Stone Greek War of Independence, 153, 157 Grieb, Kenneth, 81 Grygiel, Jakub, 12 Guatemala, 82, 83

Echeverría, Ignacio, 207 Edwards, Lovett, 44–45 Egypt, 160– 61; and Israel, 101–2 Elizabeth II, Queen, 163 El señor presidente (Asturias), 85 English Patient, The (Ondaatje), 148–49 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 197– 98 Ethiopia, 132–33, 136, 144–45 European Union (E.U.), 17–18; and Turkey, 185, 191, 197, 202 Ex Ponto (Andrić), 43 Farah, Nuruddin, 7, 80, 131–33, 247n2; as international novelist, 132, 139–49. See also Close Sesame; Maps; Naked Needle, A Fatima, Naseem, 177– 78 Fiesta del Rey Acab, La (Lafourcade). See King Ahab’s Feast Figueroa Gutiérrez, Sergio, 96 Filkins, Dexter, 223 Forster, E. M., 4–5, 16, 24, 39; travels to India of, 25. See also Passage to India, A Fox, Vicente, 215 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 40 French, Patrick, 119, 127

Haile Selassie, 133, 135, 137 Halepa, Pact of, 157–58 Hamas, 102 Hapsburg regime, 42 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 125, 223 Hardy, Thomas, 225 Hawkins, Hunt, 115

Galanaki, Rhea, 6, 152. See also Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, The Galíndez, Jesús, 85–86 Gandhi, Indira, 164 Gandhi, Mahatma, 26 Gandhi, Rajiv, 167

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INDEX

internationalism: in Africa, 111; concept of, 1–3, 15–20, 167, 200, 208; Forster’s views on, 29; and nationalism, 29, 43, 84, 111, 145 international novel, 2–10, 52, 71, 132, 167– 68; realism in, 79–80, 219. See also titles of specific works international organizations, 18–19 Iran, 238 Islam: origins of Sunni-Shiite division in, 178– 79 Israel: fiction set in, 103– 9; Occupied Territories of, 102–3; shifting boundaries of, 99–102; United States as ally of, 106– 7, 108 Italy, and Albania, 68, 69

Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 113–15, 117, 119, 246n4 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, 231–33 Herraldo, Jorge, 207 Herzegovina, 40 History of the Devil (Defoe), 173 Hobsbawm, Eric, 15 Holinshed’s Chronicle, 59 Hood, Edward Waters, 97 Hosseini, Khaled, 9. See also Kite Runner, The; Thousand Splendid Suns, A Howards End (Forster), 24 Hoxha, Enver, 58, 62, 64, 70– 71, 74 Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert) (González Rodríguez), 206– 7, 212, 213 Hugo, Victor. See Misérables, Les

Jacobs, Frank, 100 James, C. L. R., 124 Jameson, Fredric, 10 Jordan, and Israel, 101–2 Joyce, James, 61, 156 Juárez, Mexico. See Ciudad Juárez, Mexico Judt, Tony, 17–18

Iliad (Homer), 156 Image, the Icon, and the Covenant, The (Khalifeh), 103–4, 246n7 In Cold Blood (Capote), 206 India: under British rule, 25–26, 32–33; fiction set in, 23–37, 163– 79; Forster’s travels to, 25. See also Passage to India, A Indian Rebellion (1857), 26 international: concept of, 10–12. See also internationalism; international novel International Control Commission, 68 International Criminal Court (ICC), 18–19

Kadare, Ismail, 6, 62– 63, 244n2; and Andrić, 57–59. See also Chronicle in Stone; Concert, The; Long Winter of Loneliness, The; Successor, The; Three-Arched Bridge, The Kadija, Refik, 244n6 Kafka, Franz, 181 Kaplan, Robert, 11–12, 131

255

INDEX

U.S. intervention in, 81–83, 88– 90, 91– 92, 94– 97 Latin American dictators, 7–8; as depicted in The Autumn of the Patriarch, 80–81, 83–84, 97; novels about, 85–87 League of Nations, 18, 43, 69 Leigh, Gustavo, 96 Lenin, Vladimir, 14 Leopold II, King, 113, 129 Levin, Bernard, 116 Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, The (Galanaki), 6, 10, 151– 62; as ghost story, 155, 161– 62; as historical novel, 154; and Homer’s Odyssey, 154–57; myth and history in, 154–57, 161– 62 Lin Biao, 76 Line in the Sand (St. John), 217 London, Treaty of (1913), 68, 158 Long Winter of Loneliness, The (Kadare), 70 López Angulo, Gerardo, 95 loya jirga, 231

Kars, Turkey: as setting for Snow, 181, 186–87. See also Snow Karzai, Hamid, 236, 238, 240 Kautsky, Karl, 53 Kennedy, John F., 82 Kennedy, William, 83 Kerincsiz, Kemal, 185 Khalifeh, Sahar, 9; as international novelist, 103. See also Image, the Icon, and the Covenant, The; Wild Thorns Khan, Daoud, 227 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 164 Khyber, Mir Akbar, 227 Killing Fields, The (Valdez), 213 King Ahab’s Feast (Lafourcade), 85–87, 88, 89 Kissinger, Henry, 95, 107 Kite Runner, The (Hosseini), 9, 235 Koran, critical study of, 176 Kremer, Eduard, 147 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 189 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), 192– 93 Kurds, treatment of in Turkey, 181, 184–85, 192– 93, 197– 99 Kyd, Thomas, 195

Mabanckou, Alan, 116 Macbeth (Shakespeare), as alluded to in Chronicle in Stone, 64, 74– 77, 244n6 Machado y Morales, Gerardo, 82 Macmillan, Harold, 238 Mahfouz, Naguib, 103 Man Booker International Prize, 3, 62 Mao Zedong, 70, 119

Lacan, Jacques, 144 Lafourcade, Enrique, 85, 87, 89 Lakshmi, Padma, 174 language, and nationhood, 14, 133, 135, 247n2 Latin America: communism in, 86; fiction set in, 7– 9, 79– 97, 205–21;

256

INDEX

Mobutu Sese Seko, 7, 80, 116–18, 119, 123, 129 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 132–33 Monroe Doctrine, 82 Morrison, Toni, 141 Muhammad: Rushdie’s depiction of, 164, 176, 187. See also Satanic Verses, The Mujahideen, 226, 228, 229, 231–32 Mulele, Pierre, 118 Museum of Innocence, The (Pamuk), 187

maps: as trope in Maps, 131–32, 142–44, 146–47; as trope in The English Patient, 148–49 Maps (Farah), 7, 9, 10, 131–49, 181, 237; author as protagonist of, 136, 138–39, 147; body and blood as theme in, 140–43; identity as theme in, 138–39, 170; as influence on The English Patient, 149; maps as theme in, 142–47; protagonist of, 136–39 maquiladoras, 9, 218 Maristain, Monica, 211 Marxism, 53 Masood, Syed Ross, 25, 29 Massoud, Ahmad Shah, 231, 233–34, 235 Maurice (Forster), 25 Mazari, Abdul Ali, 231 Mazote, Toro, 95 McNeill, William, 55 Meir, Golda, 107 “Mera Joota hai Japani” (Hindi song), 172 Mexico: and border conflicts with the United States, 216–18, 220; fiction set in, 8– 9, 205–21. See also Ciudad Juárez, Mexico Midaq Alley (Mahfouz), 103 Middle East. See Israel; Palestine Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 4, 164 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 168, 172, 173 Misérables, Les (Hugo), 10, 105, 106 Mishra, Pankaj, 243n1 Mladić, Ratko, 44

NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Naipaul, V. S., 4, 7, 80, 115–19, 124; Africa as viewed by, 124–29, 223; critical perspectives on, 124–25. See also Area of Darkness, An; Bend in the River, A; Congo Diary, A Naked Needle, A (Farah), 139 nation: concept of, 11–18; in Chronicle in Stone, 65– 66; and language, 14, 133, 135, 247n2; in The English Patient, 148–49. See also names of specific countries nationalism: in Albania, 67– 68; concept of, 1–2, 13–15, 93– 94, 151; and internationalism, 29, 43, 84, 111, 145; Pamuk’s theory of, 199–200 Netanyahu, Binyamin, 102 Nezami, 225 Nicaragua, 82, 90 Nixon, Richard, 70, 95

257

INDEX

Palace of Dreams, The (Kadare), 62 Palacios, Javier, 95 Palestine: and border conflicts with Israel, 99–102; fiction set in, 103– 9; Jewish immigration to, 100–101; partitioning of, 101 Pamuk, Orhan, 4, 6, 80, 175; as narrator in Snow, 184; political prosecution of, 182, 184–86; political views of, 187. See also Museum of Innocence, The; Snow Paradise Lost (Milton), 168, 172, 173 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 69 Pasha, Ismail Ferik, 152–53. See also Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, The “Passage to India” (Whitman), 15–16, 23–24, 92 Passage to India, A (Forster), 4–5, 15–16, 23–37, 162, 166, 170; chronology of, 26; as political novel, 36; prophetic aspects of, 24–25, 32–36; role of Aziz in, 27, 29–36; structure of, 30; and Whitman’s poem, 15–16, 23–24 People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), 227 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 83 Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, 82, 94– 95, 215, 216 PKK. See Kurdistan Workers Party Plath, Sylvia, 141 pluralism, 199–200. See also internationalism Pol Pot, 70

Nobel Prize: winners of, 3, 4, 39–40, 79, 185. See also Andrić, Ivo; García Márquez, Gabriel; Naipaul, V. S.; Pamuk, Orhan Noli, Fan, 75– 76, 244n6 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 9, 19, 218, 220 nostos (homecoming): and The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 154–57 novel: as chronicle, 44–47, 58– 61; of ideas, 33, 52, 108– 9, 200–201; political significance of, 84–85; power of, 240–41. See also international novel; and titles of specific works Obama, Barack, 236 Odyssey (Homer), and The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 154–57 Ogaden region: 132–33, 135–36, 139, 141, 144; ceded to Ethiopia, 132, 146. See also Somalia Olds, Robert, 82 Ondaatje, Michael, 148–49 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 79, 85 Orga nization for African Unity, 100 Othello (Shakespeare), 169 Ottoman Empire, fiction set in, 6, 39–55, 57– 77, 151– 62. See also Bosnia; Serbia; Turkey Ovid, 43 Pakistan: Taliban in, 224, 235, 238; tribal tensions in, 238–39

258

INDEX

Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 5, 10, 36, 163– 79; in Bolaño’s 2666, 219; as comedy and tragedy, 168– 69; controversy surrounding, 163– 64; dualism in, 168– 69, 170; evil as theme in, 172– 74, 219; historical context of, 165– 66; as international novel, 167– 68; omniscient narrator of, 169– 70; racial difference in, 166, 174; on religious reform, 175– 76; supernatural as aspect of, 166, 170– 72, 176– 79; theological questions raised in, 170– 74; time frame of, 167– 68 Savage Detectives, The (Bolaño), 208– 9, 216, 221 Sayyaf, Abdul Rasul, 231 Schlesinger, James R., 107 Seale, Bobby, 210 Serbia, 6, 44, 68, 69; fiction set in, 39–55 Sexton, Anne, 141 Shah, Zahir, 227 Shakespeare, William. See Macbeth Shari’a, law of, 234 Sharif Sharif, Abdel Latif, 214 Sharmake, Absirashi Ali, 134 Shehu, Mehmet, 71 Sherwood, Marcella, 27 Shree 420, 172 Siad Barre, Mohamed, 134, 135, 139 Silk Road, 230 Simons, Marlise, 84 Sinai Peninsula, 102. See also Israel Six Day War (1967), 102

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 61 postcolonialism, 5 PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico), 212–13, 214–15, 217 Qader, Abdul, 227–28 Rabbani, Mohammad, 231–32 Rahman, Emir Abdur, 240 Reagan, Ronald, 97; and Afghanistan, 226, 228, 229 realism: in fiction, 5; in 2666, 219 Reasons of State (Carpentier), 85 Renan, Ernest, 12–13, 14–15, 17, 238 Ressler, Robert, 213 Rio Treaty (1947), 86 Roberts, Julia, 227 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 83 Room with a View, A (Forster), 24 Roosevelt, Franklin, 82, 89 Roosevelt, Theodore, 82, 88, 91– 92 Rosenfelder, Mark, 82 Rushdie, Salman, 4, 124, 187; Bolaño’s commentary on, 219; controversy surrounding, 163– 64, 166; marriages of, 174– 75. See also Midnight’s Children; Satanic Verses, The Sahebjam, Freidoune, 238 Said, Edward, 5, 124–25 St. John, Rachel, 217 Sandino, Augusto César, 82

259

INDEX

Three-Arched Bridge, The (Kadare), 58–59 Tito, Marshal, 41, 44 Tlatelolco Massacre, 214, 215 Tremaine, Louis, 247n2 Trinidad and Tobago, 116; flag of, 129 Troncoso, Arturo, 96 Trujillo, Rafael, 85–87, 92 Truman, Harry, 186–87 Tukojirao III, 25 Turkey, 14; ethnic and religious conflict in, 181, 184–85, 191– 93, 197– 98; and European Union, 185, 191, 197, 202; female suicides in, 202–3; fiction set in, 6, 181–203; and Greece, 153–54; head-scarf issue in, 193– 98; honor killings in, 202–3; Kurds in, 181, 184–85, 192– 93, 197– 99; political censorship in, 182, 184–86; recent history of, 191– 93. See also Ottoman Empire 2666 (Bolaño), 4, 8– 9, 19, 20, 205–21, 237; division into parts, 207–8; narrator of, 220–21; as nonfiction novel, 206– 7; “real” counterparts to characters in, 210–11, 212–14

Snow (Pamuk), 4, 6, 106, 136, 140, 181–203, 221, 237; as black comedy, 188–89; and Casablanca, 182–83; head-scarf issue in, 183, 193– 98; as historical novel, 201–2; narrators of, 183–84; as novel of ideas, 200–201; play within a play in, 195– 97; as political novel, 187– 91; romance as aspect of, 182–83, 201–2 Sokolović, Mehmed Pasha, 40–41, 54 Somalia: clan rivalry in, 134–35; as “failed state,” 147–48; fiction set in, 131–49; language as nationality in, 133, 135, 247n2; partitioning of, 133–34, 139 Somaliland, 134 Soviet Union: in Afghanistan, 226–28, 231 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 195 stoning, 238 Successor, The (Kadare), 70– 71, 74 Syria, and Israel, 101–2 Taliban, 224, 226, 233, 234, 235–36; and destruction of stone Buddhas, 230–31 Tanzou, Sony, 116 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 225 Thatcher, Margaret, 166, 167 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 246 Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Hosseini), 9, 223–41; as chronicle, 224–25; historical background of, 226–37

Ubico, Jorge, 81 Uganda, 118 Ulysses (Joyce), 156 UNESCO, 19, 58, 151–52, 230 UNICEF, 19 United Nations (U.N.), 18, 44; and plan for partition of Israel, 101

260

INDEX

Woman from Sarajevo, The (Andrić), 43 women: in Afghanistan, 228–29, 234–35, 240; fiction with focus on, 237; in an international polity, 237–38; murders of, in Ciudad Juárez, 206– 7, 212–13, 216, 217, 218. See also Maps; Snow; Thousand Splendid Suns, A; 2666 World Bank, 19 World War I, 69 World War II, 41, 43, 71; Jewish immigration during and after, 100–101 Wright, Derek, 247n2

United Nations Security Council, 102 United States: and Canada, 218; and Israel, 99, 106– 7, 108; and Latin America, 81–83, 88– 90, 91– 92, 94– 97; and Mexico, 216–18, 220 United States of Banana, The (Braschi), 10 Updike, John, 185–86, 187, 201 Valdez, Diana Washington, 213 Venezuela, 84, 88–89, 90 Vergil, 128 Vietnam War, 70 Vittorio Emanuele III, King, 69

Yeats, William Butler, 4 Yom Kippur War (1973), 107 Yugoslavia, 43–44, 69. See also Bosnia; Serbia

Walcott, Derek, 124 Whitman, Walt, 15–16, 23–24, 92 Wild Thorns (Khalifeh), 9, 99–109; as novel of complaint, 105– 6; as novel of ideas, 108– 9; “occupation” as issue in, 104–5; time frame of, 104 Wilhelm de Wied, prince of Albania, 68 Williams, Raymond L., 83–84 Wilson, Charlie, 227 Wilson, Woodrow, 57, 69, 75 Witt, Emily, 125

Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo): fiction set in, 115–29. See also Mobutu Sese Seko Zanzibar, 118 Zelaya, José Santos, 82, 90, 91– 92 Zogu, Ahmed Bey (King Zog), 69, 75 Zola, Émile, 106

261