Witness Literature - Proceedings Of The Nobel Contennial Symposium 9812381686, 9789812381682

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WITNESS LITERATURE

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WITNESS LITERATURE Proceedings of the Nobel Contennial Symposium

Edited by Horace Engdahi

World Scientific New Jersy . London . Singapore . Hong kong

Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: Suite 202, 1060 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

WITNESS LITERATURE Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium Copyright © 2002 by The Swedish Academy All rights reserved.

ISBN 981-238-168-6

Printed in Singapore.

Proceedings

of the Nobel Centennial Symposium, "Witness Literature" Arranged by the Swedish Academy on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the Noble Prize in Literature Stockholm, 4-5 December 2001

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CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Philomela’s Tongue: Introductory Remarks on Witness Literature Horace Engdahl

1

When We Don’t Speak, We Become Unbearable, and When We Do, We Make Fools of Ourselves. Can Literature Bear Witness? Herta Müller

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The Freedom of Self-Definition Imre Kertész

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The Bedazzled Gaze: On Perspective and Paradoxes in Witness Literature Peter Englund

45

On the Frontier Timothy Garton Ash

57

Of Tamarind and Cosmopolitanism! Nuruddin Farah

69

Cloned Eyes Li Rui

77

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Contents

Witness: The Inward Testimony Nadine Gordimer

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Elaborations of Testimony Kenzaburo Oe

99

Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth Gao Xingjian

113

Contributors

129

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PREFACE

In December 2001, the centennial anniversary of the first Nobel Prize was celebrated. To mark the occasion, the Swedish Academy organized a symposium on the theme of “Witness Literature” that was held on December 3rd and 4th in the Grand Hall of the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The symposium was planned by a committee consisting of two of the Academy’s members, Horace Engdahl and Per Wästberg. Speakers from Asia, Africa, as well as Eastern and Western Europe gave talks, including four winners of the Nobel Prize. A number of Swedish critics, scholars, and authors participated in the discussions. The first day took the form of a closed seminar while the second day was open to the public. The primary objective of the symposium was to examine the concept of witness literature and its relevance to contemporary literature. The concept is relatively new and has not yet been defined clearly by literary criticism and scholarship. Yet, twentyfive years ago, Elie Wiesel described “the literature of testimony” as the literary invention of our times. As can be seen in the contributions submitted in this volume, the discussion primarily alternated between two aspects of the topic: on the one hand, the particular claim to truth that witness literature puts forward; and, on the other hand, the process that leads from catastrophe to creativity and that turns the victim into a writing witness with the power to suspend forgetfulness and denial.

ix

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Preface

The contributions to this volume are given in the order in which they were presented at the symposium.

Horace Engdahl Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Stockholm, 1 May 2002

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the Nobel Foundation for funding the symposium and Susanne Widén for making the practical arrangements with her usual skill. I also thank the librarians at the Nobel Library for their assistance in tracking down materials needed for preparing the notes of the published proceedings and Claire Hogarth, the subeditor of this volume, for her adroit copy editing and meticulous attention to detail in every part of the making of this book.

Horace Engdahl Volume Editor

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PHILOMELA’S TONGUE: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON WITNESS LITERATURE

HORACE ENGDAHL

Since Ovid’s Metamorphoses accommodates all that is human and divine, it also includes a myth about testimony. The Athenian, Procne, has married the Thracian King, Tereus. But she misses her sister Philomela, who has remained with their parents. Procne asks her husband to arrange for her to see Philomela again. Tereus goes to Piraeus. As soon as he sees Philomela, he grows hot with desire for her. Her father allows her to leave if she promises to return soon. Tereus takes her in his ship to the coast of Thracia. There he shuts her up in a cabin in the forest and rapes her. Crushed with shame, Philomela begs Tereus to kill her, threatening otherwise to cry out his misdeed. He becomes frightened, draws his sword, ties the girl’s hands behind her back, pulls out her tongue with tongs, and cuts it off. Ovid does not spare us the horrendous image: the tongue is seen to quiver on the ground to a murmur strange. Like a serpent’s severed tail it writhes, dying, towards the maimed maiden’s foot.1 1

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When Tereus returns home to his wife, he lies that her sister died during the journey. Philomela remains in her prison, incapable of speech. But she works out a stratagem. She weaves a white vestment disclosing the crime in purple letters and manages to have it sent to Procne. Procne reads the woven testimony and realises what has happened. She is seized with burning hatred of her husband. At the annual festival of Dionysus, she sets out into the woods with the Bacchantes and frees Philomela. The two sisters consider how best to take their revenge. For a time, they contemplate castrating Tereus, but decide upon something even more hair-raising. Procne kills her child by Tereus, their son Itys, and serves his flesh for her husband’s dinner. So that Tereus may realise what he has eaten, Philomela suddenly comes in with the lad’s bloody, severed head. And more intensely did she never wish to speak and clothe in words her gruesome joy.2

Ovid pictures an extreme situation in which testimony is nearly stifled, succeeding only thanks to the fact that speech, its usual medium, can be replaced by writing. According to the classical view, the substitution of script for speech means that Philomela’s utterance must, for its realisation, loan another’s voice. One can imagine how Procne, when she receives the white vestment, sounds the words to herself so that her silenced sister’s cry is heard through her. It is tempting to see in the Philomela myth a harbinger of literary mediations of testimony, even though it is improbable that the poet had any such thought. Be this as it may, his poem helps us make an observation: it tells us that that testimony is more than merely a true story; that it has a direct connection with the event and with the victim; and that it is a sequel of an evil deed, like revenge. In Ovid’s story, revenge and testimony are sisters.

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One does not become a witness only by observing an event with one’s own eyes. A witness is a person who speaks out and says, “I was there, I saw it, I can tell people!” As an act of speech, testimony is inseparable from this kind of self-reference and from the accompanying claim to immediate credence. Pronounced by a different person in a different situation, the same series of words could be a fable. Language lacks a special marker for truth. Testimony is an utterance that presupposes a certain kind of speaker, perhaps even a special way of speaking. We like to think that we can specify its typical traits: directness, seriousness, absence of the devices of rhetorical pleading, spontaneous emotion showed through anger, tears, pauses—like the purple colour of Philomela’s written characters. In La Mémoire, l´histoire, l´oubli (Memory, history, oblivion), Paul Ricoeur has described testimony as an original social institution, the basis for the truth function without which language and society would not work. Truth is initially nothing but that which a credible witness certifies. “Step by step, this link of trust is extended to all exchanges, contracts, and pacts and renders concurrence with the other’s words the principle for social cohesion, to the point at which it becomes habitual in respectable circles and, indeed, a general rule: first grant credence to the other’s words; then put them into question if there are strong reasons to do so.”3 This primary trust in what the other says is the basis for human association and for the emergence of a kind of common sense that corrects occasional mistakes and lies. It is this vital tissue that is damaged when social institutions make themselves guilty of corruption, mendacity, and concealment. The prohibition against false witness is one of the ten fundamental commandments the God of the Old Testament enjoins upon mankind. The act of speech which we are discussing appears early in the history of poetry. Classical tragedy depends on the witness account since the most important actions, acts of violence, may not be

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shown on the stage. Instead, someone rushes in and reports to the Chorus what he has seen with his own eyes, and the Chorus attests to the truth of the testimony by expressing grief and horror. To be complete, the testimony requires an answer from the human community. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, this service is rendered by the author himself or, more precisely, by his alter ego, the wanderer in the netherworld, who learns about the dead by listening to the stories they have to tell. One after another, they press forth and testify to their fates. “Siena mi fe’, disfece mi Maremma” (Siena made me, Maremma unmade me), to quote from the shortest testimony in world literature, yet long enough to save a murdered woman from being swallowed up by oblivion.4 The Dante of the poem receives the words of the dead; through him, they appeal to the justice of posterity. His work is a dress rehearsal for the Day of Judgment. Testimony in literature, then, is more than a simple act of disclosure. To start with, it differs in two decisive impulses: in giving voice to the silenced, and in preserving the victims’ names. In his Rome, Naples et Florence, Stendhal describes his stay in Southern Italy in 1817.5 He writes in his usual conversational manner, allegro con spirito. Then something happens to the text. It changes tone as if converting to a different linguistic mode. The voice of the dandy fades and gives way to that of an informer, who, with clipped objectivity, recounts the atrocities that accompanied the suppression of the republican revolt in Naples in 1799. This account takes ten pages of four hundred, but it has repercussions for the entire book. In these pages, the author stops wanting to impress the reader and forgets himself in favour of something that must not be forgotten. This is as remarkable as when Goethe breaks off his circling and dissociated style in Die Belagerung von Mainz and seems to be writing with no other purpose than to get down on paper what it was like: outrages were committed; he showed composure when he prevented a mob from lynching a fleeing revolutionary. The story was

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published many years after the event. Goethe hesitated before speaking out in this way, conscious of the account’s explosive power. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented The Gulag Archipelago, the result of his investigations of the Russian camp system, he explained that he considered this work literary.6 It bore the subtitle opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya (An Experiment in Literary Investigation.) The Russian formulation is deliberately contradictory: issledovaniye is the normal word for a scientific treatise, but the qualifier Literary indicates that the book is the work of a writer and not of a scientist. It is not based on the method of historical science but on the voices of witnesses and on the author’s ability as a former internee to give the right meaning to the victims’ words. Underlying the methodological difference there is another, more fundamental one. Historical research describes concluded events. For the witnesses and their interpreters, the event never stops happening. Solzhenitsyn’s prose annihilates the time between the perpetration of a crime and our reading of its account. Truly successful misdeeds leave no witnesses. It was only just possible to substantiate adequately the Nazi policy of annihilation. The black book of communism has large gaps, as Solzhenitsyn shows in The Gulag Archipelago. Of the worst wave of deportation, in 1929 and 1930, there is scarcely any memory, any testimony. Millions of peasants were purged and sent to the taiga, Stalin’s most serious crime. “This wave poured forth, sank into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it.”7 It is the same with Stalin’s massive resettlement programmes of 1944–46. They involved mainly millions of simple people who wrote no memoirs. The purge of 1937, on the other hand, is well known because of the large number of city-dwellers and intellectuals it affected. Elie Wiesel asserted as long as twentyfive years ago that witness literature is the literary innovation of our time: “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle,

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and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.”8 He exaggerates the novelty of the thing, but I believe he puts his finger on the most profound change in literature since the breakthrough of modernism. Perhaps it is not the scale of twentieth-century misdeeds that has placed testimony in the centre; but rather our horror over the systematic erasure of memory in totalitarian societies. There is a clear objection to coupling testimony with literature. What we normally require of true evidence is the opposite at every point of what we usually allow in a literary work, since literature enjoys the privilege of talking about reality as it is not, without being accused of lying. It is also evident that testimony can be mimicked as can every other way of using language. The novel in particular, as Bachtin demonstrates, is primarily a portrayal of discourses and not of immediate reality. By simulating the position of the eyewitness, the artful writer can lend unwarranted authenticity to his text. This is an old problem. The best eyewitness account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign is given in Chateaubriand’s memoirs, but Chateaubriand sat out the war in the peace and quiet of his home in France. Without saying so explicitly, he invites the reader to believe that he followed on the heels of the French host to Moscow and back. And to choose a more complex example, it is hard to read Imre Kertész’s novel Fateless without believing one is reading a truthful account of the writer’s experience of German concentration camps.9 But Kertész, who really was interned in Auschwitz, denies that this book is autobiographical: “The most autobiographical thing in my biography is that in Fateless there is nothing autobiographical.”10 Perhaps he simply implies that he acts like an writer, that is to say, he reconstructs an experience without necessarily explaining its link to his specific case. The matter is particularly difficult here, since a distinguishing quality of the experience he represents is a certain kind of unreality. The novel is the biography of someone who has no individual fate and is,

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for this reason, no autobiography. The one who testifies is, finally, “someone else” even if this other should carry the same name as the victim. Nevertheless, the effect of such a book depends on the reader’s conviction that the author is an authentic witness. What is the basis for this conviction? Do you just “know” (it says so on the dust jacket; the author says so himself)? Or is it the effect of a certain quality of the text? One would prefer the second answer, but in that case, one has to suppose a tone or a force that cannot be imitated, an idea which literary art is bent on contradicting. The discovery that an allegedly authentic testimony is a fiction or a plagiarism immediately robs it of its power. However, misrepresented facts in a testimony to some extent remain unimportant. A witness is allowed to err, but the writer may not pretend to be a witness. Plato’s most forceful criticism of literature is the one given at the end of the Protagoras dialogue and which turns up in a different form in his best-known text, the Apology: namely, his reproach of its ingratiating nature and susceptibility to manipulation. Socrates is, admittedly, attacking skilful orators, not poets; but the argument is of general validity. He readily concedes that his enemies are masters of verbal expression, but interprets their skill as an indication of mendacity. My accusers, then, as I maintain, have said little or nothing that is true, but from me you shall hear the whole truth—not, I can assure you, gentlemen, in flowery language like theirs, decked out with fine words and phrases. No, what you will hear will be a straightforward speech in the first words that occur to me, confidant as I am in the justice of my cause, and I do not want any of you to expect anything different.11

Socrates, Plato’s ingenious literary creation, initiates here a tradition of anti-literature: the struggle for literature’s point zero, the uncoloured word, the speech of the truthful witness.

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We should not disregard this conflict between testimony and literature. The authority principle in rhetoric lacks significance for the language of testimony—or should do so at any rate. Of course, we also test a witness’s credibility, but this test has nothing to do with her or his appearance or way with words. It concerns only the tone in which the event continues to vibrate in what is said and to declare itself unfinished. The persona of a witness includes a certain loneliness or at least a withdrawal from ideological struggles. One cannot be a debater and a witness to truth at the same time. “The witness produces no theory, teaches no doctrine, does not attempt to convince one of his own world view”, writes Renaud Dulong in Le témoin oculaire (Ocular witness).12 In the company of testimony, the didactic and manipulative features of literature stand out with embarrassing clarity. But allow me also to point out two dilemmas where literature and testimony converge. Philosophers and critics reflecting in recent years over the predicament of testimony—primarily in discussions of the Holocaust—have time and again come upon a peculiar thing. To be understood and to appear probable, the eyewitness account must rely for support on the community’s shared perception of reality, common sense. At the same time, the witness sometimes harbours an experience that clashes with all normal sense. Similarly, one can view the form of the work of art as a deviation from general perception, and an effort to validate an individual vision in the face of the social arrangement we call “reality.” Testimony not only preserves the event in the present tense but also retains its alien and incomprehensible traits. It has been asserted that the difficulty of finding any strategy for survival in the concentration camp, and the subsequent difficulty of the victims to produce a coherent account of what they were subjected to, had to do with the irrational quality of their persecution. Camp existence defied any conception of purposeful human

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behaviour and was therefore opaque. The prisoners were often incapable of grasping the absurdities of the rules, the behaviour of the SS-men, the reactions of the Kapos and the other prisoners. Nothing matched, as it did in the outside world, with what a person learns. To testify, one must understand the logic in the course of events one is describing. But normal capacity for thought was defied by the unprecedented madness of the Holocaust just as much as by the seeming meaninglessness of the Soviet mass arrest. The difficulty in communicating is therefore not only due to the audience’s lack of experience of the kind of privation represented, but also to the witness’s inability to bring coherence to what he has experienced. In some sense, the speaker and the listener are equally foreign to the event. The difference is that the former has been subjected to its violence and therefore in spite of everything bears a physical knowledge of it. How does a woman get a male audience to understand what her body has been subjected to in a culture that doesn’t take seriously the human rights of women? It seems so trivial, they do not see what she means. The body murmurs strangely, like Philomela’s severed tongue. For a tie to be re-established between the victim and humanity, perhaps they have to meet in this very lack of understanding of what happened.13 Elucidatory historiography represents an obstacle to such a meeting and therefore must be bracketed. Testimony’s worst enemy is not silence but the ready-made explanation. Renaud Dulong says that the mutual animosity between historiography and testimony, which can easily be demonstrated in discussions of scholarly method and which is paralleled by the courts’ sceptical attitude to testimony and preference for “technical evidence,” concerns not only the question of proof but also the witness’s distaste for general explanations, which represents an uncomfortable obstacle to historical and legal procedures:

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The message [of testimony] is, rather, directed at upholding the past as enigma, as scandal, and as interpellation. Hence, it appears that no historical genre, by the very function of its discourse, is able to recapture this. History unravels the secrets of the past, it neutralises the conflicts, and absolves the faults; it synthesises the swarm of events, places them in order: the linearity of chronological series and the arrangement of facts assumes control, whatever precautions one takes in the name of the relationship between cause and effect. The one-dimensional character of chronological presentation is synonymous with progression and evokes the notion of progress…14

Historical explanations are a kind of anodyne. Feelings aroused by human suffering are put to rest when what happened is seen as a logical sequence of cause and effect and therefore to some extent inevitable. The victim’s reality is broken off from our own and posted to another region of being: the region of historical events. That happened, we tell ourselves, but in a different reality to our own. Only testimony with its perpetual present tense and its direct touch can lift out of us this delusion and destroy the semblance of necessity, logical end, and meaning. It does this not by clarifying: the witness talks of something that is incomprehensible in the hope that someone else will make it possible to understand and with the certainty that any explanation must be rejected as inadequate. In the revolt against explanations, testimony and literature are unified. The other dilemma that brings the two together may be expressed in the following paradox: the true witness is the one who cannot testify. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the French writer Roger Laporte wrote a series of slim volumes, eventually collected in a volume entitled Une Vie, in which he step by step explores an unknown reality, foreign to literature, that presses upon him in his writing.15 He tries to listen to what is inside the language and to find the gap between speech and silence, through which the unknown has to push its way. He builds intricate

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theories for his own text, in the end only to find them arbitrary. Towards the end of the work, he realises he must take upon himself the weakness and muteness of this unknown “thing”; otherwise, the wordless suffers in his place and the trial to which he subjects himself is illusory. But how can a writer take this muteness upon himself and yet continue to write? What he is groping towards is an ultimate trial which, were it possible, would rob him of speech and which, as long as it is impossible, renders his words superfluous. Such is, to Laporte, the nature of writing. The same paradox appears in Primo Levi, when he declares that it is not the survivors of the concentration camps who are the true testifiers.16 He writes, We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the “Muslims,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.17

“Muslims” was the nickname for the prisoners who had given up: an anonymous and continuously topped-up mass, people in whom the divine spark had gone out, who had grown too empty to actually suffer. The silent Muslim with bent back and a face that reflected not a single trace of thought, is for Levi an image of our age. He considers that only the silenced are “complete witnesses”: only they know what it means to be wholly deprived of one’s human status, which simultaneously means the loss of the ability to say what it is like. The survivors’ truth is not the ultimate truth simply because certain states, characterised by the most profound torment, are impossible to recall once one has left them. In Zapiski blokadnogo tjeloveka (Notes from the blockade), Lidija Ginzburg speaks of the difficulty of remembering enormous hunger once it no longer

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ravages. Everything changed when one was starving: time, space, the nature of objects, the relationship between body and soul. A new being arose: “blockade man.” Once conditions improved and one’s old personality returned, the blockade guard and his feelings disappeared without trace. Ginzburg refers to the law of oblivion as the cornerstone of life. There are also accounts of how torture destroys any confidence in humanity so that it can never be restored, which renders testimony impossible. Total loss of purpose leads to silence. Nazism erased from its victims the feeling that there was a “thou,” writes the psychoanalyst Dori Laub, herself a childhood survivor. You could not testify even to yourself.18 Testimony presupposes that the victim regains the listener inside himself, who receives his own silent voice and its words for what has happened. Shoshana Felman, Laub’s co-author, maintains that literature gives a model for the creation of this kind of internal address when the external, social address becomes impossible. The person who is writing seeks a confident beyond all known recipients, who exists only in the space of the text and who anticipates the reception that is ultimately necessary for the testimony. “As an event directed toward the re-creation of a ‘thou,’ poetry becomes, precisely, the event of creating an address for the specificity of a historical experience which annihilated any possibility of address,” writes Felman.19 Philomela’s wish for death means that her soul has already been murdered. Shame is the suppression and dissolution of the subject, and the severed tongue represents with terrible literalism the impossibility of address. However, the transition to writing does not seem as hopeful in the myth as in the therapeutic world vision. The purple characters presage the bloody revenge. Philomela is not reconciled by testifying. She is overcome with an archaic rage that lies beyond all reason even for Ovid. It is the unbridled revenge of which we, uncomprehending, see traces in the reports from contemporary theatres of war. When Philomela’s

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writing cancels out her speechlessness, there remains a worse and more complete muteness, that of the butchered Itys. With cunning literary artistry, using the very rhetoric Socrates despised, Ovid makes the killing of the child a culmination equally repugnant to the rape. Who will testify for Itys? Perhaps the poet, the liar, despite everything. It is probable that only the phantasmagorical account of the revenge makes it possible for the average male reader of the poem to grasp the depth of the violation, in the same way that Tereus realises what he has done only when he sees Itys’s severed head. Ovid’s tale ends with all three—husband, wife, and sister— finally losing their humanity and being changed into birds (a hoopoe, a swallow and a nightingale). For the people of antiquity who knew the myth, this does not mean that they were silenced and forgotten. When you heard their animal cry or song, you remembered their story. This is perhaps the ultimate limit of what a testimony can be. Notes 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses 6:558–60. 2. Ibid., 659–60. 3. “De proche en proche, ce lien fiduciaire s’étend à tous les échanges, contrats et pactes, et constitue l’assentiment à la parole d’autrui au principe du lien social, au point qu’il devient un habitus des communautés considérées, voire une règle de prudence: d’abord faire confiance dans la parole d’autrui, ensuite douter si de fortes raisons y inclinent.” Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l´histoire, l´oubli (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 207. My translation. 4. Dante, The Devine Comedy 5:134. 5. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). 6. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–56: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 2 vols., trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 7. Ibid., 1:24.

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8. Elie Wiesel, “The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration,” in Dimensions of the Holocaust, ed. Elliot Leif kovitz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 9. 9. Imre Kertész, Fateless, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992). 10. “Das Autobiographische in meiner Biographie ist, daß es in ‘Schicksalslosigkeit’ nichts Autobiographisches gibt.” Imre Kertész, Galeerentagebuch (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1993), 185. My translation. 11. Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Patheon Books, 1961), 4. 12. Renaud Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire: Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personelle (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998), 225. My translation. 13. This is the chief theme of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s path-breaking work, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 14. Dulong, 220. My translation. 15. Roger Laporte, Une Vie (Paris: P.O.L., 1986). 16. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 17. Ibid., 83–84. 18. Laub, Testimony, 82. On Laub’s background, see the note on page 75. 19. Felman, Testimony, 38.

Translated from the Swedish by Tim Crosfield

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WHEN WE DON’T SPEAK, WE BECOME UNBEARABLE, AND WHEN WE DO, WE MAKE FOOLS OF OURSELVES. CAN LITERATURE BEAR WITNESS?

HERTA MÜLLER

Books about bad times are often read as testimonies. My own books are also about bad times—I had little other choice. They deal with the stunted life under the dictatorship, the everyday existence of a German minority that, in giving way to outside intimidation, responded with an internal despotism all its own, and the eventual disappearance of these people as they left for Germany. Many consider my books testimonies. As I write them, however, I don’t think of myself as bearing witness. This is because of how I learned to write: not from speaking, but from silence and concealment. That’s how it began. Later I had to relearn how to keep silent, since few wanted to hear the whole, exact truth. In the language of the village—so it seemed to me as a child—the words people used were directly attached to the things they described. The things were named exactly as they were, and they were exactly as they were named. There was a complete and

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permanent accord. For most people, there were no gaps between the words and the objects, no holes to peep through and find yourself staring into nothingness, as if you were slipping out of your skin into the void. The handholds required to work through the day’s routines were instinctive—well rehearsed and wordless. The head had no need of them, nor did it offer viable alternatives of its own. The head merely served to hold the eyes and ears in place for work. And work was accompanied by words only when several people performed a common task or when one person was dependent on the handhold of another. But even then words weren’t always needed. Heavy labor—such as carrying sacks, turning soil, or mowing with a scythe—was a study in silence. The body was too taxed to wear itself out further with talk. Twenty or thirty people were capable of staying silent for hours. Watching them, I sometimes felt: so this is what happens when humans forget how to speak. By the time they eventually finish their life’s toil, they will have forgotten all their words. What people do does not need to be repeated in words. Language encumbers the body and gets in the way of the handholds—I knew that much. But the discrepancy between outside and inside, between what is in the hands and what is in the head, the sudden realization, I’m thinking things I shouldn’t be—this was something else entirely. Something that came only when fear came too. I wasn’t more apprehensive than other people; my reasons for being afraid were probably just as groundless as theirs. My fear was a construct, a figment of my imagination. But, as Emil M. Cioran writes, moments of groundless fear are the closest thing to pure existence. The sudden search for meaning, the nervous fever, the shiver in the soul at the question, what is my life really worth? This question set itself above all ordinary life, flashing its presence during otherwise “normal” days. As a child I never went hungry or barefoot; at night I slept in freshly made, crisply ironed sheets. As she switched off the light, my grandmother would sing to me, “Before I lay

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me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” But then the tiled stove beside the bed would transform into the water tower that loomed at the edge of the village, the one overgrown with Virginia creeper. The prayer that was supposed to calm and lull me right to sleep had the opposite effect; it set my mind churning. That’s why I’ve never understood how faith is able to quiet fear, how it affords some people a sense of equilibrium, or what makes it so suited for stilling thoughts inside your skull. No matter how mechanically we recited the prayer, it evolved into a paradigm urging me to interpret my own condition. How could the Lord keep my soul when it was here in my room with me, separated from heaven by a thick ceiling? Why was my grandmother singing these words to me if they were asking for something impossible? In our dialect, we called the creeper “inky grapevine” because its black berries stained your hands with spots that ate away at your skin for days. The water tower loomed over my bed, its inky grapes black as deep sleep was supposed to be. I knew that falling asleep meant drowning in the ink. I also knew that whoever couldn’t sleep must have a bad conscience, something unpleasant stored inside the head. So that was obviously what I had, but I didn’t know why. Ink was in the village night outside, flooding away the ground and the sky. The crickets and frogs screeched during the night. They were pointing the way underground. They locked the village up inside the echo of a box. Like all children, I was taken to visit the dead. They were laid out in their homes, always in the most beautiful room. We visited them one last time before they went to the cemetery. The coffins were open; their feet lay facing the door, their soles turned up. You went through the door and made one trip around the coffin, starting at the feet. The frogs and crickets were the servants of the dead. At night, they talked to the living: diaphanous sounds to blur the mind. I held my breath as long as I could, listening to what they were saying. But then I would start gasping for air

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in a panic. If you once understand what they are saying, I thought, you will be lifted off your feet and carried away. Down by the river, where I had to tend the cows on days that glared with heat, I had the same feeling of being packed in a box, like fodder, and being left for the countryside to devour. I didn’t own a watch. But every day, four trains passed through the valley, and I wasn’t allowed to go home until after the fourth. By then it was eight o’clock in the evening. That’s when the sky also started eating grass and came to fetch the valley to itself. I hurried to get away before it was too late. On those long days in that shamelessly green valley, I asked myself countless times what my life was really worth. I stared at my hands and feet and was amazed they belonged to me; I wanted to find out what material they were made of, and when God wanted me to give the material back. I ate leaves and flowers so that they would be related to my tongue and so that we would be more alike—because they knew about life and I didn’t. I spoke to them by name: “Milk Thistle” was supposed to mean the plant with milk in its stalk. But the plant didn’t listen. So I tried inventing names—“Thornrib,” “Needleneck”—anything to avoid the words “milk” and “thistle.” Eventually, these made-up names uncovered a gap between the real plant and me, and the gap opened up into an abyss: the disgrace of talking to myself and not to the plant. The four trains ran through the valley; the windows were open and I could see the passengers standing in their short sleeves. I wanted to see their faces and got as close as I could to the tracks. Clean cities were riding inside the train; some of the ladies had red nails and glittery jewels. My own skin was dirty; my fingernails green and brown. The sky over the valley was a big blue muck, the pasture was a big green muck, and I was a little muck in between that didn’t count at all. Our dialect didn’t have a word for “lonely”; it just knew the word “alone” and that was alleenig, which sounds like wenig, meaning “little.” And that’s exactly the way it was.

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That’s exactly they way it was in the middle of the cornfields too, surrounded by the cobs with their yellow teeth. My mouth was thirsty and the sun overhead was like a round tray used in elegant homes to serve guests a glass of water. In that landscape I always thought about death; my visits to the dead had taught me about the greenish cartilage around the ear, where the impatient plants sink their teeth to begin their work of decomposing right in the middle of the most beautiful room in the house, instead of waiting for the grave. On the village streets, in the valley, and in the cornfield, I knew, these are the fringes of the world, you should be living on the carpet, and that’s made of asphalt, in the city. Although farmers were the only people I knew, I wanted to leave the fringes behind and move to the carpet, where the asphalt under the soles is thick enough to keep death from sneaking out of the earth and creeping up around your ankles. I wanted to ride in the train like a city lady with red polished nails, to walk across the asphalt with shoes as dainty as lizard heads, to hear the dry clip clop of the footsteps I’d noticed on two visits to the doctor in the city. Every year of my childhood showed me that the field was nourishing me only because it intended to devour me later on. Perhaps I should have been more accepting of “normalcy” instead of dismissing it for not being what it never could be. By not being so, I provoked transience into appearing. I yearned for a “normalcy” I never learned how to attain. The idea of talking about all this didn’t occur to me: my breakaway thoughts had to stay hidden. But my dialect had no words for what I was doing except for two adjectives: “lazy” for the physical aspect and “profound” for the psychological. I didn’t have any words for it either. Nor do I today. It isn’t true that there are words for everything. Or that we always think in words. To this day, there are many thoughts I think without words: I never found any, not in the village German, not in the city German, not in Romanian, not in East or West German. And

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not in any book. Speech does not cover our innermost realms; there you are drawn into a place where words cannot reside. Often there is nothing more to be said about what is most important; all talk merely bypasses what is truly significant. The belief that speech can overcome confusion is something I’ve never heard anywhere but in the West. Words do not set life in order, neither in the cornfield nor on the asphalt. The notion that everything has to make sense is also something I’ve only encountered in the West. What can speech accomplish? When most of life no longer makes any sense, words crash as well. I saw that happen to the words I had. And I was convinced that the ones I didn’t have would crash too if I had had them. Today, when I speak and write, I still don’t know how many and which words are needed to completely provide for my breakaway thoughts — that immediately begin to stray from whatever words are found. And how quickly the words would have to appear and be ready to jump in and switch with others, just to catch up with the breakaway thoughts. And what would it mean to catch up? The mind speaks to itself in a completely different way than words respond to it. Nevertheless, I always wanted to “be able to say it.” If I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have gone so far as to try out different names for Milk Thistle in order to settle on its proper one. Objects have always been important to me; I still consider them inseparable from what and how a person is. If they outlive their owners, then the entire absent person migrates into the objects left behind. When my father died, the hospital gave me his dentures and his glasses. At home, he kept his smallest screwdrivers in the kitchen drawer among the silverware. As long as he was alive, my mother would tell him every few days that the drawer wasn’t where they belonged, he should put his tools somewhere else. After he died, they stayed there for years; they had won the right. I thought, if my father could come back to

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the table now, he would be allowed to eat with screwdrivers instead of knives and forks. Only one month had passed after his death and the apricot trees in the courtyard had no qualms about blooming. We invest our feelings—often in strange ways— in objects that for no reason help crystallize the memories inside our head into something tangible. But we do this in a roundabout way. Dentures and glasses did not signal my father’s absence; screwdrivers and apricot trees did. Irrationally, I stared at the trees and found that, if I stared long enough, the little twigs, still bare, looked exactly like the screwdrivers. I was grown up and still everything was as shifty and tangled as before. Berlin is not the right zone for apricots; it’s too cold. I didn’t miss the apricot trees in Berlin. But then, without looking, I found one, next to an S-Bahn bridge. The tree has no owner, except perhaps the city. It’s a runaway patch of countryside. The tree has been living in Germany longer than I have. And it looks as if it had grown tired of village life too and sneaked away unnoticed. Perhaps runaway trees experience the same things as runaway people: they leave a dangerous place at just the right moment, and find a country that’s just about right, but then wind up in the wrong place in that country, with no resolve to leave. I pass the apricot tree on my way to the store. Naturally, the street has two sides. Every day, I make a decision to visit the tree or to avoid it, depending on which side I take. I say to myself, let’s see how the tree is getting along. Or else, the tree better leave me alone today. It’s not my father urging me to visit the tree, not the village, not the country — no kind of homesickness. The tree provides neither burden nor relief: it’s simply there, left over from another time, an aftertaste. Many objects, which for mysterious reasons I once needed to shy away from, keep coming back. They keep recurring and eventually find me. Hats, among other things. When you take them off, they show your naked forehead. So “raising one’s hat” is the equivalent of “offering one’s forehead,” which in German

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is the same as “facing up to something.” When people take off their hats, you can see the white silk lining inside. Once two men from the secret police took off their fur caps at the same time, just as they were coming in the factory with a new plan to harass me. When their hats came off, their rumpled hair stood up in the center of their heads. In each case, the brain had pushed the hair up through the head; I could see the gray matter lurking in the silk lining. I can talk about the apricot tree in the village and in the city, and the brains in the hats—but I can’t explain with words what they cause inside the head. Words are cut to fit speech; they may even be precisely tailored. But nonetheless, they are only there for speech or for writing. No matter how well they fit, they cannot completely grasp the screwdrivertwigs of the apricot trees or the brainhats. They are not the seamless echoes of what goes on behind the forehead. Even in the country, there were more than enough traps in the objects and words. But at the age of fifteen, I left the fringes of the world and moved onto the asphalt of the carpet. The asphalt spoke Romanian, and it wasn’t just the city, but the state itself. Although I owned my first clip clop lizard shoes, I wasn’t entirely in possession of myself. When I walked through the city, I felt that the only thing I could still call my own were the tips of my toes inside the high heels. I spoke as little as possible and concentrated on listening. Half a year later, this new language was in my mouth, as if the sidewalks, official counters, streetcars, and shops had learned Romanian for me. When everything around you speaks a language you don’t understand, you listen to it with the entire neighborhood. And if you stay long enough, the neighborhood learns the language for you. That’s how it was with me. One day, Romanian suddenly seemed as if it belonged to me too. In contrast to German, however, my Romanian words seemed wide-eyed and full of wonder if I unintentionally

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compared them to my German ones. Their contortions were sensual, impudent, and surprisingly beautiful. In our village dialect we say the wind geht or “goes.” In High German, which was spoken at school, they said the wind weht or “blows.” But for me as a seven-year-old, that sounded like the wind had weh, which meant it was hurting. Meanwhile, in Romanian they say vintul bate—“the wind is beating.” When you said that, you could hear the movement: here the wind wasn’t feeling hurt; it was hurting others. The differences applied to the opposite case as well. In German, when the wind subsides, we say it has “lain down” or gelegt — something flat and horizontal. But in Romanian it’s vintul a stat, “the wind has come to a standstill”—something upright and vertical. This example is only one of the constant shifts that occur when a single phenomenon moves from one language to another. In every Romanian sentence, the exact same world was different: the Romanian word for palate is cerul gurii or “mouth heaven,” and that language lends itself to creating long, unexpected curses—an area where German is sadly lacking. I’ve often thought Romanian tirades are so poetical because they’re pronounced from a mouth heaven. A successful Romanian oath is half a revolution in the palate, which is why there’s never revolution on the streets. The foreign language sees the world through the eyes of the mother tongue. We gain our mother tongue without much effort. It is a dowry that emerges unnoticed and is judged by a language that is acquired later and in a different way. From then on, the mother tongue is no longer the sole repository for objects, the only measure of things. Clearly, its place in our lives remains unshaken; we generally trust its measure of things even if this measure is put into relative perspective by the new language. We realize that this instinctual measure is our most certain, our most necessary possession, even though its presence is accidental. It’s

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just there, in your mouth, free of charge, at your disposal, without having been consciously learned. Our mother tongue is immediately and unconditionally like our own skin. And it is just as easily hurt if it is disrespected, disregarded, or even banned. At first, my Romanian was like my pocket money—never sufficient. But today I understand that my halting acquisition of Romanian, which forced me to think below my level, also gave me the time to marvel at the viewpoint of this language. I realize I have to speak of my good fortune because that’s exactly what it was. More and more often, I found words in Romanian that were more sensuous and to my mind more apt than what was available in my native German. I have yet to write a single Romanian sentence in my books. But Romanian is always co-writing; the language grew into my view of the world. Mother tongues aren’t ever hurt when their accidental nature is brought into focus by the perspective of other languages. On the contrary, exposing your own speech to the gaze of another language only ratifies your relationship and strengthens it in a love that isn’t forced. I never loved my mother tongue because it’s better, but merely because it was the most familiar. Unfortunately, one’s instinctive trust in one’s mother tongue can be broken. This happened with Paul Celan. Still, Celan couldn’t shed his native German; he had no choice but to live with it. He had to testify, in German, with German, that his mother tongue was the language of those who murdered his mother. With Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt it was different. After the annihilation of the Jews, he shunned German and for decades wrote only in French. His last books, however, which he wrote in German, display such virtuosity that other books written at the same time in Germany pale in comparison. In discussing their books, many Western European authors, particularly young ones, are fond of saying, “My homeland is my native tongue.” They cherish the belief that, if it were necessary,

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their mother tongue could replace everything else. But they never had to test this proposition. Their homeland is indisputably there, ready and waiting for them. I find such statements irritating when they come from authors who can take the idea of “being at home” for granted. Anyone who makes the claim that “my homeland is my native tongue” is duty-bound to consider those who coined this phrase in the first place—the emigrants who fled Hitler’s murderers. And if they are truly taken into account, the phrase shrivels on the lips of the new users into a mere attestation of self-assertion that says little more than “I’m here too.” “My homeland is my native tongue” was, for the exiles from Hitler, a mantra of self-reliance, doggedly repeated when they were far from home and without prospects for the future. People who can enter and exit their homelands at will should not exploit the phrase. In their mouths, it suggests that the others might have been able to put aside their loneliness, their permanently shattered concept of self, the collapse of their very existence—since their mother tongue, as a portable homeland inside the skull, could make up for everything. The point is not that they were able to take their language with them; it’s that they had to do so. The only time you don’t have it with you is when you’re dead, and then what does homeland matter? I follow a line by Jorge Semprún, a man who survived a concentration camp and then lived in exile during the Franco dictatorship. It’s from his book Federico Sánchez verabschiedet sich (Federico Sánchez takes his leave): “my homeland isn’t the language itself, as it is for most writers, but what is spoken.”1 Language alone has never been a homeland for me either. Semprún knows that, in order to belong, you need to have at least a minimum of agreement with the contents of what is being said. How many Iranians are arrested for a single sentence in Farsi? How many Cubans, Chinese, Iraqis, North Koreans are unable to be at home in their mother tongue even for a minute?

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Was Russian a homeland for someone like Sakharov when he was under house arrest? When life stops making sense, words crash. And all dictatorships misuse language, whether on the Right or on the Left, atheist or religious. They blindfold the words and attempt to blot out the language’s very reason. Speech that is prescribed becomes as hostile as any other indignity. Homeland is out of the question. After I left the fringes of the village and arrived in the asphalt carpet of the city, fear of the state came creeping around my ankles. The first repressions I saw were of strangers; then some of my friends were summoned to regular interrogations, their apartments searched, their manuscripts confiscated. They were kicked out of the university and arrested. The repressions came closer and closer, and, within a couple years, they reached me as well. The secret police came to the factory and wanted to turn me into an informer. And I said no. After that, I experienced for myself everything my friends had told me about interrogations, house searches, and death threats. That’s why I know how fear can enlarge one’s view and what friendship looks like when you’re not sure you’ll be alive from one day to the next. During this time my childhood question—what is my life really worth?—became outmoded. When a particular state no longer considers you of any value, you become willful and unruly. Out of spite, you begin enjoying life. Death threats force a love of life, a determination to live in the here and now. This makes more sense than it might seem; it is sense confirmed by experience. When I emigrated to Germany, I had to leave many friends in the land I left behind. Later, one of my friends was found hanged in his apartment. The state had come and, once again, they had killed. They killed Roland Kirsch. He was twenty-eight years old, a construction engineer who wrote poems. On the last card he sent me, he wrote, “Sometimes I have to bite my finger to make sure I’m still here.”

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Today the neighbors say they heard several voices yelling the night of his death. But back then no one went to help him. An autopsy was prohibited. The death certificate lists the cause of death as suicide. My shock at this death brought to mind an inverse case in which a neighbor from my village had hanged himself in what was clearly a suicide. On that occasion, the autopsy was imposed. In the last phase of cancer, my neighbor had been given only penicillin, since the doctor had no morphine. The man could no longer bear the pain, and so he chose to die. In the courtyard behind his building, there was a mulberry tree with a ladder underneath. Every year my neighbor trained his chickens to sleep in the tree. Each evening, they would climb up the ladder into the treetop, arrange themselves on the branches, and sleep. Because he had spent weeks training them, the chickens were very accustomed to his presence. They didn’t stir when he came to their tree, dressed in his best suit, and hanged himself. Early the next morning, the chickens were sitting on the branches as usual, and he was hanging from one beneath them. For years afterward, the breakaway thoughts began in my head whenever I saw the tree. All I could think of was the one sentence: they used the same ladder, the chickens and my neighbor. The penicillin doctor had the gall to question the suicide and insisted on an autopsy. The man had been dressed for death; the doctor divested him of his dignity, and on a hot summer day, playing the great expert, conducted the autopsy atop a butcher’s block beneath the mulberry tree. The dead man had already quitted his flesh and moved into the flesh of mulberry fruit, a different material, inert and still. With a dark blue stripe around his neck, he had turned himself into the biggest berry ever found on a tree. For me, he entered the earth as the Mulberry King. When, after excruciating interrogations by the secret police, I was once again outside, walking along the street, my head

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churning, my eyes as rigid as a plaster cast, my legs feeling as though I’d borrowed them from someone else—when I was walking home in this state, the plants in the gardens would show me what I was going through, which could not be said with words. To do that, all they needed were the colors and shapes they already had, and the places they were already occupying. The plants enlarged what had happened into a monstrosity, but at the same time they began to shrink things as well, which was necessary if I was to return to everyday existence. The dahlia showed me that I needed to understand the interrogation as the duty of the interrogator, that the nicks on the small examining table were made by all the others who had been questioned before me, that I was one among many, but nevertheless unique. It showed me that what caused me distress was, in his ugly line of work, mere routine for the interrogator. But also that, when the routine was perpetrated on me it became something special, and that I, as a unique person, had to see it that way for my own protection. How can you use words to explain that inside a dahlia there is a complete interrogation when you’ve just been questioned, or that it holds a prison cell when someone you like is in jail? How much can I say when my friend asks about the details of the interrogations, and I want to tell her everything? Everything I can express with words, that is. Each time she asked, I recounted all the facts, but never mentioned the dahlias. What went unsaid balanced out what was said. Where my silence would have been misconstrued, I had to speak; and where speaking would have made me seem near insanity, I had to stay silent. I didn’t want to give her the creeps or sound ridiculous. She was a child of the city. Where I dawdled, she charged ahead—which is why I liked her. Her view of things was intact; she never brooded over words. Instead, she loved clothes and jewelry. Her sensuality brought her into the realm of the political. Without resorting to theories, she despised the regime—as utterly bankrupt of sensuality.

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When I read the books of other authors, writing resembles speech. When I write my own, I only speak inside my own mouth, and the writing resembles silence. Whenever I put lived events into my sentences, a ghostly procession is set into motion. The events packed inside the words pass on to some new place known neither to them nor to me. To develop the metaphor: when I write, it is as if the bed moves inside the forest, the chair inside an apple. But it also happens in reverse: a purse grows bigger than a city; a fingernail larger than a house. When events first happen, we experience them in a place, with a ceiling or the open sky overhead and a street or a wooden floor underfoot. They take place in the rhythm of the clock, on this particular day or that particular night. In the actual event, there is a face-toface, whether with people or simply with objects. Things are measured; they have beginnings, durations, and ends. We feel the passing of time, quick or slow, on our own skin. And none of this ever happens because of words. What has been lived couldn’t care less about writing; it needs to be completely transformed before it can be reconciled with words. Only then can a sentence begin resemble life. Life never lets itself get caught in a one-to-one correspondence with words; it has to be taken apart and tailored to fit the words. The author takes what is lived and casts in it another form. It is no longer day or night, town or country; the new world is ruled by nouns and verbs, main and dependent clauses, meter and sound. Because I grew up in the country, so close to plants, I attributed intentions to the plants in the city. The arborvitae and fir trees there were as hostile as the valley and the corn in the country. They were the plants of those in power, while the dahlias and poplars were the plants of the weak. The arborvitae and fir trees served power as opaque evergreen hedges around state buildings and private villas. Like it or not, the cones of both species look like small urns. These plants had abandoned their natural condition and sided with the state.

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Once again, a friend came home to find his apartment ransacked. As before, the search had been staged to look like a break-in. We knew the game; every year it happened a few times to each of us. The books and papers had been rifled, pictures torn from their frames, the hem of the curtain slit open. Money and jewels were left untouched. One small object would always be missing, something of no importance: an alarm clock, a watch, a transistor radio. And the door would be tampered with to counterfeit a break-in. On account of the missing objects, nearly every search was recorded as a theft. And sooner or later a mockery of a trial would take place. The secret police would accuse some random prisoner of being a thief, who at the trial would confess to having broken in. On this occasion, my friend was missing his transistor radio. But this time there was no trial. My friend was told that the thief was a man by the name of Ion Seracu, who had died in jail. When he asked the court where he might find Seracu’s survivors, my friend was told that the deceased had had none. We decided to verify this information. We knew that dead people with no survivors wind up in the pauper’s cemetery, so that’s where we went. But we were also guided by the unusual name given the alleged thief: sarac means “poor” in Romanian. The pauper’s cemetery was known as the place where the state buried its victims. The grass there was knee-high and in full bloom, crisscrossed with paths trampled by emaciated dogs that were running up and down carrying various body parts: fingers, ears, toes. We found a grave with the name Ion Seracu. It was adorned with a bouquet of flowers—not grass flowers, but roses. They were still fresh, and it was hot out, so they couldn’t have been there long. The dead man must have had visitors shortly before us. But who? In the middle of the cemetery was a small cement shed without a door. Outside, someone had written the word “Vampire” in

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red oil paint. Inside the shed, a sink was mounted on a wall, and a cement table stood in the middle of the room. On the table lay a young woman—naked, dead. Her ankles and feet had been bound with wire, now cut open. Her hair, face, and body were thickly daubed with mud. The woman had clearly been pulled from the water. Except the wire meant she had not drowned, but had been drowned. On our way to the cemetery, I had bought a bag of cherries. Involuntarily, I reached inside the bag and laid two cherries on the dead woman’s head in the spots where her eyes should have been. We left. The grass was unbelievably beautiful. And it was hungry for me. Did the grass mean to be a gift of flowers for the dead who had no survivors, or a blooming screen to conceal the murders of the state? Or was it both? Or was it neither the one nor the other—just my foolish need, compelled by fear, to put into order what I could not cope with? A year after that visit to the cemetery, I left Romania and moved to Germany, where I intended to speak out, whenever asked, about the crimes of the regime. But friends advised me not to mention the cemetery: “No one will believe you. The most it will do is make people think you’re crazy. They’ll stop believing you.” So I kept the cemetery to myself; I chose to talk about less dire examples of crimes, and I saw that the warning was correct. Because even those examples were seen in the West as exaggerated. Even they made people suspect I might not be completely right in the head. I recall the time of the dictatorship as a time when I was learning more and more that could not be said. I am still plagued by the grass in the cemetery, so I made it into these sentences: “The words in our mouths do as much damage as our feet on the grass. But so do our silences.”2 And: “The grass stands tall inside our heads. When we speak it gets mowed. Even when we don’t. And then the second, and the third growth springs up at will. And even so: We are the lucky ones.”3

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Notes 1. Jorge Semprún, Federico Sánchez verabschiedet sich, trans. Wolfram Bayer (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1996), 13. 2. Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Metropolitan, 1996), 1. 3. Ibid., 2.

Translated from the German by Philip Boehm

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THE FREEDOM OF SELF-DEFINITION*

IMRE KERTÉSZ

The issue I should like to explore tonight is one that here in the centre of Europe may not even be an issue. My subject is the freedom of self-definition, which entails the simple notion that each and every member of society has the right to be what he or she is. No one should become the object of derision or the victim of discrimination on account of his birth or the way he chooses to regard himself — even if such discrimination is condoned, openly or in secret, by the powers that be. At the same time, of course, no one should enjoy unfair advantages due to his origins, beliefs, thoughts, or simply because of who he is. You, ladies and gentlemen, presumably take these freedoms for granted; you enjoy them in your everyday life as basic human rights and may not see the need to talk about them.

*A talk delivered in Hanover on November 15, 2001 as part of the Weltenbürger lecture series.

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I believe that after thoroughly examining this question, we may discover that it is necessary to discuss it, for even in the Western democracies, freedom of self-definition is not the completely and satisfactorily resolved issue it may first appear to be. It is true that the concept of human rights, the most fundamental of which is the right to liberty and dignity, was first formulated by Western civilization. But the totalitarian state also has its origins here. For twentieth-century dictatorships, it was natural to do away with individual rights, to confine people like sheep in giant folds, and to attach to them easily recognizable, garish labels—the all-too-obvious emblems of a privileged or stigmatised state. One usually thinks of the extreme ends of such defining enclosures. But there were dozens of others in between, representing various forms of discrimination. We cannot overestimate the damage done by the institutionalisation and practical application of this system of collective labelling—how it distorted people’s views, poisoned their relationships with one another, and perverted their own self-images. The system of symbols devised by the Nazis was in a way the simplest and most transparent. Their aim was to exterminate certain people while encouraging others to breed as though they were brood mares. In communist dictatorships, the situation was more complicated. Here the officers doing the selecting were always inside the enclosures, and they kept sending people from one pen to another. It sometimes happened that, in the middle of the selection process, the officer in charge was grabbed from the back and rudely thrust into one of the unpleasant pens, into which, until that moment, he had been busy shoving others. I don’t wish to get too involved in an analysis of dictatorial regimes, which turned discrimination and genocide into a general principle of their rule. Besides, I mentioned only the two most extreme forms of collective discrimination practiced by twentiethcentury dictatorships and gave only European examples. We know that there are many non-European forms. Even in Europe, there

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are milder, but nevertheless quite effective forms of collective discrimination that we might call civil discrimination. Governmental authority seems helpless against civil discrimination, and politicians labelled endearingly as populist exploit it with a kind of easygoing shamelessness. Then there is, especially in the Eastern European postcommunist states, the type of discrimination that is tacitly condoned, even promoted, though officially hotly denied by the authorities. I should add that, at this forum not long ago, an Indian writer, Urwashi Butalia, related her own experiences. We learned from her what happens to a population when politics drives a wedge between two peoples, in this case Indians and Pakistanis, that speak the same language and share the same culture—how their thinking, their very lives, may be turned upside down by religious fanaticism and irrational nationalism. Practically overnight, these people found themselves in two different camps and suddenly didn’t know what to make of the hard fact of their own existence, their own clear identity, their hitherto undisturbed self-definition. We Europeans have often experienced such sudden, often brutal changes in the past century—more so in Eastern or Central Europe than in the western part of our continent. Let me add that such changes are usually accompanied by irreplaceable cultural losses. One-time cultural centres and university towns, where three or four languages were spoken, sank to the level of provincial backwaters in large empires and simply disappeared from the cultural map of Europe. Most of us here will think of Czernowitz, where the poet Paul Celan hailed from, as “a city inhabited by people and books.” It’s impossible for me not to remind this audience that it was the Germans themselves, as a consequence of their drive toward world domination, who destroyed German culture in multi-national, multilingual areas whose population ran to the millions—areas largely dominated by German cultural influence. They destroyed the German or Yiddish-speaking Jewish minority there, which gave the German tongue such literary

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giants as Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, or the previously mentioned Celan. Often living in other linguistic environments, these writers wrote in German, and did so because that was the language they spoke in their parents’ home; and being Jewish and therefore rootless and cosmopolitan, as their enemies would have it, they thought in the dimensions of a major language. To write in German signified intellectual independence for these writers; it ensured their freedom of self-definition. Today these once partially German cultural zones (and I emphasize the word partially)— from, say, the Crimean peninsula through Bukovina to Galicia in the north—no longer enrich German culture, and the only ones responsible for this loss are the Germans themselves. I say this with a certain regret and shall explain why I do so presently. For now, let me point out that positing politics and culture as enemies rather than as mere opposites is a characteristically twentieth-century phenomenon. It is by no means a natural development. Politics divorced from culture creates unlimited despotism through sheer power and can wreak terrible havoc. This divorce may not destroy lives and property, but it always corrupts the human soul. The means of destruction is called ideology. The twentieth century, a century noted for a disastrous loss of cultural values, turned what had been values into ideology. The most tragic aspect of this change was that the modern masses, which never had access to culture, received ideology in its stead. This development had many causes, one of which was surely the fact that these masses appeared at a time when European civilization was undergoing one of its most, if not the most, profound spiritual crisis. Let’s not delve too deeply into the chain of causes and effects; let’s just say there were people who, with the help of subtle techniques developed by the machinery of political parties, undertook to control and use these masses. It may have been Thomas Mann who said that it is enough to call a large mass of people a Volk to get them to embrace just about anything. It didn’t take totalitarian state power to do this; the

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authoritarian rule of a Franco, a Dolfuss, or a Nicholas Horthy could also turn religion, patriotism, and culture into politics and turn politics itself into a tool of hatred. Hatred and lying — these were probably the two most important components of the political education received by people in the twentieth century. We need only recall those “Two Minutes Hate” in George Orwell’s 1984.1 “Lying had never been as potent a history-making force as in the last thirty years,” wrote Sándor Márai in 1972. This was especially true of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, which after the First World War evinced overly sensitive nationalist feelings. A great Central European power, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, collapsed, and its disintegration produced poisons that infected the new nation states that arose in its place. In the universities and colleges of a cruelly truncated Hungary, discriminatory laws were put into effect, and, in 1938, more sweeping anti-Jewish legislation was enacted. In 1944, they put a yellow star on me, which in a symbolic sense is still there; to this day, I have not been able to remove it. I admit it must seem astonishing that more than ten years after the elimination of the last European totalitarian states, more than ten years after the introduction of representative democracy in this part of Europe, I should still say this. The truth is that it wasn’t easy to face up to this fact, and it was even harder to try to come to terms with it. Such painful states of mind, it seems, automatically produce their own pathology without our being fully aware of it. For example, you get the feeling that the world around you is intangible, ghost-like, even though it’s you yourself who has become unreal and spectral. Or the opposite happens: you perceive your own self as foreign, though all you’ve done is blend in with your alienating surroundings. My wife, who is American and therefore free of these East European maladies, has noticed that, when we are abroad, I undergo a complete personality change. In foreign countries, I feel at home while, at

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home, I act like a stranger. With foreigners, I converse freely, but, with my own countrymen, I am ill at ease. In the dictatorship called socialism, this was a natural state, and I more or less learned to live with it. Getting accustomed to racism in a democracy takes more time. But at least I am now getting to the bottom of a problem, which, I believe, is not only mine. What I am really talking about is that, in my daily life, I must constantly respond to disturbing stimuli that come my way from the world around me. They are like mild electric shocks that prickle the skin. Metaphorically speaking, I am forever scratching myself. We are all familiar with Montesquieu’s famous dictum: “First I am a human being, and then a Frenchman.” The racist— for anti-Semitism since Auschwitz is no longer just antiSemitism—wants me to be first a Jew and then not to be a human being any more. At first, in our confusion, we grope for arguments with which to defend ourselves and find that we talk to and think about ourselves in a most primitive manner. No wonder: what we are up against is above all primitive. If we are shoved into an animal cage, we have to fight like animals. The debased thinking we protest against leads us to think about ourselves in lowly ways; after a while, it’s not ourselves we’re thinking about but somebody else. This process, in short, distorts our personality. The ultimate and most painful self-defence of such a distorted personality is also familiar: confronted with inhuman ideologues, the hapless victim is bent on proving his own humanity. There is something pathetic in these exertions, for the very thing ideologues want to rob him of is his humanity. But once he accepts racist categories, he becomes a Jew, and a Jew, as I indicated before, cannot be a human being any more. Thus, the more he tries to prove that he is human, the more pitiful and less human he becomes. In a racist environment, a Jew cannot be human, but he cannot be a Jew either. For “Jew” is an unambiguous designation only in the eyes of anti-Semites.

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A French writer, Edmond Jabès, once said that the difficulties of Jewish existence are identical to those of a writer. Nobody has described my situation more clearly. Still, I see an important difference. My becoming a writer was the result of a conscious decision, but I was born a Jew. In order for my writer self and my Jewish self to come together and form a single attribute, I have to view my Jewishness the way I do the planned execution of a literary work: a task to be completed; a decision in favour of total existence or self-denial. If I choose a full life, everything at once turns to my advantage. In the end, the fact that I am a Jew is the result of a decision; having made it, not only will I not be plunged into a so-called identity crisis, but a sharper light will also be cast on my entire existence. Nevertheless, I must confront a few questions raised by the peculiar nature of my Jewishness. Two or three decades ago, I would have considered the question of whom I am writing for an irrelevant pseudo-question. I am, of course, writing for myself, I would have said, and, basically, I still maintain that. But today I am more inclined to admit that other people, the world around me, interrelationships called society also play a role in creating the entity called “myself.” Thus, at least in part, I am a prisoner of my circumstances, and this no doubt has left its mark on everything I’ve produced. If I say I am Jewish writer, I don’t necessarily mean that I myself am Jewish. For what kind of a Jew is one who did not have a religious upbringing, speaks no Hebrew, is not very familiar with the basic texts of Jewish culture, and lives not in Israel but in Europe? What I can say about myself, however, is that I am a chronicler of an anachronistic condition, that of the assimilated Jew, the bearer and recorder of this condition, and a harbinger of its inevitable demise. In this respect, the Endlösung has a crucial role: no one whose Jewish identity is based primarily, perhaps exclusively, on Auschwitz, can really be called a Jew. He is Isaac Deutscher’s “non-Jewish Jew,” the rootless European

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variety, who cannot develop a normal relationship with a Jewish condition that has been forced upon him. He has a role to play, perhaps an important one, in European culture (if there is still such a thing), but he can have no part whatsoever in postAuschwitz Jewish history or in the Jewish revival (if there is, or will be, such a thing, I must again add). The writer of the Holocaust is therefore in a difficult position. In an earlier essay entitled A számüzött nyelv (The exiled tongue), I tried to develop the idea that the Holocaust does not and cannot have its own language.2 The European survivor must describe his ordeal in one of the European languages, but this language is not his; neither is it the language of the country he has used to tell his story. “I write my books in a borrowed language which, quite naturally, will expel it, or tolerate it only on the edge of its consciousness,” I wrote in that essay: I say “naturally” because the country whose language I use has developed myths during its centuries-long struggle for national survival, and these, being part of an unspoken national consensus, have affected its literature as well. I like to write in Hungarian because, this way, I am more acutely aware of the impossibility of writing. Actually, this is Kafka’s word. In a letter to Max Brod, in which he reflects on the situation of the Jewish writer, Kafka speaks of three impossibilities: it is impossible not to write, impossible not to write in German, and impossible to write any other way. Then he says, “We can almost add a fourth impossibility: it’s impossible to write.” Today he might add something else to the list: it is impossible to write about the Holocaust. We could continue enumerating the paradoxical impossibilities ad infinitum. We could say that it is impossible not to write about the Holocaust, impossible to write about it in German, and equally impossible to write about it any other way. Wherever he writes, in whichever language, the writer of the Holocaust is a

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spiritual fugitive, asking for spiritual asylum, invariably in a foreign tongue. If it’s true that the only real philosophical question is that of suicide, then the writer of the Holocaust who chooses to continue living knows only one real problem, that of emigration, though it would be more proper to speak of exile. Exile from his true home, which never existed. For if it did exist, it would not be impossible to write about the Holocaust. Then the Holocaust would have a language, and the writer of the Holocaust could be integrated into an existing culture. But this can never be. Every language, nation, civilization has a dominant Self which perceives, controls, and describes the world. This always active, collective Self is the essence with which any large community, nation, people, or culture can, to varying degrees of success, identify with. But where can the consciousness of the Holocaust find a home? Which language can claim to include the essence of the Holocaust, its dominant Self, its language? And if we raise this question, must not another one follow—whether it’s conceivable that the Holocaust has its own exclusive language? And if the answer to that question is “Yes,” wouldn’t this language have to be so terrifying, so lugubrious, that it would destroy those who speak it?3

Perhaps it is only right that the Holocaust exile should accept his banishment, about which he can issue reports from time to time. This must be so especially in Eastern and Central Europe, where as a consequence of two world wars and the Holocaust in particular, an inter- and supranational language disappeared, a language spoken from the Bukovina to Cracow, from Prague to Fiume—a language in which writers who couldn’t or wouldn’t find a place in a national literature found their freedom of expression. These national literatures show little willingness to incorporate the chastening lesson of the Holocaust, while the experience itself, albeit in a very different way, is also part of their collective consciousness. But—apart from public figures who openly espouse racism—it would be harmful to blame anyone

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for this, and even more harmful to speak of anti-Semitism “absorbed with mother’s milk.” Received anti-Semitism is a burdensome legacy, but it is certainly not genetic; its causes are exclusively historical and psychological. These nations have suffered great injuries to their national dignity and have been struggling for ages for their very existence as nations. In a characteristic but by no means original way, they have, alas, discovered in anti-Semitism a handy weapon in this struggle. Oscar Wilde, who, in the still innocent nineteenth century, was imprisoned for interpreting his freedom of self-definition too liberally, wrote in one of his essays, “‘Know Thyself!’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world ‘Be Thyself’ shall be written.”4 Our experiences, our very eyes, tell us daily that it is the “new world” that makes this more and more impossible. Still, we couldn’t aim for more than what Nietzsche devotes an entire chapter to in his great book, Ecce Homo: to become what we are, to follow our destiny, and to draw from it the proper conclusions no matter how bitter these may be. It is possible that the road to the freedom of selfdefinition takes us nowhere. For a writer, for whom one language, the one he writes in, is always privileged, it is difficult to admit that, as far as he is concerned, one language is like another, and none of them are really his. In reality, I belong to that tradition of Jewish literature that came into being in Eastern and Central Europe. This literature was never written in the language of the immediate national environment and was never part of a national literature. We can trace the development of this literature from Kafka to Celan and to their successors—all we have to do is peruse the various émigré literatures. For the most part, this literature deals with the extermination of European Jewry; its language may vary, but whatever the language, it can never be considered a native tongue. The language in which we speak lives as long as we speak it. Once we fall silent, the language is lost too—unless one of the larger languages takes pity on it and

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lifts it onto its lap, as it were, as in the pietà paintings. German is the language today that is most likely to do this. But German, too, is only a temporary asylum, a night shelter for the homeless. It is good to know this, good to make peace with this knowledge, and to belong with those who belong nowhere. It is good to be mortal. Notes 1. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classic, 1981), 12. 2. Imre Kertész, A számüzött nyelv (The exiled tongue) (Budapest: Magvetó, 2001). 3. Ibid., 291–293. 4. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in De Profundis and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1986), 27.

Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders

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THE BEDAZZLED GAZE: ON PERSPECTIVE AND PARADOXES IN WITNESS LITERATURE

PETER ENGLUND

Memory is a fragile instrument, constantly subject to erosion, prone to simplification and error. And this is not improved by the way in which expectations and foreknowledge exert a remarkable attraction, which distorts and amplifies. It is often said that it is difficult to perceive the history that you are living in: history, like traffic accidents, is something that only happens to others. What we traditionally call history, what we learn at school and university, has largely been doctored, refined, and tidied, and when we compare this neatly straightened past with the irreconcilable complexities of our own experiences, it is easy to magnify the differences. What applies to history applies as well to what we experience through the media, but here the foreshortening is not the result of explicative abstraction but rather of condensation. The outcome is the same, however: a divide between experienced history and the written form. If there is anything that could bridge this divide, it might well be what we call witness literature.

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I am an historian, and I represent a profession that has traditionally nurtured a kind of love-hate relationship to this genre. Most scholars will readily and repeatedly tell you how risky it is to use works of this kind as sources, while repeatedly and readily doing so themselves. Perhaps here I can shed some light on this paradox by indicating the inherent contradictions of the genre itself. I thought I would begin by talking about the problems and blessings of hindsight, basing what I say on three works of witness literature that describe Stalin’s reign of terror from within. Then I will move to the question of what happens in the shift from memory to literature, what we can call the process of corruption and refinement in the production of witness literature, based here on three memoirs from the First World War. Finally, I will arrive at something intended to resemble a conclusion, where I go into what I call the speech and silences of the witness. First: the question of hindsight. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, those who wish to relive an era should “blot out everything they know about the later course of history.”1 But is this possible? Different ways of dealing with this kind of knowledge can be exemplified by three works, all written by women and all based on their experiences during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s: Elena Bonner’s Mothers and Daughters, Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow, and— I almost said “of course”—Evgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.2 They are not only united by gender and the period in which they lived; they were all once faithful communists, leading relatively privileged lives. Bonner was admittedly only a teenager, but she grew up with the nomenclature. Larina wrote the most conventional work. Not in formal terms: its composition is fairly complex with several time frames and a number of abrupt interruptions in the chronology, for which she gives no other excuse than a laconic comment about the

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capriciousness of memory.3 And admittedly she does want to remember, but also to explain and, ultimately, to safeguard the memory of her husband, the famous revolutionary, Nikolai Bukharin. Larina wants to use hindsight in the obvious way, to her advantage, to render her account comprehensible; but in witness literature this always involves taking a risk because it threatens, for good or for ill, to transform what is written—as it does in this case—into something half-way between memoir and history. Ginzburg, in contrast, wants only to record her experiences in writing and not to attempt to grasp what she calls “the whole truth.”4 The difference between them is not, however, only a matter of purpose but also of setting: Larina’s work was written during Perestroika, while Ginzburg began to write in the 1950s, immediately after her release from her long prison sentence. Ginzburg also states that she lacked the information, the talent, and the understanding required to paint the big picture. Another difference is that Larina’s work was intended for publication from the very beginning, whereas Ginzburg wrote originally only for herself. Interestingly enough, when the idea of publication was subsequently bruited in the 1960s thaw, Ginzburg says that it had the effect of distorting her work: that was when she began to be cautious, primarily because of censorship. Perhaps the best works of witness literature are those not intended for any audience?5 Even so, Ginzburg cannot elude the cursed illumination of hindsight either. This can be seen, for instance, in her description of the period up until the day in the winter of 1937 when she receives a telephone call summoning her to an interrogation and her Calvary begins. She offers valiant resistance to hindsight with phrases like “Hardly anyone at that time realized…” or “Looking back on it after several years, I realized with amazement…” and the like.6 But even so, she cannot fend off expressions like “a presentiment of terrible misfortune.” 7 And when she sees Stalin

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for the first time at Gorky’s funeral, she remembers reacting with an inexplicable lack of respect because “evidently some sixth sense told me that this man was to be the evil genius in my life….” 8 When one reads Ginzburg’s work, one is impressed by her attempts to keep hindsight at bay, while at the same time realising that such attempts are always, to some extent, in vain— irrespective of who is writing. A third model for dealing with the problem of hindsight can be found in Bonner. She offers us what appears to be a simple and chronologically straightforward description of her childhood as the daughter of two career communists. Thanks to her parents’ position, she enjoyed a protected life, and she depicts a truly happy childhood, which ends abruptly, though, in May 1937 with the arrest of her father, when she practically becomes an orphan.9 It is probably because her memories are the images of childhood and her teens that she can so consistently avoid foreseeing the future in all that happens. This makes her recollections feel both highly credible and all too human, as, for instance, when the first stages of the reign of terror more or less completely pass her by because she has just fallen in love.10 At the same time, Bonner cannot circumvent hindsight either. Her method of dealing with it is, however, elegantly simple. Her book contains what is virtually a system of notes in the form of interpolations printed in italics containing her comments or descriptions of what happened later.11 And this really works. Her recollections remain unadulterated and, at the same time, Bonner does not counterfeit elevated objectivity, untouched by the course of time. All three of these women must be called artists in the use of memory. Ginzburg and Larina in particular describe how they literally spent years in the prison camps turning the recollections of their experiences into mental memorials.12 In this way, the act of putting words to paper is merely the completion of a process of remembrance that had begun much earlier. This is not

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completely unproblematic, at least not for an historian, because it leaves little room either to follow the work or even verify it, except in very broad terms. Otherwise, the process usually goes through several stages, with diaries playing a central role. And this allows us to perceive that the transformation of memory into literature almost invariably involves condensing, honing, rewording, excluding. It is quite evident that there is an inherent opposition between the witness’s faithfulness to reality on the one hand and the writer’s commitment to art on the other. All of this cannot, however, be described as a simple case of fact versus fiction. As a rule, it is more subtle than that. The step from memory to literature not infrequently involves changes and additions that can be described as refinements in that they are not intended to conceal what we call reality but instead to make it more distinct. Perhaps we could use Aristotle’s classical wording and say that the step is one from the true to the probable. Few events have had such significance for modern witness literature, both as a genre and as a phenomenon, as the First World War. Here I can only suggest some reasons: more people than ever before were drawn into one and the same upheaval, and not only were a record number of them literate, but many of them also took it for granted that they should turn to literature to process and express their experiences. (Moreover, they did not have the new visual media, film and television, which have turned out to be such powerful, some would assert too powerful, mnemonics.) Right through the 1920s, numerous memoirs, recollections, and other kinds of witness literature were being published. This culminated in 1928–29, when Sheriff ’s play Journey’s End was given its much discussed premiere and, at the same time, works were published such as Erich Maria Remarque’s best-seller All Quiet on the Western Front, Ludwig Renn’s War, Ernst Jünger’s Fire and Blood, Max Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (also an

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international bestseller), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Edmund Blunden’s Overtones of War, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.13 I am only going to deal with the last three here, Graves, Blunden, and Sassoon, whose works have all become classics and continue to be published in new editions. Sassoon is interesting here because he enables us to follow the transubstantiation from recollection to literature. He was an amateur poet who, throughout the war, kept a diary, now published, that become the foundation of his trilogy, The Memoirs of George Sherston, of which Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man forms the first volume—three books in which he summarises his experiences from the war in a form lightly disguised as fiction. The fictionalisation does not, however, consist primarily in the pseudonyms given to the characters in the books and which turn it into something of a roman à clef (he calls himself “George Sherston,” Robert Graves becomes “David Cromlech,” Bertrand Russell “Thornton Tyrell,” and so on). Nor have the actual events been fictionalised to any great extent; they follow step by step what really happened to Sassoon, including his spectacular repudiation of the war and his subsequent treatment at a kind of military mental asylum in Scotland, Craiglockhart. (In the third volume in particular, Sherston’s Progress, major sections of the diary are reproduced, which is also why it is the weakest of the three from a purely literary point of view.) Not does it involve the entertaining but unconnected small fantasies that fill Goodbye to All That by Sassoon’s friend, Graves.14 No, here the fictionalisation is more refined than that. As both Arthur Lane and Paul Fussel have pointed out, it is a matter both of trivial devices, such as often shifting central events to the hour of dawn quite simply in order to raise the emotional tension, and of major effects such as developing descriptions by using antitheses.15 This is most clearly apparent in the contrast Sassoon depicts between the rural idyll he leaves in 1914 and the

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world of disillusionment and modernity engendered by the war. We tend today to focus on the external devastation of the landscape, objects, and people; but Sassoon’s technique embodies something that was more powerful for his contemporaries—their inner sense of loss. The question of the veracity of witness literature comprises, however, more than the business of re-expressing or excluding things. It also concerns the form as such. In prescientific history, conflicts between form and content are common, even though they are rarely as severe as in the Latin historian Lucan, who nonchalantly altered Mediterranean geography and changed the names of a number of localities so that his verse would scan. For modern historians, this conflict is very much concerned with the problem of narrative. What happens when we turn the past into a narrative? We gain, of course, coherence, totality, and flow but at the risk of forcing narrative and teleological unity on to something that in reality is diverse, confused, and contradictory. The very form of narrative tempts us to tidy things up. The condensation and composition required (which are, incidentally, also the historian’s primary literary tools) can, of course, be discerned in Sassoon, Graves, and Blunden. However, Blunden’s book, unlike the others, is not a straight narrative, as it does not centre on the narrator himself as much as on his unit—a battalion of infantrymen that 1917 sucked into the horror that was called Passchendaele. Blunden’s book, The Undertones of War, does not, as far as I know, include the element of fictionalisation that can be seen in the other works. Instead, something else is discernible: how style itself can cloak its subject. Blunden obviously writes well, with almost pedantic precision, clear poetic formulations, and an assured sense of rhythm. (The reader is not one whit surprised to discover that sections of the text were published as free verse in the London Magazine.) It is, however, difficult to ignore the mismatch in the work between its poetic, highly literary status, often with

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an archaistic choice of words, and the awful reality that Blunden is trying to evoke. And this, of course, is a risk that all witness literature runs: the literary artist struggles with the witness, and literature prevails. Witness literature is a mongrel form of literature, and, like other mongrels, it is not infrequently full of life. Its links to actual events also endow it with undeniable charge. But, in spite of appearances, the genre is a difficult one, both in form and function. There are more failures than triumphs. The problem is that instead of a union of the best of two distinct literary worlds, we often get a union of the worst. The outcome functions neither as a source nor as literature. The requirements of veracity distort the literary form while the literary form distorts the testimony. Auden wrote that every attempt to create something that could be at once beautiful and functional was doomed to fail, and this may even apply to witness literature.16 But even so, as Galileo says, eppur si muove (it moves). The limitations of narrative sources in general, and the limitations of witness literature in particular, have long been recognised by historians as the cold facts of life. For many, this has led to stringent but salutary scepticism of all kinds of contemporary memoirs: they are, by definition, unreliable. For others, it has given rise to new kinds of research, where instead of posing questions about the narrative’s what, focus is rather on the narrative’s how. One example of this, interesting because its source material consists of works of witness literature treated as vestiges of their period, is Klaus Theweleit’s remarkable, although not unproblematic, Male Fantasies, which probes the roots of Nazism.17 Is it not profoundly ironic, in view of the witness’s avowed intention of etching memory fast, that, for a scholar like Theweleit, silences are most interesting: what is not contained in these books? In addition to this kind of silence, the silences characteristic of a work, there is another silence that we cannot disregard in

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any discussion of witness literature. This is the silence of those who were themselves never allowed or who were never able to testify. Primo Levi, primus inter pares among the survivors who have borne literary witness to the Holocaust, includes in his book The Drowned and the Saved a disturbing but also plausible argument—interestingly enough with support from another eyewitness from the labour camps of the twentieth century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.18 Levi claims that the survivors are not the true witnesses, as they are by definition a fortunate minority. Those who encountered the worst, those who underwent the extremes, those who, to use Levi’s words, “saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute….”19 I have spent a long time on the problems inherent in witness literature and on potential sources of error and failure. Ultimately, however, these problems bear upon the colossal power of witness literature. Just as objects, memorials, and monuments can with the years become fetishes to such an extent that they replace genuine memories, witness literature can also swell to the point where it begins to expropriate what it was intended to ward off. And indeed witness literature from the First World War provides one very good example of this. Historians have shown how our image of the attitude of the participants in the war has been shaped by a relatively small number of works, all written by sensitive, educated, upper-middle class young men with literary talents. (And this in spite of the fact that some of them were hardly more than disguised novels.) Instead, attempts have been made to show that other attitudes existed, not least among those often referred to as common soldiers.20 But the voices of witness literature have concealed their silences. Indeed, the case of Sassoon shows how complex the ecological system of the memory can be: what once began as a diary and was distilled into a work of witness literature has now undergone further refinement and emerged as Pat Barker’s trilogy on the First World War. It takes us, for instance, to Craiglockhart,

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where we meet both Siegfried Sassoon and Rivers, the psychologist, who in reality helped Sassoon.21 At the same time, we are confronted with disconcerting sections of text that could easily be confused with those written by an eyewitness. This is evidence of the author’s skill and also becomes a problem—but I still do not know what kind of problem. I have been talking mainly as an historian. This may be why I have concentrated on the shortcomings of witness literature rather than its virtues. A work of witness literature is an imprint of its contemporary time, and the problem with contemporarity is that it is ongoing: it lacks scale. We have no choice but to be possessed, swept along by the period in which we live, and, in this current, it is of course difficult to separate the trivial from the decisive. With no yardstick, everything seems the same size. Only when something has been brought to fruition is it possible to measure it. We undoubtedly need eyewitnesses. At the same time, we cannot deny that their gaze is by no means infallible; it is subject to the bedazzlement that affects all those who participate. The kind of question we ask is crucial. When it comes to understanding an event, a process, or an era, the importance of eyewitnesses cannot be challenged: “I know because I was there.” When the same event, process, or era needs to be interpreted, their footing is less stable: “I know although I was there.” Those who lived at the centre of things know everything about how it felt but little about what it was: this is their tragedy. As their successors, we know a great deal about what it was, but nothing about how it felt: that is ours. Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256. Benjamin is paraphrasing Fustel de Coulanges.

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2. Elena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Knopf, 1992); Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow, trans. Gary Kern (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Eugenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) and Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanowich, 1981). 3. Larina, 39. 4. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 420. 5. Ibid. See “Epilogue,” 417, 23. 6. Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, 21. 7. Ibid., 12, 25. 8. Ibid., 28. 9. Bonner, 306. 10. Ibid., 243, 255, 258. 11. Ibid. See, for example, 258. 12. Larina, 132, 156–7. 13. Robert Cedric Sheriff, Journey’s End (London: Gollancz, 1930); Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. Brian Murdoch (London: Vintage, 1996); Ludwig Renn, War, etc, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Martin Secker, 1929); Ernst Jünger, Feuer und Blut; ein kleiner Ausschnitt aus einer grossen Schlacht (Fire and blood) (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1937); Max Plowman (Mark VII), A Subaltern on the Somme in 1916 (London: Dent and Sons, 1927); Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Hogarth, 1984); Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960); Edmund Blunden, Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War (London: Duckworth, 1996); Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber, 1954). 14. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 203–04, 216. 15. Arthur Lane, An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972) 110; Fussell, 92–101. 16. W. H. Auden, “The Dyer’s Hand,” in Prose, vol. 2, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 2002), 29–31. 17. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987–88).

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18. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988). 19. Ibid., 64. 20. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 357–66, 448–57. 21. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (London: Penguin, 1996). For example, see pages 107–15 and 148–54.

Translated from the Swedish by David Jones

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ON THE FRONTIER

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

All my writing life, I have worked on frontiers. Night, fog, armed guards, tension. Walk just a few paces down the snow-covered Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, through a musty East German portakabin, and you move from a world called West to a world called East. Nothing changes, and everything changes. Or a sandbagged border post between Milosevic’s Serbia and liberated Kosovo: fresh-faced Canadian soldiers pass you tenderly from one darkness to another. But also—and sometimes almost as tense— the frontiers between politics and culture, between continental Europe and the Anglosphere, between academia and journalism, Left and Right, history and reportage. I love crossing frontiers. So much is revealed at them. And thinking about “Witness Literature,” I want to walk the frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction. I deliberately use the less familiar “literature of fact,” rather than those lumpen terms from a publisher’s catalogue, “non-fiction” or Sachbuch. “Literature of fact”—the phrase is beautiful, and

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contains the key word, “fact.” But first, what of its other half, that large word “literature”? It seems to me self-evident that these adjacent territories of fact and fiction both belong to literature, as France and Germany both lie in Europe. “Literature” is often taken to mean invented worlds. The twentieth century sustained the nineteenth’s romantic privileging of the creative imagination. For a hundred years, the Nobel Prize in Literature was mainly, though not exclusively, awarded to novelists and poets—which fact is, if I understand it aright, the background to our meeting. But who could possibly argue that the work of Thucydides, Macaulay, Nietzsche, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, or, for that matter, Naipaul’s Among the Believers are not literature?1 Wherever the boundary of literature lies, it is not here. This frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction is open, unmarked. Some very fine writers stray across it quite casually, as one does when travelling in the Masai Mara— no border posts, same shrub land, same dust, same cheetahs, but suddenly you are in Tanzania not Kenya. These frontier crossings come in many forms. In the reportage of that master traveller, Ryzsard Kapuscinski, we find haunting claims that would certainly not survive the attentions of a fact-checker at the New Yorker. (I open his Shah of Shahs at random, and read “The Iranian Shiites have been living underground, in the catacombs, for eight hundred years.”2 ) With Kapuscinski, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled. Paul Theroux’s travel book The Great Railway Bazaar, which is full of amusing incidents and wonderfully entertaining dialogue, concludes with an elaborate plea for its own strict, reportorial accuracy.3 He describes in detail the four thick notebooks in which he wrote things down as they happened, “remembering to put it all in the past tense.”4 On this railway trip through Asia, he writes, he had learned “that the difference between

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travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy—how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.”5 At this I found myself murmuring, “Well, you did, you did.” Perhaps I am quite wrong, but even the production of four weather stained notebooks containing words identical to those on the printed page would not dissuade me, for the invention can come at the moment of recording. The historian Simon Schama begins his very stimulating and avowedly experimental Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) with a compelling eyewitness account of the Battle of Quebec by a soldier who fought in it.6 At the end of the book, Schama reveals that this account was fiction, “constructed from a number of contemporary documents.”7 So you were in Tanzania after all. Schama suggests that history as story telling, as literature, must reclaim the ground it has lost to history as science or pseudoscience. I could not agree more. But from this particular literary device, it is not a long step to the postmodernist conclusion that any historian’s “story” is as good as any other. Sometimes, the frontier transgression comes not in the text itself, but in the context established by the writer. According to the biography of Jerzy Kosinski by James Park Sloan, Elie Wiesel was initially lukewarm about Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which tells of a Jewish child hiding alone during the war in a Polish village, thrown into a slurry-pit by anti-Semitic Polish peasants, and struck dumb by the experience.8 Then Wiesel gathered from Kosinski himself that the book was closely based on Kosinski’s own childhood experience, and so hailed it as a “chronicle” and “a poignant first-person account.”9 The novel was celebrated as a “testament,” a work of witness.10 Later, it turned out that Kosinski had never hidden alone, was never thrown into a slurry pit or struck dumb. The work was discredited on the very grounds that had established it. Kosinski’s selfjustification was deeply interesting for our purpose. “I aim at

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truth, not facts,” said the novelist, “and I’m old enough to know the difference.”11 Now I want to mount a defence of this frontier, so open, ill-marked, oft-transgressed; a difficult defence, rather against the spirit of the times (“Who cares? It’s all entertainment anyway”). But I hope that you may join me in this old-fashioned act of defiance, as we stand on an invisible line in the middle of the Masai Mara, with only an ink-black umbrella to protect us against the burning sun. For the defence of this line seems to me of the first importance precisely when it comes to the moral and artistic quality of witness. Our defence will be stubborn, but not naïve. Kosinski had a point. Just as literature extends both sides of this frontier, so does truth. Truth is the other continent to which the states of fact and fiction equally belong. “Ah,” you may say, “but these are two different kinds of truth.” Yet that is exactly what needs to be examined, for in saying that both belong to literature we are suggesting—and I think rightly—that in many ways it is actually the same kind of truth. Nor shall we naïvely suppose that “witness” can be found only on one side of the line. “You who harmed an ordinary man…,” # # Milosz writes Czeslaw in one of his most famous poems, “do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You may kill him—another will be born. / Deeds and words shall be recorded.”12 The poet ! Poems and novels are an essential remembers: Poeta pamieta! # part of the literature of witness. But I do suggest that any meaningful notion of witness depends on having a clear delineation of this frontier, and knowing which side you are supposed to be at any one time. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement imagines a novelist who tries at the end of her life to atone for a terrible thing she did as a child, by telling the truth about it.13 But since she does so in a novel, no one can know what is invented and what real. She cannot atone, because she is God in this invented world.

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Words like “witness,” “testimony,” “evidence,” and, of course, “fact” have their sober offices in a court of law. And witnesses in literature, as in law, often testify to a particular kind of fact: the fact as something someone has done, often to someone else. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, the most common meaning of the word “fact” was “an evil deed or crime.” “He is…hanged,” wrote a sixteenth century authority, “neere the place where the fact was committed.”14 (The usage survives in the English phrase “accessory after the fact.” In German, Tatsache means “fact,” and Tatort “scene of the crime.”) When we say “witness literature,” we think first of witnesses to those “facts” that are committed by human beings upon other human beings whether in war, apartheid, holocaust, or gulag. Now, in defending this line, unnaïvely, we must start by conceding much to those who would blithely stroll across it. For a start, all historians, journalists, and lawyers know that witnesses are wildly unreliable. They forget, lie, exaggerate, get confused. That’s why, so biblical scholars tell us, the Bible reflects the Jewish law of multiple witness. Jesus chose twelve witnesses to record his acts—or facts. But (as this example suggests) even multiple corroboration achieves only a very rough approximation to the original reality. I have spent some time in recent years talking to Serb and Albanian witnesses to atrocities in Kosovo and Macedonia. Turning from Serb to Albanian and back again, I have often wanted to say to them what Chaim Weizmann’s father, a famous village peacemaker, reportedly used to exclaim after hearing one side of an argument: “From what you tell me, I can see that you are entirely in the wrong. Now I shall hear the other side; perhaps you are in the right after all.”15 Moreover, the evidential basis on which history is written is often extraordinarily thin. Sometimes, we have only one witness. During the velvet revolution in Prague in 1989, crucial decisions were taken by a group around Václav Havel, meeting in a curious glass-walled room in the subterranean Magic Lantern theatre.

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Most of the time, I was the only outsider present and certainly the only one with a notebook open, trying to write down what was being said. And I remember thinking, “If I don’t write this down, nobody will. It will be lost forever, as most of the past is, like bathwater down the drain.” But what a fragile foundation on which to write history! Of course, others who were there will add their recollections. But what use are recollections? The problem with memory is at the heart of the problem with witness. When I set out some years ago to explore my Stasi file, I thought, “This is the perfect way to test the credibility of secret police files. After all, if I know anything at all, I know what I myself did and said.” But as I read the file, talked to the people who had informed on me, and the secret police officers who had spied on me, I found that I didn’t really know even that. Or rather, what I thought I knew kept changing with every new revelation. We don’t simply forget; we re-remember. Memory is a rewritable CD that is constantly being rewritten. And rewritten in a particular way: one that both makes sense of the story to us and makes it more comfortable for us. Isn’t it curious how, if two people separately describe to you an argument between them, both seem to have won? Philosophers have long been on to this in their different ways. Thomas Hobbes wrote that “Imagination and Memory are but one thing.”16 One of Nietzsche’s deepest apothegms reads, “ ‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally, memory gives way.”17 Schopenhauer ascribed it to vanity rather than pride. More recently, the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has suggested, after studying split-brain patients, that human beings have what he labels “the interpreter” located specifically in the left brain, whose job it is to string together our experiences into narratives that seem to make sense.18 In short, we all have a novelist in our heads. A novelist called Memory, ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call “My Life.”

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Yet that is only half the ground we defenders of the line must concede, the better to advance. Suppose for a moment that there was no involuntary exercise of the creative imagination through memory. Suppose we had a perfect, impartial, scientific record of what really happened. (With the new technology of video cameras, we can get closer to it than ever before, though with only two of the four senses deployed by a human witness. Cameras cannot smell or touch.) Even then, we would still have almost nothing— and much too much. To study five years of the French revolution in just one corner of Paris, you would have to sit for five years in front of a screen. To create the literature of fact, we have to work like novelists in many ways. We select. We cast light on this object, shadow on that. We imagine. We imagine what it is like to be that old Albanian woman weeping over the body of her murdered son, or what it was like to be a fourteenth-century French serf. No good history or reportage was ever written without a large imaginative sympathy with the people written about. Our characters are real people; but we shape them like characters, using our own interpretation of their personalities. Then we talk of “Michelet’s Napoleon,” “Taine’s Napoleon,” and “Carlyle’s Napoleon,” for each Napoleon is in some important sense the author’s creation. So the property of deliberate imagining is certainly not confined to that opera house in the Tanzania of fiction. Imagination is the sun that illuminates both countries. But this leads us into temptation. A voice in your ear whispers, “You know that Kenyan in the slouch hat really did say that awfully funny thing you think he almost said. Just write it down. No one will ever know. And look, just across the frontier, there is that gorgeous flower— the one missing novelistic detail that will bring the whole story alive. Pop across and pick it. No one will notice.” I know this voice. I have heard it. But if we claim to write the literature of fact, it must be resisted.

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Why? For moral reasons, above all. Words written about the real world have consequences in the real world. If, in my book The File, I had identified as a Stasi informer someone who was not, in fact, a Stasi informer—and I nearly did—that man could have found his life ruined.19 Friends would have shunned him, he would probably have lost his job—and worse. (At least one person exposed as a Stasi informer committed suicide.) On a larger scale, the Balkan wars of the last decade have been fuelled by bad history, written by all sides. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm observes, “The sentences typed on apparently innocuous keyboards may be sentences of death.”20 There is also a moral obligation to the victims, whether living or dead. How would we feel—how would the survivors feel—if we learned that events described in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man had been deliberately invented, or ornamented?21 These moral reasons are sufficient, but there are artistic ones too. Writers often cross this frontier because they think their work will be enhanced as a result. Reportage or history will become Literature with a large L. Paragraph for paragraph, that may be true. But as a whole, the work is diminished. We also need to ask how (often an even more difficult question than why). How does one determine when this frontier has been crossed, given everything I have said about the unreliability of witnesses, the involuntary creativity of memory, and the necessity of deliberate imagining? A simplistic, nineteenth-century positivist answer about scientific Truth won’t do. For the truth achieved by the literature of fact is in many ways the same as that achieved by the literature of fiction. If we are convinced that human beings might have acted, thought, or felt in this way, it is in large measure as a result of the writer’s word craft and imagination. I would suggest that, as well as satisfying all the truth-tests that apply to fiction, the literature of fact must pass two further, special truth-tests: those of facticity and veracity. First, facticity. Are those things in the text that claim to be facts actually facts,

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or are they merely, to use Norman Mailer’s nice coinage, factoid? Dates, places, events, quotations. Did the informer identified in my Stasi file with the incongruous code-name “Smith” actually sign a formal undertaking to work for the secret police as an “unofficial collaborator” or did he not? Everything else—causes, motives, consequences—is, strictly speaking, speculation; this is fact. (As a matter of fact—as a matter of fact—I know “Smith” did sign, because I have studied the original document.) Many alleged facts can be externally verified. The discipline of history and the craft of reporting have developed rules, procedures, and specialist skills for testing evidence. Some even merit the label “scientific.” (An analysis of the ink used in “Smith’s” pledge for example.) To pass this basic test of facticity does not make a text true, but to fail does make it untrue. Yet much of the time, especially with “witness literature,” the witness is alone at the scene he or she describes. Alone with his or her eyes, conscience, and imagination. If we find witnesses accurate about things we know, we are more likely to believe them on things we don’t; but sometimes, there is little that we can know or check. What test works here? The best I can come up with is the quite unscientific litmus of veracity. Do we feel, as we read the text, that the writer is making what George Orwell, in praising Henry Miller, called “a definite attempt to get at real facts”?22 For me, the model of such veracity is Orwell’s own Homage to Catalonia.23 Actually, Orwell got some of his externally verifiable facts wrong—not least because most of his notes were stolen during a secret police search of his hotel room in Barcelona. But we never for a moment doubt that he is trying to tell it exactly as it was. And when we reach his plea of veracity at the end of the book, it is the very opposite of Paul Theroux’s. Orwell writes, in that wonderfully plain, conversational style that he worked so hard to achieve, “In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my

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partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.”24 In effect, he says “don’t believe me!”—and so we believe him. Veracity is revealed in tone, style, voice. It takes us back to the artistic reasons for defending this line. You can so often tell just from internal, stylistic evidence when a writer has strayed. Take a now notorious example: the book published in 1995 as Bruchstücke (in English, Fragments) by Binjamin Wilkomirski, which purported to be the memories of a man who survived the Nazi death camps as a Polish Jewish child.25 It is now established beyond reasonable doubt that the author was a Swiss musician of troubled past and disturbed mind, originally called Bruno Grosjean, who had never been near a Nazi death camp—but who had imagined himself into that past, that other self. Reading Fragments now, one is amazed that it could ever have been hailed as it was. The wooden irony (“Majdanek is no playground”), the hackneyed images (silences broken by the sound of cracking skulls), the crude, hectoring melodrama (his father squashed against the wall by a transporter, dead women with rats crawling out of their stomachs)—this material, when you know it is fraudulent, is truly obscene.26 But even before one knew that, all the aesthetic alarms should have sounded. For every page has the authentic ring of falsehood. Contrast this with the great books of true witness. Of course there are large variations in tone and style. Many nonetheless have a certain voice in common: a voice of pained, sober, yet often ironical or even sarcastic veracity, which speaks from the very first line. Take and contrast with Wilkomirski’s book the first line of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements

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in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals.”27 How could you not believe this? The facts do not always have to be ugly. “I will bring you,” writes the English poet Craig Raine, “the beauty of facts.”28 This is, no doubt, a rather Anglo-Saxon sentiment. Yet facts, like artefacts, can be beautiful. On a white landing shelf at my home in Oxford, I have two objects. One is a beautiful rounded natural stone, some three inches high, of a delicate grey colour tinged with a very pale pink, and moulded into contours by the cold sea washing across a pebble beach on the northeasternmost tip of mainland Britain at the Duncansby Stacks, where I picked it up during a contented afternoon spent with my family. The other is a jagged piece of the Berlin Wall, made of a gritty composite barely deserving the name of stone, with a patch of garish graffiti on one side. They sit there, the rough and the smooth, the unnatural and the natural, facing each other, rather brightly lit on the white shelf, and they are a poem. A poem for the literature of fact. Of course, it is a grave limitation for any witer to leave the facts as facts. But art grows through self-limitation. On this frontier we should stand. Notes 1. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986); V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers (New York: Knopf, 1981). 2. Ryzsard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (London: Quartet, 1985). 3. Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (London: Penguin, 1977). 4. Ibid., 379. 5. Ibid. 6. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations) (London: Granta Books, 1991), 3–8.

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7. Ibid., 327. 8. James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (New York: Dutton, 1996); Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird (New York: Grove, 1976). 9. Kosinski, quoted in Sloan, 223. 10. Ibid. 11. Kosinski, quoted in “Sex, Lies and Jerry Kosinski,” BBC TV, ! Bookmark (4 November, 1995). ! ´ 12. Czesl#aw Mil#osz, Poeta Pamieta: antologia poezji swiadectwa i sprzeciwu 1944–1984 (London: PULS Publications, 1984), 114. 13. Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). 14. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “fact.” 15. Norman Rose, Chaim Weizmann (London: Penguin, 1986), 17. 16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. MacPherson (London: Penguin, 1968), 89. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (München Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, 1969), 86. 18. Michael Gazzaniga, The Mind’s Past, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xiii and passim. 19. Timothy Garton Ash, The File (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 75–82. 20. Eric Hobsbawm, “The Historian between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity,” Diogenes 42, no. 168 (Winter 1994): 63. 21. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987). 22. George Orwell, A Kind of Compulsion 1903–1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10, ed. Peter Davidson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 404. 23. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, ibid. 24. Ibid., 186. 25. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments, trans. John E. Woods (1995); reprinted in The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, ed. Stefan Maechler (London: Picador, 2001). 26. Ibid., 404; 426; 379; 442–43. 27. Levi, ibid., 15. 28.Craig Raine, Collected Poems 1978–1999 (London: Penguin, 2000), 582.

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OF TAMARIND AND COSMOPOLITANISM!

NURUDDIN FARAH

In the vicinity of the courts in Somalia, it is common for one to see clutches of men loitering with intent. Some of the men who hang around at the entrance to the courts are there to help you write your letters because you happen to be illiterate, some to find you a lawyer at short notice, but the majority are there to bear false witness. Decently dressed in a manner that attracts no attention, the men wait as patiently as vultures perched on the highest point of a roof in the neighbourhood of an abattoir. Actors manqué, they entertain themselves with humorous anecdotes about many a vulnerable client, now satisfied, whom they served at the payment of a fee. These professional men are so alert that they stir into action at the sight of a gullible man or a woman with a problem. And they offer their services for a price and in cash. That they can tell the pregnable state of the person as soon as he or she comes into view is an advantage that serves them well. When you come down to think of it, it is all part of an act: the judges know the men who bear false witnesses, as do

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the jurors and the public too. We allude to Carais Ciise in the region of Somalia where I come from when we wish to imply that so-and-so is bearing false testimony, or tells lies knowingly, and benefits from doing so. I can think of many such witnesses, among them a number of well-known writers. Not committed to telling the truth and lacking deep knowledge of the areas about which they write, these givers of false testimony are easily discerned, especially by locals. But not so for many of their readers, least of all those who are unfamiliar with the faraway areas about which these false witnesses write. I won’t mention the names of these writers because it would not be good etiquette to do so. What I would like to do instead is to give another kind of testimony when the notion of truth suffers unimaginable abuse at the hands of an entire community or a group of professionals and when truth is comprised. I am referring here to the commentaries and other forms of reporting by journalists, writers, or political analysts who offer us misguided testimony when it comes to Somalia when they should know better. My argument is that much of the commentary on the Somali civil war is based on a false premise in the form of a cliché, an easy peg on which to hang a misguided theory. We are told again and again that the Somali civil war is the consequence of an ageold clan conflict that has only lately gone awry. The clan is viewed by many of the commentators as the single most important issue, since it pits one family or groups of families related to each other through blood against others who are not related by blood. This view is also erroneously held by a large number of Somalis, who ought to know better, but who don’t for reasons to do, I think, with a sense of intellectual tardiness. Of the landmarks of Mogadiscio, I remember Tamarind Market most. As is often the case, misnomers abound in a city with an ancient oral history and with a memory far more complex than the lives of the peoples currently residing in it. Try as you might

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to trace things to their origins, you will find that nobody has the slightest idea why the market, which wasn’t a market in the sense that we understand when we speak of an African market, was called Tamarind Market. Driven by your obsessive search for the explanation forever eluding you, you come across other misnomers along the way. In fact, it may even surprise you to hear that the term Tamarind itself is a misnomer, comprised as it is of two Arabic words: timir and Hind, meaning “dates” and “India.” Now what features do dates and tamarind have in common? But before you answer the question, if you will pardon my digression, let me ask another question at the risk of being indiscreet. Do you in actual fact know what tamarind is? Have you seen it, eaten it, and tasted it? Or do you know of it only vaguely, in the way a child growing up in the tropics “knows” of snow in the sense of having seen it on TV or having read about it in a folktale? In other words, have you asked yourself why the Arabs, who “knew” dates and grew it in abundance, gave the name “dates of India” to the thing we now know as tamarind? Perhaps we are engaged in a prosaic comparison between two unlike items, one known to those bestowing the name and the other unknown, and we should just leave it at that. Equally, could we assume that the sticky melange that the Arabs named “Dates of India” is what the Indians knew as tamarind? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case! Anyhow, I remember the enthusiasm of the seventies in which all Somalis were in joyous celebration. In those long-gone years, we were enthusiastic about a number of things. We were highly enthusiastic about the political independence that was only a decade old then. We were enthusiastic too about our particular cultural and linguistic legacies and of the enviable fact that ours was the only country in the continent of Africa with a sizeable population whose people spoke one language, Somali. Many of us would also mention another important point of which we were very proud. We knew that the city we lived in, Mogadiscio,

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was not only one of the prettiest and most colourful cities in the world, but also that it was decidedly the oldest in sub-Saharan Africa and older than many of Europe’s most treasured medieval cities. One of Mogadiscio’s best-kept secrets was the shopping complex locally known as Tamarind Market. This was always abuzz with activities, its narrow alleys filled with shoppers. You could see entire families pouring into its alleys and plazas soon after siesta time, some shopping for clothes, others wishing to acquire what they could find in the way of gold or silver necklaces, many made to order. Stories abounded in which you were told that some of the shoppers came from as far as the Arabian Gulf to strike bargains, well aware that they would pay a lot more for the same items in their home countries in the Emirates or Saudi Arabia. In those days, no bride would get married without a collection of custom-made gold and silver items bought from one of the artisans there. And, for your tailoring needs, you went behind the market, where you would be fitted for your shirts, dresses, trousers, caps, jackets, or a pair of your leather boots, all to be had at bargain prices. The history of Mogadiscio, how it came into being, and what became of it after it went up in flames following the civil war are to my mind all tied up with the history and destiny of the small cosmopolitan community that ran the Tamarind Market. The presence of this small community dates back to the tenth century, at which time Mogadiscio existed as a city state and boasted a negligible level of administration run for the benefit of the bourgeois elite, many of whom came from elsewhere: Iran, Indian, and Arabia. As more and more foreigners migrated to it from other countries over the years, the city assumed an unmistakably cosmopolitan orientation. It was an open city with no walls to which anyone could come, provided he or she lived in harmony and at peace with those already there. It was as small as many other cities in other parts of the world then, probably no bigger

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than four square kilometers. And it was prosperous, thanks to its residents, many of them artisans hailing originally from the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent. Parallel to the open city, within the radius of a few kilometres in any direction, there resided a pastoralist community made up entirely of Somalis who, for all intents and purposes, were peripheral to the city’s residents and their cosmopolitan way of life. Traffic was principally one-way, with a few and then later more pastoralists taking up residence in the city so as to benefit from the educational infrastructures there. Otherwise, the urban and the rural communities existed apart from one another, except that the one was always selling something to the other. But they regarded each other with mutual suspicion. The pastoralist Somalis, who are by nature urbophobics, saw the city as alien and parasitic, and because it occupied an ambiguous space in their hearts and minds, they gradually accumulated hostility towards the city until they became intent on destroying it. The sacking of the city in 1991, when Tamarind Market fell victim to the most savage looting, was not the first time a conglomerate of pastoralists acting under the command of citybased firebrands set on dispossessing the city of its “foreign” elements, laid waste to it. The same sort of thing occurred more than four hundred years ago, between 1530 and 1580, according to oral historians. The manner in which the sixteenth-century city was laid to waste had uncanny similarities to the 1991 sacking: in both cases, contingents of disenfranchised herdsmen, led by city-based men and armed with ancient injustices newly recast as valid grievances, visited havoc on the city. In retrospect, I would say the recent sacking had a lot to do with the Italian colonial presence, which brought about massive changes in the city’s demography. After all, it was Italy that recruited many Somalis into its army to fight in its colonial war of expansion into Ethiopia. That many of those co-opted into serving in the police and armed forces were from regions of

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Somalia other than the communities adjacent to the city would in, a perverse way, upset its demographic balance. Following the Great War, further influxes of migrants swelled the rank of those already there, and those whom I would describe as “semipastoralists” because they had one foot in the rural area and the other in the urban, accounting for the largest number of arrivals. By the time flag independence came, more pastoralists were poised to move towards the towns and then to the one and only city in the country, Mogadiscio. And the pull towards the city and away from the seasonal droughts and crop failures meant that there would be tremendous demographic upheavals, giving Somalia one of the highest urban migration rates in Africa. In the late seventies, after another war between Somalia and Ethiopia over the Ogaden, a massive number of refugees, in addition to a huge internal migration from the regions with depressed economies, helped to make the urban growth reach alarming figures. Somalia by then had become a state with one city, ruled by a single tyrant, Siyad Barre. It came to pass that in the late eighties the city moved toward its own extinction, because it no longer had any of the amenities one normally associates with cities. In spite of this, everyone gravitated towards it: to find jobs, to be where the action was, where the industries were, where the only university was, and where you could consult an eye doctor or a heart specialist. Power was concentrated in the figure of the tyran; and he was there too. Local orature has it that in 1989, just before the armed militias invaded the city, close aides to the “Mayor of Mogadiscio,” as the tyrant was known then, suggested to him that he quit the city. His arrogant dismissal of the suggestion now seems prescient, for he is rumoured to have responded that if anyone tried to run him out of his city, he would make sure that he took the whole country along with him to the land of ruin. There are very few things that we know with absolute certainty when it comes to Mogadiscio. A city with several names, some

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ancient and of local derivation, some hundreds of years old and of foreign origin. The city claims a multiplicity of memories and sources, some of which are derived from outside Africa, others native to the continent. However, no one is sure when the name Mogadiscio was first used or by whom. Does the name consist of two Somali words Maqal and disho, meaning, in Somali, “the place where sheep are slaughtered” and indicating that it was once an abattoir? Or is the etymology nonindigenous, derived from Arabic, at one time the lingua franca of the city-state? In other words, is it the composite word Maq’adu Shah, meaning “the headquarters of the Shah”? Does its local name Xamar define a city built on “red sand”? Or does the red colour implicit in the word Xamar refer to a people of reddish hue? Myself, I find it fascinating that there are arguments and counterarguments and claims and counterclaims about the history of the city to the extent that we cannot shrug any of them off, nor accept any at face value. However, if there is one thing of which we are absolutely certain, it is that the relationship between the urbophiles and the pastoralists was a vexed one, regardless of whether we think of the sixteenth century or the 1991 sacking. In both sackings, what took the cosmopolitan communities several hundred years to build was destroyed in a very short time by the invading hordes of pastoralists and borderline city-dwellers, both groups being hostile to the cultural melange of the city. The 1991 sacking was more destructive because by then Mogadiscio had become the factotum-state of a nation, into which all the country’s available resources were poured. But it was similar in important ways to the city’s sixteenth-century precursor, because it too was a city-state and set apart from the austere cultural landscape of the country surrounding it, a cosmopolitan city with a negligible level of administration. Insofar as most Somalis were concerned, the power inherent in the city was invested in people who were alien to them, “foreigners” of a kind and elitists at that. Perhaps what the warlords and their

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irregular armies managed to destroy in Somalia was not the infrastructure of the city, of which there was very little, or the foundation of the state, of which there was hardly any worth saving. Rather, they destroyed the spirit of a place like Tamarind Market, murdering the people who ran it, chasing out those who frequented it, in short, demolishing the idea of cosmopolitanism. In my most recent visit to Mogadiscio, I was at a loss for words when I saw what became of Tamarind Market, a place of carnage. For me, there was a cause to mourn: the murder of the cosmopolitan spirit of the Market. In its place, another market to serve the needs of a city now largely emptied of cosmopolitans has been created: the Bakhaaraha Market. At this newly established “Market of Silos,” for that is how its name translates, market forces prevail, and the clan reigns supreme. It is the height of a nation’s tragedy when those who pillaged and therefore destroyed a city’s way of life are allowed to turn murder into profit. Militarised capitalism is on the ascendancy, and the idea of cosmopolitanism is dead and buried. The destruction of the Tamarind Market augurs badly if, like me, you’re invested in the metaphoric truth implicit in the notion of Tamarind, an evergreen tree of the pea family, native to tropical Africa. The seeds of the edible fruit are embedded in the pulp of the tamarind, which is of soft brown or reddish black consistency and used in foods as much as in medicines. Not so the Bakhaaraha Market. To me, a silo suggests an entity that takes pride in its separateness, intolerant, parasitic, and unproductive.

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CLONED EYES

LI RUI

As a writer, I have often been invited to conferences and seminars on literature for which I have prepared a number of papers. Gradually, I have come to understand one thing: all these discussions eventually have nothing to do with ourselves. In the end, when you face a sheet of paper or the keyboard of a computer, you face the world and literature alone. It is more or less like walking into a bookshop or a library. You see many good books, but what you want to do is to write a totally different one and place it on the bookshelves. The experience of writing can be expressed in a metaphor we have all heard: when an apple falls from the apple tree, a pious believer says that it happens because of God’s will, while a rigorous scientist says that it’s caused by earth’s gravitation. A hard-working fruit grower worries about this year’s harvest, while a boy immediately smiles, picks up the apple and takes a bite. No one can clearly explain why we draw so many conclusions from the same event. And not only do the conclusions differ: thinking

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carefully, we may also ask ourselves whether all mortal beings on this earth really live in the same world. For example, we, who sit in a comfortable room in Stockholm discussing literature, very probably have experiences and points of view different from those of the Chinese peasants who toil on the yellow highland, in cold wind or under the scorching sun. While we are either wisely or profoundly discussing “literature as a witness,” a bomb is probably exploding among a group of people somewhere in the world, and those who dropped the bomb and those whose bodies are smashed into pieces by it also have completely different experiences and points of view. For this reason, I would like to tell you about an event which I once experienced myself. About thirty years ago, China brought about the Great Cultural Revolution. I was sent from Beijing to Dijiahe, a village in the Luliang mountain area. I worked there as peasant for six years. At the time, we who were sent from the cities to the countryside were called “educated youth.” One year, during the autumn harvest season, a theft took place in the village. Someone stole a bag of wheat from the threshing ground. At that time, the system with people’s communes was still in effect in the Chinese countryside: the fields belonged to the collective, and every village was organized into one collective production team. Stealing the production team’s wheat was the same as stealing collective property. Dijiahe was a small village with only sixteen households. No such thing had ever happened before. Therefore, the theft became a great scandal, and the commune leaders regarded it as a case of class struggle. They personally visited the village to investigate the case, even though it was situated about nine kilometres away from the commune. However, after the investigation they had no clues that could reveal the identity of the thief. We, the “educated youth,” were outsiders and lived in a dormitory especially built for us. We had no means of hiding the booty and were therefore excluded as

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suspects. The commune leaders had no alternative but to let the villagers elect a thief, and they asked all of us “educated youths” to supervise the election. During the election, villagers who were actually relatives all placed their votes on the bookkeeper of the production team because he had hindered them from gaining complete control over the village. In one instant, these peasants, who usually seemed so candid and simple, managed to turn the theft of one bag of wheat into a village power struggle. The complicated result of the election was really far beyond the expectations of all those concerned. It became neither the kind of class struggle that the leaders had wanted to see, nor the accusation of the real thief that was needed to clear up the case. And it certainly wasn’t a real democratic election. In fact, it was the most peculiar “democratic election” I have ever witnessed. The reason why I tell you about this small event is to emphasize the complexity of being a witness. I am sure that everyone involved in the event would offer a completely different version of the “truth.” If this is true for a small village of only sixteen households, how can we expect to have an “objective” narration of the world and its history? This short story only provides us with limited material and possibilities, whereas literature claims much more than just a passive record of objective reality. As I understand it, the reason why literature can emerge from such different worlds is that it expresses the most profound experiences and emotions, and displays the richest imagination. Every writer is singular, has his own eyes, and his own inner world. In this “non-objective” inner world, there are riches difficult to describe, riches with innumerable shapes and forms, and unforgettable, profound authenticity. When you enter a graveyard, you see rows of gravestones standing silently under the sun. Every gravestone represents an authentic death. But only when you suddenly see the names of your relatives or friends do warm tears fill your eyes and thousands of thoughts come to mind. At that moment,

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silent death suddenly changes into endless memories and grief. Past events and emotions that are hard to express in a few words suddenly emerge in the external world. The world touched by our eyes has rich human significance because it contrasts with the inner world. During the so-called unprecedented Great Cultural Revolution, the Chinese were forced to think about and look at the world according to “Mao Zedong Thought,” and to express themselves in Maoist style. They were only allowed to sing one tune and to dance one dance. So-called “model plays” were created particularly for this purpose. No one knows how many “unreal” inner worlds and emotions were strangled and suffocated in that “real” and unitary outer world. Thirty years have passed, and today China has seen great changes. Both vitality and corruption have spread all over the country like wild grass. No witness can fully describe the depth and the complication of the change. Big claims like “pushing forward the progress of history” only become superficial simplifications of real life, a whitewashing of cruelty and darkness. I have seen how capitalism and money, which years ago were seen as sources of evil and the greatest enemies, have now mingled with power and become a new religion. I have discovered that once again, people in China speak the same language, think according to the same values, act according to the same morality, sing the same tune, dance the same dance, and use the same famous trademark products to package and make themselves up. The only difference from the past is that nowadays the goal is not revolution, but popularity—to create popularity in order to make big money. For this reason, people have manufactured a number of skilled popular “stars” to “guide” the market. In order to monopolize a market that can generate great profit—Chinese money as well as foreign currencies— everyone wants to co-operate with those in power. No one knows how much human feeling and conscience has drowned in the

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dirty waters of the popular conspiracy of power and money. Such a world produces obedient eyes and fashionable lies. For this reason, literature should now preserve the authenticity of the inner world and its emotions and remain a witness of intuitive knowledge. Because of this experience, as a writer I am sceptical of any kind of theory intended to guide literary writing, no matter whether in the name of “revolution” or in the name of “postmodernism.” On July 5, 1996, the first female sheep created by clone technology was born in England and given the name Dolly. As we are used to giving historical periods names like “the stone age,” “the iron age,” “the age of the steam engine,” “the age of electricity,” or “the computer age,” it has now been proudly announced that we have entered the “the clone age.” From now on, lives can be duplicated like information on computers discs, in exact copies of the original. However, the cloning of human beings as the next step in our development has immediately become an issue causing international debate and worry, because cloning technology has touched upon the most fundamental ethical base for the survival of mankind. Just as humans have used scientific methods to eliminate numerous other species on earth, today some people plan to apply cloning technology to decide what kinds of human beings should be born and allowed to live. Behind these debates, we can see a common fear and worry: that is, the fear of living in a homogeneous world even if it has been made homogenous by science. We know that when power expands into dictatorship, it creates a unitary world, and when money expands into monopoly, it does the same. This time, it is science that can create a unitary world of the highest scientific degree. In this world, the classification of good and bad, superior and inferior, decided by a few people, will become the terrible supreme “truth.” Some scientists have commented thus on the issue:

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Cloning means duplicating genes exactly as they are. It will not change the composition of genes in groups of lives. The reason is that clones do not undergo a process of recomposition of genes by deductive splitting and sexual reproduction or zoogamy, and therefore they cannot create new compositions of genes. Without these, a species cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances. However, as long as cloning is not carried out on a great scale, we do not have to worry about such a situation.1

Here, the scientists give us a prerequisite for using cloning technology: “as long as this technology is used properly.” But historical facts show that we have a poor record. When we grasped the technology to build ships and airplanes, we produced gunboats and bombers; when we grasped the method of creating nuclear energy, we produced nuclear weapons; when we grasped the sciences of bacteriology and biology, we produced biochemical weapons; when we grasped space technology, we produced spy satellites and so-called star-war programs. Almost every technical revolution was followed by an even greater injury to mankind. We have hardly ever observed prerequisites. In one sense, we can say that the greatest ecological damage to date to this celestial body where we live is the result of the development of human science and technology. I believe in the science that my own eyes can see, but I cannot believe in the myth of the supremacy of science and technology that I see at the same time. And I particularly do not believe in any myth regarding sciences and technologies that are controlled and monopolized by a few people. At the same time, we have also seen that masterpieces are produced every time literature betrays and resists that kind of unitary world. In those works, we see man’s creativity, pursuit of freedom, and—most precious—his dignity. Therefore, for a writer, if there is a “universal truth,” then that truth is that we should never see the world through the same eyes, and always resist “cloned” eyes.

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Notes 1. Fang Zhouzi, Kuiyang—zhimian zhongguo xueshujie de fubai (Ulcer: Facing directly the corruption of the Chinese academic circles) (China: Hainan chubanshe, 2002), 327.

Translated from the Chinese by Maiping Chen

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WITNESS: THE INWARD TESTIMONY

NADINE GORDIMER

One cannot but see something unintentionally foreboding, ominous in the theme chosen early in the year 2001 for the lectures to be given at this gathering for the Nobel Centennial. As those of us who have been honoured by the request to speak were gathering our thoughts and perhaps beginning to assemble them on the page, terror pounced from the sky and the world was made witness to it. We writers had no way of knowing, as we wrote, what the consequences of this inconceivable act would be proving to be, as we stand up before you in Stockholm months later. And here we are. We all know by now the consequences that have come to pass. Whatever is still to come, there remains the first of terrible events which set the others in tragic train on September 11th. What place, task, meaning will literature have in witness to a disaster without precedent, descending deliberately and pitilessly on a country not at war?

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A sunny day in New York. HORROR was written on the sun… The prophetic words of the poet, William Plomer.1 For the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of the unspeakable horrors of war; this was the horror that had come with the arrival of a new millennium that has dedicated itself to globalisation—a concept which both implies and is absolutely reliant on an end of violent solutions of international conflict. Place, task, meaning. To apportion these I believe we have first to define what witness is. No simple term. I go to The Oxford English Dictionary and find definitions fill more than a smallprint column. Witness: “attestation of a fact, event, or statement; testimony, evidence… One who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation….” 2 Television crews, photographers, are pre-eminent witnesses in these senses of the word, when it comes to a catastrophe so staggeringly visual. No need for words to describe it; no possibility words could. Firsthand newsprint, descriptive journalism, becomes essentially a pallid after-image. Television made “personal observation,” “attestation of a fact, event,” a qualification of witness not only for those thousands who stood aghast in the streets of downtown New York and around the Pentagon, but everyone world-wide who saw it all happening on television. The place and task of attesting the fact, event or statement, testimony, evidence—the qualification of one who is or was present and is able to testify—this is that of the media. Analyses of the disaster follow in political, sociological terms by various ideological, national, special or populist schemas, some claiming that elusive, reductive state, objectivity. And to the contexts— political, sociological—in this case, according to the dictionary there must be added analysis in religious terms. For the eighth definition reads: “One who testifies for Christ or the Christian faith, especially by death; a martyr.”3 The Oxford English

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Dictionary, conditioned by Western, Christian culture, naturally makes the curious semantic decision to confine this definition of the term witness to one faith only. But the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in the USA were witness, in this sense, to another faith—a faith which the dictionary does not recognise: each man was one who testified to the faith of Islam by death and martyrdom. Place, task—meaning. Meaning is what cannot be reached by the immediacy of the image, the description of the sequence of events, the methodologies of expert analysis. If witness literature is to find its place, take on a task in relation to the enormity of what happened on a sunny day in September and in that day’s aftermath, it is in the depths of revealed meaning. It is in the tensions of sensibility, the intense awareness, the antennae of receptivity to the lives among which writers experience their own as a source of their art. Poetry and fiction are processes of what The Oxford English Dictionary defines as the state of witness “applied to the inward testimony”—the individual lives of men, women, and children who have to reconcile within themselves the shattered certainties which are as much a casualty as the bodies under the rubble in New York and the dead in Afghanistan. Kafka says that the writer sees among ruins “different (and more) things than the others”4; “it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.”5 This is the nature of witness that writers can give, surely must give, and have been giving since ancient times in the awesome responsibility of their endowment with the seventh sense of the imagination. The “realization” of what has happened comes from what would seem to deny reality—the transformation of events, motives, emotions, reactions from immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning. If we accept that “contemporary” spans the century in which all of us here were born as well as the one scarcely and starkly

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begun, there are many examples of this fourth dimension of experience that is the writer’s space and place, attained. “Thou shalt not kill”: the moral dilemma that patriotism and certain religions demand be suppressed in the individual sent to war comes inescapably from the First World War pilot in W. B. Yeats’s poem: “Those that I fight I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love.”6 A leap from murderers’ row that only the poet can make. The Radetsky March and The Emperor’s Tomb—Joseph Roth’s peripatetic dual epic of frontiers as the Charybdis and Scylla of the breakup of the old world with the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is not only inward testimony to the ever-lengthening host of ever-wandering refugees into the new century, the Greek chorus of the dispossessed that drowns the muzak of consumerism.7 It is the inward testimony to what goes on working its way as a chaos of ideological, ethnic, religious, and political consequences—Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia—that come to us through the vision of Roth. The statistics of the Holocaust are a ledger of evil, the figures still visible on people’s arms; but Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man makes extant a state of existence that becomes part of consciousness for all time.8 The primal cause of human inhumanity to humans, which was about to epitomise in the fall of atom bombs on Japan, is fore-shadowed and encompassed in Kenzaburo Oe’s World War II story, where a black American survives the crash of an American fighter plane in a remote district of Japan and is discovered by villagers.9 None have ever seen a black man before: “He is black, you see that…. He’s a real black man…”; “What are they going to do with him, shoot him?”10 “Because he’s the enemy,” asserts the narrator, a child of the village.11 But his father says, “Until we know what the town thinks, rear him.” “Rear him? Like an animal?”

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“He’s the same as an animal,” my father said gravely. “He stinks like an ox.”12 The man is chained to a wild boar trap and kept in a cellar; the small boys are delegated to take him food and empty his sanitary pail. Totally dehumanised, “the black soldier began to exist in the cellar for the sole purpose of filling the children’s daily lives.”13 They are fascinated by and terrified of him, until one day they find him tinkering with the boar trap with the manual skill they recognize from the abilities of their own people. “He’s like a person,” one boy says.14 They secretly bring him a tool box. He works to free his legs. “We sat next to him and he looked at us, then his large yellow teeth were bared and his cheeks slackened and we were jolted by the discovery that he could also smile. We understood then that we had been joined to him by a sudden deep, passionate bond that was almost ‘human.’”15 Oe’s genius of inward testimony goes even deeper in not turning away from the aleatory circumstances—otherness, its definitive in war—which end in the captive using the boy brutally as a human shield when the adults come to kill him. And the monitored and measured accounts of distortion, mutation of living organisms, human, animal and plant life, down generations, which was to come as the result of atomic explosion, find the shudder of meaning in a single flower. Another Japanese writer, Masuji Ibuse, writes of an iris appearing out of season: “from…the angular leaves emerged the twisted stem with its belated, purple flower. The petals looked hard and crinkly. No wonder I had mistaken them for tissue paper.” And a friend says, “the iris in this pond is crazy and belongs to a crazy age!”16 The level of imaginative tenacity at which the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote witnessed the apocalyptic events of apartheid amid which he was living is also organic in its persistent perception.17 He writes, “I want to look at what happened; / That done, / As silent as the roots of plants pierce the soil / I

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look at what happened… / When knives creep in and out of people / As day and night into time.”18 In an earlier age, the greatness of Joseph Conrad’s inward testimony finds that the heart of darkness is not Mistah Kurtz’s skull-bedecked river station besieged by savage Congolese, but back in the offices in King Leopold’s Belgium where knitting women sit while the savage trade in natural rubber is efficiently organized, with a quota for extraction by blacks that must be met or punished at the price of severed hands.19 # These are some examples of what Czeslaw Milosz # # calls the writer’s “fusing of individual and historical elements” and that Georg Lukács defines as the occurrence of “a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it”; “the duality of inwardness and the outside world.”20 I have spoken of the existential condition of the writer of witness literature in the way in which I would define that literature. The question raises a hand: How much has the writer been involved in his or her own flesh-and-blood person, at risk in the radical events, social upheavals, the threats to the very bases of life and dignity? How much must the writer be involved? In a terrorist attack, anyone present in the air or on earth is at risk, become activist-as-victim. No choice of being any kind of observer. In other terrible events—the wars, social upheavals, for good or bad ends—like anyone else, the writer may be a victim: no choice. But the writer, like anyone else, may have chosen to be a protagonist. As witness in her or his own person, victim or protagonist, is that writer not unquestionably the one from whom the definitive witness literature must come? Albert Camus believed so. Camus expected that his comrades in the French resistance who had experienced so much that was physically, mentally, both spiritually devastating and strengthening, appallingly revealing, would produce writers who would bring all this to literature and into the consciousness of the French as no other form of witness

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could. He waited in vain for the writer to emerge. The extremity of human experience does not make a writer. An Oe surviving atomic blast and fallout, a Dostoevsky reprieved at the last moment before a firing squad; the predilection has to be there, as a singer is endowed with a certain kind of vocal chords, a boxer is endowed with aggression. Levi could be speaking of these fellow writers as well as of himself, as an inmate of Auschwitz, when he realizes that theirs are stories each to be told “of a time and condition that cannot be understood except in the manner in which…we understand events of legends….”21 The duality of inwardness and the outside world…that is the one essential existential condition of the writer as witness. Marcel Proust certainly would be regarded by most as the one among great writers least confronted by any kind of public event; critics seem to ignore that the cork-lined room to which they confine him did not exclude the invasion of the Faubourg Saint-Germain of his novel by the most tellingly brilliant revelations of anti-Semitism among the most privileged and powerful in France. So I am not daunted by any raised eye-brows when I accept, from Proust, a signpost for writers in our context: “the march of thought in the solitary travail of artistic creation proceeds downwards, into the depths, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance—towards the goal of truth.”22 Writers cannot and do not indulge in the hubris of believing they can plant the flag of truth on that ineluctable territory. But what is sure is that we can exclude or discard nothing in our solitary travail towards meaning, downward into the acts of terrorism. We have to seek this meaning in those who commit such acts just as we do in its victims. We have to acknowledge them. Graham Greene’s priest in The Comedians gives a religious edict from his interpretation of the Christian faith: “The church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly.”23 And another of his characters, Dr. Magiot, avows, “I would rather

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have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.”24 There are many, bearing witness in one dictionary definition or another, who remind the world that the United States of America, victim of ghastly violence, has had on its hands the water of indifference to the cosmic gap between its prosperity in the last decade and the world’s poor—the richest ten percent of twenty-five million (plus) Americans had a combined income greater than the combined income of the forty-three percent poorest of the world population, around two billion people.25 Georg Büchner’s character in the play Danton’s Death makes a chilling declaration: “Terror is an outgrowth of virtue…the revolutionary government is the despotism of freedom against the tyranny of kings.”26 Where does the despotism of terrorism begin to grow; why? And where will it end? How? This is the mined territory of meaning in the crisis of the present, from which the writer’s responsibility cannot be absolved: “Servitude, falsehood and terror…. Three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, obscure them from one another and prevent them from rediscovering themselves.”27 That is what Camus found in that territory. It is a specification within Milan Kundera’s credo: “for a novelist, a given historical situation is an anthropological laboratory in which he explores the basic question: What is existence?”28 And Kundera goes on to quote Heidegger: “The essence of man has the form of a question.” If this question is unanswerable, just as final truth is unattainable, literature has been and remains a means of people rediscovering themselves. Which may be part of the answer to terrorism and the violent response it evokes. It has never been more necessary, vital, than now, when Information Technology, the new faith, has failed to bring this rediscovery about. Is there inevitably a loss of artistic liberty for the writer in inward testimony as witness?

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A testy outburst not from a writer, but from a painter, Picasso, replies, vis-à-vis their creativity, for artists in every medium: What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet …quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it.29

Neither can the art. And there emerges “Guernica.” Flaubert writes to Turgenev, “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”30 Witness literature is not anathema to, incompatible with experiment in form and style, the marvellous adventures of the word. On the contrary, when writers, as André Pieyre de Mandiagues asks “have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measures, must it not be recited, spoken?”31 In response, the writer has to wrestle with all the possibilities of his medium, the Word, to find the one way in which the demands of meaning can be recited, spoken. There is no style and form ready-made for witness literature. If it is to be a poem, it has to be found among all the combinations of poetics, tried or never tried, to be equal to the unique expression that will contain the event beyond the event, its past and future. As Yeats did with his pilot at war. If witness is to be a story or novel, that final demand—the expression of the event before and beyond the event—is the same. Among all the ways of plumbing meaning, existing and to be, this has to be discovered. Here, if I may, I recount my own experience as that of a writer given evidence of a disaster which seemed to exceed all measure. This year it happened differently; the Twin Towers of the American people were flung in a single brutal attack to bury

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the lives of thousands of Americans. It was not an institutionalised event, its consequences, which are upon the world now, were then incalculable. In my own country, South Africa, racism in its many, brutally destructive guises, from killing in conquest to the methodology of colonialism in practice, certified as divine will by selective doctrine, took the lives of thousands of Africans and stunted the lives of millions more, systematically, over generations. While the world looked on unperturbed and even profited, helping itself to the country’s resources produced by cheap labour. I grew up in the Union that came out of wars for possession between two colonisers, the British and the descendants of the Dutch, the Boers. The Africans had already been dispossessed by both. I was the child of the white minority, blinkered in privilege as a conditioning education, basic as abc. But because I was a writer—for it’s an early state of being, before a word has been written, not an attribute of being published—I became witness to the unspoken in my society. Very young, I entered a dialogue with myself about what was around me; and this took the form of trying for the meaning in what I saw by transforming this into stories based on what were everyday incidents of ordinary life for everyone around me: the sacking of the backyard room of a black servant by police while the white master and mistress of the house looked on unconcerned; later, in my adolescence during the ’39–’45 War, when I was an aide at a gold mine casualty station, being told by the white intern who was suturing a black miner’s gaping head-wound without anaesthetic, “They don’t feel like we do.” As time and published books confirmed that I was a writer, and witness literature, if it is a particular genre of circumstance of my time and place, was mine, I had to find how to keep my integrity to the Word, the sacred charge of the writer. I realized, as I believe many writers do, that instead of restricting, inhibiting, coarsely despoiling aesthetic liberty, the existential condition of witness was enlarging, inspiring aesthetic liberty, breaching the

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previous limitations of my sense of form and use of language through necessity: to create form and use anew. In the fifties, a story written almost anecdotally tried for inward testimony of the delivery from the mortuary of a body, any black man’s body would do, instead of that of the father of a labourer on a white man’s farm; the denial of possession of even six feet of the country, a grave-sized share, to its rightful owner. In the 1970s, when the dispossession of Africans of their country reached its final entrenchment under apartheid, I found myself writing a novel for which only some combined form of lyricism and its antithesis, irony, could try for the meaning of land, buried this time with the body of an unknown black man on a white man’s rural retreat and rising, in the river’s flood, a corpse to claim it. The apparently obsessive return to the theme—literally the ground of colonialism on which I lived—was both subconscious in the writer’s lifetime love affair with the possibilities of the Word and an imperative from the condition of witness. Aesthetic liberty is an essential of witness literature if it is to fulfil its justification as meaning. And the form and use of language that will be the expression for one piece of work will not serve for another. When next I wrote a novel, it was, in terms of witness literature, an exploration of inward testimony to revolutionary political dedication as a faith like any religious faith with edicts not to be questioned by any believer, and the consequences of this, the existential implications handed down from father to daughter, mother to son. Witness called on aesthetic liberty to find the form and language in order for the narrative to be fulfilled in meaning. Lyricism and irony would not serve where a daughter’s inner survival of personality depended on fully recovering her father’s life of willing martyrdom; his loving relationship with her and its calculating contradictions in the demands his highest relationship, political faith, made upon her; his actions, motives, other personal attachments, which the condition of revolutionary clandestinity perforce made a mystery.

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A work where, indeed, actual documents must be encompassed to be deciphered in terms of inward testimony. Through aesthetic liberty I had, so to speak, to question this story in many inner voices, to tell it in whatever I might reach of its own meaning, submerged beneath public ideology, discourse and action. Not a psychological but an aesthetic quest. There is no ivory tower that can keep the assault of reality from beating at the walls, as Flaubert dismayedly noted. In witness to it the imagination is not irreal but is the deeper reality. Its exigence can never allow compromise with conventional cultural # # calls “official lies.”32 That outstanding wisdom and what Milosz intellectual of no compromise, Edward Said, asks who, if not the writer, is “to uncover and elucidate the contests, challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and normalized quiet of unseen power”?33 And the final word on witness literature surely comes from Camus: “The moment when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.”34 Notes 1. William Plomer, “Manifesto,” in Turbott Wolfe (1925; reprint, with an introduction by Laurens van der Post, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 216. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s. v. “witness.” 3. Ibid. 4. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod. (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 1. 5. Ibid., 2. 6. W. B. Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” lines 3–4. 7. Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1995); The Emperor’s Tomb, trans. John Hoare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984). 8. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987). 9. Kenzaburo Oe, “Price Stock,” in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, trans. John Nathan (London: Marion Boyars, 1978).

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10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 124. 12. Ibid., 126–27. 13. Ibid., 144. 14. Ibid., 146. 15. Ibid., 147. 16. Masuji Ibuse, “The Crazy Iris,” trans. Ivan Morris in The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath, ed. Kenzaburo Oe (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 17–35. 17. Mongane Wally Serote, “Ofay-Watcher Looks Back,” in Yakhal’inkomo (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1983), 57. 18. Ibid., 57. 19. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1999). 20. Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leah (London: Sidgwich and Jackson, 1981); Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). 21. Levi, ibid. 22. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, vol. 2 of In Search of Time Lost, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996). 23. Graham Greene, The Comedians (London: Bodley Head, 1966). 24. Ibid., 312. 25. Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press for the United Nations Development Programme, 2001). 26. Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, trans. James Maxwell (London: Eyre Methan, 1979). 27. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 283. 28. Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Knopf, 1974). 29. Pablo Picasso, Les Lettres Françaises 30. Gustave Flaubert to Ivan Turgenev, Croisset, 13 November 1872, The Letters of Flaubert 1857–80, ed. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1982), 200.

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31. André Pieyre de Mandiagues, The Margin, trans. Richard Howard (London: Calder and Boyárs, 1967). 32. Czeslaw # Milosz, # # “Dedication” in Selected Poems (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 45. 33. Edward W. Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” The Nation, 17 September 2001, 31. 34. Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (1965; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1970).

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ELABORATIONS OF TESTIMONY

KENZABURO OE

Just as a good majority of twentieth century writers aspired to author a testimony of the contemporary age as they embarked upon their literary careers, I aspired to do the same as I embarked upon mine. And, just as many of the writers encountered difficulty, I too did not quite well succeed in fulfilling what I had set out to accomplish. There are, of course, those who have produced excellent testimonies from diverse scenes of the twentieth century. These writers, though but sons and daughters of the contemporary age, have secured a place in humankind’s universal testimonial archive, their works the raw voices of individuals. It is no exaggeration to say that we find, in these archives, an array of works comparable to the testimonies of Dante. Of the many experiences to which one can testify, today I have chosen to talk about one pertaining to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I conducted repeated field research on my own with a view to writing an extensive testimony on this topic, but I must confess I have not yet been able to produce the

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kind of work I had intended to write. I shall first talk about why I have not been able to accomplish this and later on discuss a female writer whose testimony I evaluate very highly. In the summer of my thirtieth year—twenty years after the bombing of Hiroshima—I started interviewing A-bomb victims receiving treatment at the Hiroshima A-Bomb Hospital for outbreaks of latent radiation illnesses. From then on, I visited Hiroshima every summer for many years and conducted interviews in the same manner I had conducted the first one. However, no single patient whose account I recorded was the same, for none survived from one year to the next. The method I employed in conducting my interviews was to first spend an entire day listening to what a patient had to say while a doctor stood by to see that he or she was not getting tired. I took notes and recorded the interview on a small taperecorder. The next day, I would visit the person again and have him or her read the text I had written based on my notes and the recording I had made. The first few words all my interviewees uttered upon reading what I had written were, without exception, “No, this is not what I went through that day, nor in the days that followed!” They would then retell their experience, using my text as a starting point. The account would be more detailed than the first, making it a vivid testimony in terms of narration. Even so, upon reading my second text, the patients would say, “No, this is not what I went through that day, nor in the days that followed!” This comment was a preface to the ongoing, still more vivid narrative of their experience. However, the longest I could stay in Hiroshima was for three weeks, and there was no end to our joint work. On the last day of my annual summer visit, instead of giving me permission to publish the final draft, each befriended patient, male and female, said as they always did, “I enjoyed it. Let’s do it again.”

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The patients’ words anticipated Edward W. Said’s thoughts on elaboration and a line in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: “until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis.”1 Before discussing these two thinkers in more detail, I would like to draw upon one A-bomb victim’s testimony, which is first-class literature in its own right. Writer Hayashi Kyoko was a fourteen-year-old school girl when she suffered the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Three atomic bombs, two plutonium and one uranium, had been developed by then. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb. The other plutonium bomb was used in a test in New Mexico. The uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. In 1975, Hayashi published Matsuri-no-ba (A festival site), a short story depicting her experience of the Nagasaki bombing.2 This was thirty years later, and, in the meantime, she had given birth to a healthy child. These thirty years, however, were years in which she lived in constant fear of an outbreak of radiation illness, compounded by the fear of her child being afflicted with a genetic ailment. Nevertheless, it is hardly possible for the gifted Hayashi, who later became a representative post-war writer, especially of the short story, not to write about her childhood experience during this long period of time—although at first she may have only verbalized it in her heart and not put it down on paper. The reason why she did not publish her writing earlier is most likely because a voice continued to echo in her ears, saying “No, this is not what I went through that day, nor in the days that followed!” By no means does this imply that she strove to escape from her August 9 experience. Instead, she continued to push herself up to a progressively higher place, building upon what she repeatedly negated, always in search of words and expressions to replace the ones she penned before. The process heightened and, at the same time, added depth to her perception of what

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had happened on that day in August. This she did in order to comprehend the meaning of not only her own experience but also of what humankind of the twentieth century experienced on that day. Needless to say, the dropping of the plutonium bomb over the heads of Nagasaki citizens played no positive role in the history of humankind. However, the manoeuvring of words by an emerging female writer heightened and deepened the meaning of the bombing as an absolute quantity and quality, and established it as an event never to be forgotten. Matsuri-no-ba, Hayashi’s first work, abundantly shows the literary qualities that only the toil of such rewriting and elaboration can accumulate. For example, bitter irony. What occasioned Hayashi to write the work was a letter addressed to a Japanese scientist, which had been put in a radiosonde that was dropped from the B-29 lead plane at the same time as the bomb, to measure the pressure and other effects of the explosion. The letter, a warning for Japan to surrender, was from colleagues with whom the scientist had worked during a stay in the Unites States. It included the following passage: “As scientists, we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold in fury.”3 Hayashi’s point of departure as a writer is to write in criticism of the scientists who authored the letter: As a victim of the Nagasaki bombing, I cannot read the warning with a calm mind, it coming at the expense of the lives of people whose faces I knew, and being fraught as it was with premeditated effectiveness. As a testimony of history gone by, I cannot overlook the words “this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold in fury.” I picture Nagasaki’s Uragami district on August 9 when the rain of atomic bombs increased in fury and killed my friends. The three scientists who wrote the letter as a natural course of action, or the United States, which made

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them write it—I admire them: they are capable of fury because they are God’s children.4

The irony that Hayashi expresses — one directed at the American scientists’ belief in righteousness, scientists of a largely Christian nation—is perhaps an over-simplification. However, the irony becomes more complex as she develops her recollection. Let me turn to a passage where the young girl cremates the victims in the open air, and examine how her eyes and mind have come to look upon the scene: Their stomachs split open with a cracking sound as I burn them. Specks of fat fly and sparks of fire flutter up after them, igniting them in mid-air. Watching the sudden flare-ups in the unexpectedly wide expanse of darkness is like waiting to see what sort of secret ink picture will appear on the paper on which it is drawn, and it’s fun. It’s beautiful, and I’m dazzled. Before long, I start waiting for the short moments when I would see fancy flames, when I’d be thinking to myself, “soon that belly’s going to crack open.”5

The word “beautiful” would not have appeared in the testimony had the young girl written it immediately after the bombing. It is a word Hayashi won for herself during the thirty years she accurately verbalized her memory. It overlaps with the words of the American scientists (“our beautiful discovery”) and evokes a powerful perception of humankind—one so powerful as to border on the grotesque. I believe Hayashi was not unaware of the effects of her diction. Nor did she distort the memory of the fourteen-year-old girl. Herein lies the strange power of words when they undergo elaborations spanning a long period of time. Twenty-five years later, Hayashi, who had already established herself as a writer, published a work entitled The Experience of a Person Who Has Taken a Long Time.6 In it, she writes about her first work, as follows:

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I wrote in that story that they [the writers of the letter] are capable of fury because they are God’s children. At that time, I was not particularly aware of their god, which lay hidden at the bottom of their words. I simply thought there was no rhyme or reason for me to incur the wrath of their god. There is no mention of God in the warning, but if there were an existence that could, in fury, strike people living a normal everyday life with a flash and heat unconceivable in daily life—strike those people who are no different from anybody else—that existence, I presume, has to be God. I remember myself on the hill in Matsuyama-cho that summer, where the bomb exploded, some five hundred meters above the town. I was at the Mitsubishi Weapons Manufacturing Factory, about 1.4 kilometres from the epicentre. Kana and I worked in different factories, but most of the 324 students who were in the same grade as I, and who were mobilized to do factory work, were bombed. Records say that the bomb exploded at 11:02 a.m. I was working in the paper recycling factory building, and the wooden structure came down on me. I managed to crawl out, followed other people, and fled. But the direction in which I fled was toward the epicentre of the blast. In those days, none of us in Japan—except for a limited few—had been informed of the horror of the new bomb. I crossed the Uragami River and climbed up the hill, stepping over corpses and injured persons, and it must have been about two o’clock when I reached the terraced fields of Matsuyama-cho. Looking back, I cannot help but wonder at the coincidence of the day that lured me toward the epicentre. I don’t believe there was any Divine will at work, but there were actually other routes of escape I could have taken. Perhaps the roads one must walk in life are all mapped out for us before we are born. I sense an ominous scheme on life at the depth of what I take to be the coincidence that lured me to the epicentre of the century’s

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greatest evil—an evil intent beyond the reach of human intelligence, bidding me with a relentless force to enter into the very kernel of the atomic bomb.7

The reason Hayashi dwells on her walk to the epicentre immediately after the dropping of the bomb, which she did as if she were being pulled to it, is because she, in her old age, is afraid of cancer. The problem of “internal radiation”—that is, the effect of continued radiation from radioactive substances that have entered the body—has surfaced for A-bomb victims who now have lived for half a century since the bombing. Hayashi’s body had absorbed plutonium, the worst toxic radiation ever, in Matsuyama-cho, the epicentre of the blast. Her life after the bombing can be said to have started from this town, and to complete it, she contemplates making a pilgrimage, not to the Christian god, but to the temples where the buddhas are consecrated. As if spurred on by her insalubrious physical condition, of which she is fully aware, she embarks upon the pilgrimage, bearing in her heart—or should I say together with— her fourteen- and fifteen-year-old friends who perished in the bombing and all those who died of radiation illnesses during the ensuing half century. Hayashi rejected the scientists who, soon after the dropping of the bombs, empathized with the victors. To her life, which has been that of an expresser, I would like to place in contraposition the following words of Benjamin: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers skip over those who are lying prostrate.”8 The young girl who walked alone, taking pains not to tread over the bodies of the fallen victims, continued walking on to establish herself as an expresser, constantly elaborating on the words of her testimony—until the entire past of August 9 underwent, as Benjamin puts it “a historical apocatastasis,” and

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was “brought into the present.”9 Hayashi’s literature is, in part, a realization of Benjamin’s thought. As a restitution of the past, it plays a role which I consider to be that of literature as testimony. Let me talk for a moment about elaborations in the music of the late composer, Takemitsu Toru. Said succeeded Theodor Adorno in the realm of music theorization and developed it further. Committed to “humanistic discipline” and hence always mindful of self-criticism, Said creatively analysed the affiliation between music and society in the twentieth century, especially its latter half.10 In particular, Said introduced and elucidated the various functions of elaborations in music. I learned from him how characteristic elaborations of performances—the concerthall performances of Alfred Brendel and Glenn Gould and their recordings by musicians who had expanded their roles to an extent that could not have existed prior to the twentieth century— brought about a new relationship for intellectuals in their interaction with society and music. Personally, I have lived my life as a writer as if to overlap with that of my friend, the composer Takemitsu Toru, who died before the turn of the century. Through Said, however, I have come to understand the meaning of my friend’s music in a new light. As some of you may know, it was typical of Takemitsu to lucidly present his idiosyncratic “voice,” his singular style, in the first few introductory bars of his music and then to solidly and persuasively build upon it. For the first several years following his debut, Takemitsu, who had received no formal training in music, had to battle with critics who derogatorily labelled his compositions as “pre-music.” Even after his compositions came to be performed internationally, he needed to wrestle with the kitsch simplification of his music being referred to as either “Japanese” or “Oriental.” I can say from my long years of observing him, virtually at his side, that it was by elaborating upon his music that Takemitsu fought his

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life-long battles. Said’s words lend support to my observations and ring especially true for Takemitsu’s works. There are, according to Said, a relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely as music, free of many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things as they are. I want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, and perhaps even excessive displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render the music socially superfluous and useless—to discharge it completely—but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act of freedom.11

Takemitsu won international acclaim, especially in his later years, from performers whose skills were achieved through extremely high-level elaborations. And today, young Japanese musicians endowed with new techniques and concepts continue to rediscover him even after his death. Said also points out that composers who produce their idiosyncratic works in the aforementioned manner are deemed by society to be eccentric and are thus discharged from social constraints.12 Certainly, Takemitsu, while securing a place in society where he was treated differently from other people, continued to express himself as an intellectual with a solid interest in the contemporary age. Let me return to literature. When one writes a testimony on a major incident of modern history, such as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, every detail is important regardless of how voluminous the account may be. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that the words of such a testimony soon turn into cliché, lose vividness, and ring stale despite the novelty of the account. The words can also by dyed a

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certain colour by political intent. Furthermore, they undergo “automatisation” in no time, to use a term employed by the theorists of early twentieth-century Russian formalism. A situation arises in which one has to negate what one has written in the cases I referred to above when the victims, referring to my record of their first account of their singular life-or-death experience, exclaimed, “No, this is not what I experienced that day, nor in the days that followed!” Automatisation erases, one after another, every detail of what the eyes have seen until finally we wax inclined to believe, for example, that to have been made victim of the atomic bomb, suffering humankind’s worst experience, is tantamount to not having been made victim. What the Russian formalists call “defamiliarisation” is necessary to stave off this inclination. To arrive at defamiliarisation, writers of testimony have but to continue elaborating upon their words, their sentences. Needless to say, “elaborating” in this context does not mean polishing words or decorating sentences to achieve beautiful writing. Quite the opposite, it is a process requiring toil that entails repeated laundering of all one has written. Hayashi’s central theme was how a young girl, a surviving victim of the atomic bomb, understands herself and the world as she seeks to continue her life. By examining her elaborations upon this single theme, to which she devoted so many years, I believe I can identify the techniques that enabled her to endeavour as she did. First, introduce into your experience a common voice that transcends your own and then express that voice as truly your own. Second, consider how to make the most of the voices of other individuals, both the concurring and opposing ones, and make them resonate with your own. Third, incorporate into your expression whatever the time you expended on elaboration has brought you—not selectively, but inclusively. This should

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include a recalling to mind of everything this stretch of time has destroyed in you. On this planet spilling over with information, a testimony typical to the new century will come to bear characteristics similar to those of a testimony of a person travelling alone to a new continent in terms of the thoroughness required of the elaborations and the responsibilities of the individual. By the same token, the elaborations of a writer’s comprehensive testimony based on first-hand information from the site of a regional war, for example, will assume an unprecedentedly wide range of possibilities as well as impose heavier responsibilities. Through such elaborations, a writer may be able to recreate himself and become the sort of new and immense intellectual that will be essential in the near future. Even if this is not realized, the elaborations of such writer could serve as an opportunity for new, effective, and thorough criticism of intellectuals in general in an age where ideologies are no more. Finally, there is one thing I notice as I think of the many writers of the twentieth century who have been important to the era and to me. I survey the list of Nobel laureates, which overlaps with another: namely, a list of the great men and women of letters who have not won the prize. What I notice is that these writers and poets, even in cases where their individual works appear as though they were not intended to be testimonies as such, the life of each writer, each poet, and their works taken as a whole is, without exception, a testimony of humankind of the contemporary age. The question I now ask is, has the greatest writer on the planet, or the greatest poet, been correctly selected each year for the Nobel Prize in Literature? Obviously, I hear voices of criticism concerning the selection. When I was chosen, I myself could not help but engage in such criticism, even though to do so meant self-criticism. Putting it bluntly, world literature itself is not

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necessarily the proper field from which to choose the year’s greatest writer or poet. Nevertheless, the Swedish Academy has made steady accomplishments in the direction of expansion in these hundred years by selecting, from virtually every corner of this planet, writers and poets who, in terms of locality and language, should not be consigned to oblivion. The field from which to choose such literati shall expand further and could thus completely revolutionize the definition of world literature. As I turn back to the list of Nobel laureates with such thoughts in mind, I affirm that all the works of each and every writer and poet—works which I have read with delight, especially those of the authors who have already passed away and whose images I picture in my mind — have been, indeed, a testimony of humankind of the twentieth century. As a writer who has not yet put an end to his literary career, I can say that, whenever I return to the works of my great precursors, I reconfirm my belief that literature is, in fact, a testimony of humankind of the contemporary age and that the testifiers live on, transcending their proper names. If proof of what encourages me in the little time I have left exists, I believe it to be none other than this. Thank you. Notes 1. Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Walter Benjamin, The Archades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 459. 2. Hayashi Kyoko, Matsuri-no-ba (A festival site) (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1988). 3. Quoted in Mark Selden, “Factoids and Facts” in H-ASIA: Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit Controversy, http://www2.hnet.msu.edu/~asia/threads/thrdenola.html, 10 February–25 September, 1993. 4. Hayashi, 10.

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5. Ibid., 45. 6. Hayashi Kyoko, The Experience of a Person Who Has Taken a Long Time (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000). 7. Ibid., 29–30. 8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry John (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. 9. Ibid., 459. 10. Said, vx. 11. Ibid., 71. 12. Ibid.

Translated from the Japanese by Kunioki Yanagishita

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LITERATURE AS TESTIMONY: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

GAO XINGJIAN

The topic I wish to discuss is literature and testimony. I am presuming that those here today will not object to the claim that literature testifies to human existence, and would agree that truth is the minimum requirement for literature that is a testimony to it. Literature is subservient to nothing but truth and, in this domain of the free spirit, the writer obeys only one command: to search for truth. In fact, truth has always been the most fundamental criterion of literature — that is, if literature transcending practical utilitarianism continues to be valued, is still worth personal suffering, and is still worth writing. However, during the century just ended, politics has interfered with and stifled literature to an extent that has seldom been seen in human history. The unprecedented ideological mischief turned literature into political propaganda or else made it serve political ends. Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its

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basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom. Politically engaged literature is widespread both in the West and in the East. Literary criticism is primarily a political judgement that labels writers as leftist or rightist, progressive or conservative. Under authoritarian regimes, the labels are extreme. If a writer is not patriotic, he is a traitor; if he is not revolutionary, he is a counter-revolutionary—there are no intermediate positions. The tyranny is such that not to have a political attitude is deemed political, silence is protest, and disengagement from politics is simply not allowed. If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without “isms,” is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name. Of course, the writer who does not involve himself in politics must not flaunt himself as the embodiment of social justice. Needless to say, abstract social justice is not to be found anywhere, and all this sort of rhetoric has a very false ring. Also, the writer is not the embodiment of morality. Short of becoming a sage, how can he instruct the people of the world in morality? The writer is, of course, not a judge. Oddly enough, while this is not at all an enviable profession, there are plenty of people who aspire to it. It would be better for the writer to return to being an ordinary person, born in original sin and without special privileges or powers, because this is the most appropriate position from which to observe the human world.

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However, in the century that has just passed, many of the intellectual elite went mad. It was as if, with the death of God, everyone suddenly turned into a saviour who wanted either to annihilate the obsolete world order or to establish a utopia. Naturally, there were writers among those who went mad. The fact that they had knowledge did not exempt intellectuals: there is madness in everyone. When one loses control over one’s self, the result is madness. Furthermore, as the elimination of self-love is impossible, its control has to be based on self-observation. To possess a certain amount of knowledge, even to be very learned, is not necessarily to have the capacity for introspection. Tyrants and madmen generally do not have low intelligence quotients. Moreover, human misfortunes are not always due to external repression, but are, at times, due to people’s own weaknesses. The unrestrained bloating of the self hinders observation of the human world and causes errors of judgement. It can even destroy the individual. The world neither begins nor ends with a particular individual. The iconoclasm of overthrowing all predecessors and eradicating an entire cultural legacy did not stem solely from a patricidal complex. Linked to the ideology of continuing revolution, it was no longer just an inner impulse but an infectious disease that wreaked havoc for a century and brought catastrophes to the world. If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality. Writers are dissatisfied with purely objective reports on real people and events and instead turn to literature because, through literar y techniques, they can achieve a more profound understanding of the human world even though this sort of observation, based as it is only on the individual writer, has its

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limitations. While subjectivity is inevitable, what it records are actual human perceptions. The writer would do best to revert to the status of the observer and to look with dispassionate eyes upon various facets of human life. If he is able in the same way to soberly observe his own self, he will gain considerable freedom, find the observation fascinating, and give up foolishly trying to recreate the world. In any case, a person cannot recreate himself, and even less can he recreate others. This sort of literature has no mission: it is unburdened, can approximate truth, and does not manufacture falsehoods. Literature that does not fabricate lies is written primarily for the writer himself to read. What a person writes in a private diary is generally the truth, unless a secret code is used for fear that the diary might be read. However, if the whole diary is in code and ends up with the person unable to decipher it himself, then there is no point in continuing to write the diary. A writer does not write because he hopes it will provide a livelihood, but because he perceives an actual discomfort that needs to be discharged through writing. This sort of writing does not require pandering to readers and is in fact the original purpose of literature. Unfortunately, the profession of writing becomes more commercialised as a society modernises. Literary products cannot escape market forces, and writers must fight to sell their works. This market-driven literature no longer has truth as its criterion. Harassed by continuing political and ideological interference and squeezed by the escalating cultural commodification that comes with economic globalisation, literature that has the truth of human life as its criterion is forced to retreat to the margins of society. Writers who persevere in this sort of writing are therefore relegated to the crevices of society. Fortunately, such crevices still exist in the free world. But, under autocratic regimes, how can such writers survive without fleeing? This unfortunate situation in literature is in fact a reflection of the existential predicament of human life. Literature that seeks

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truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or to the market, so readers are limited to people such as those present today who are interested in and approve of it. That such readers exist is a good thing in itself, so there should be no need to complain. This sort of literature is essentially non-utilitarian. Writers who persevere in writing such literature naturally cannot rely on winning a prize, but probably write in the hope of someday winning recognition. If the writer does not obtain some satisfaction from this sort of writing, it will be hard for him to continue, so the search for truth is an indispensable stimulus. With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive. However, writers devoted to this sort of writing are particularly stubborn. The impulse to search for truth is a passion that demands gratification: it is a form of lust. There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer. Eyewitness accounts about real people and events, even when not limited by political or social interdictions, are affected by personal advantage or disadvantage and by social practice. Their confirmation of truth can therefore only be framed within certain boundaries. A statement in itself predisposes a judgement because it can only focus on the event itself—not its causes and effect. Statements can therefore only remain at the surface layer of fact, and while they are able to satisfy the requirements of the media, they do not reveal deeper layers of truth. Literature as testimony, however, is not satisfied with just a few eyewitness accounts. It should be noted that not all eyewitness accounts are adequate. The cowardice or standpoint of a witness may lead to intentional and non-intentional omissions, or psychological inhibitions may prevent a witness from divulging certain things. And, needless to say, a witness could very well be oblivious to persons with certain motives who may be responsible

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for what has taken place. However, literature has no taboos and can transcend all of these limitations. The writer who chooses to write literature as a testimony is, of course, aware that, by writing about real people and events or about his personal experiences, he unavoidably imposes a limitation on his literary creation. But a writer will accept such a limitation because he is searching for truth, which is his overriding criterion. Compared with history, the testimonies of literature are often much more profound. History inevitably bears the imprint of an authority and is therefore revised with each change of authority. However, once a literary work is published, it cannot be rewritten, which makes the writer’s responsibility to history even greater— even if it is not the writer’s intention to undertake this burden. History can be repeatedly changed because it does not require an individual to take responsibility for it, whereas the writer confronts his own book in print with its indelible black words on white paper. Furthermore, how much of truth does history conceal? Through retrieving lost memories, the writer seeks the truth that history has concealed and, besides digging through cold historical materials, more importantly relies on the experiences of living people. Often these are the experiences of the writer himself or his family, so such testimonies naturally have elements of autobiography and biography. When embarking on this sort of writing, it is best for the writer to be an observer in order to maintain adequate distance, especially if dealing with a historical period fraught with disasters. This will allow the writer to avoid the pitfall of becoming a victim whose writing is bitter and therefore reduced to nothing more than an accusation. Indeed, this mode of observation can preserve the perspective of the individual even if he is confronting immense disasters over a prolonged period. With adequate distance, even if Mount Tai were to crumble, he would not be crushed to death. Although

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the testimony would only be that of one person, it would at least provide, as a necessary supplement to history, the preservation of memories that had been neglected by history. This sort of literature as testimony does not avoid politics, that is, in content. However, it is not political in intent. It does not wave a flag or shout out for any particular political line of action and certainly does not stand in a war chariot for a particular political faction. It therefore transcends differing political viewpoints. By touching upon taboo issues—whether in politics, society, religion, or social custom — it promotes the uncompromising independence and spiritual freedom of literature that is passionately sought by writers. A writer can, of course, have a clear political goal, want to serve in a particular branch of politics, even join a political party or political faction— such are his choices as an individual, providing he does not force others to join him. When political involvement is transformed into the unassailable will of the people, it forces every member of society into compliance and drives the whole nation to madness. Under the dictatorship of an authoritarian rule, this is not uncommon. The individual has the freedom to take part or not to take part in politics. But as far as literature is concerned, the writer who engages in politics must be able to disassociate his engagement from his literary works. Examples of writers who have achieved this extend from Hugo to Zola and Camus. This very fine tradition among French writers is worthy of emulation in both the East and the West. In contemporary literature, especially in the writing of fiction, it has become an increasingly widespread practice for writers to fictionalise their own personal experiences. By keeping to what one has experienced, one can produce fiction that is not total fabrication and which makes it so much easier to enter an experience and to feel it pulsating with life. However, this is not anything new. Many classics of the past are more or less fictionalised autobiography. From Cao Xueqin to Proust, writers

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have fused lived experiences with their inner perceptions, presenting fabrications as real events and hiding actual events behind fabrications. As long as authentic human feelings are captured, where is the boundary between fact and fabrication? However, while that boundary may be useful for verifying an author’s biography, as far as literature is concerned, it is of no significance. What is of significance, however, is the depth to which human nature is probed and whether or not truth in human life is revealed. Truth can be reached, but it cannot be exhausted. Right up to today, much has been written about the complexities of humanity and the predicament of survival. Yet, there is more that can be written about life, death, love, and lust. Literary revolutions proclaiming the death of antecedents have failed to deliver people from their difficulties. As long as mankind is not completely destroyed by its own madness, literature that probes human life will continue to be written, because more can always be said. Similarly, as an affirmation of human cognition, appropriate forms of linguistic expression are inexhaustible and are forever pursued. An event or a feeling, even a momentary impression or a fleeting thought in the inner mind, can be explained in different ways. Whether or not a description is accurate, as well as fresh, depends on how the narrator views it and how he articulates it in writing. The writer is continually searching for a unique way of narrating: in other words, what he is searching for is his own path to actual perceptions, even if he has to do this through fabrication. The writing of fiction does not need to adhere rigidly to any particular style. But it is, of course, meaningless to search for a new way of writing unless the aim is to stimulate clearer perceptions, just as it is meaningless to explore new modes of literary narration unless this exploration contributes to the search for truth. Stylistic exploration should not be a goal in itself, undertaken for the sake of creating a controversy. Writers introduce eyewitness accounts, editorial reports, biography, autobiography,

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memoir and diary writing, and even notes into the creation of fiction because they are looking for a path to truth. The road of literature to truth is established by perceptual experiences. Relying on his memories of experiences and his imagination, the writer recalls concrete perceptions that act as location markers that give him access to regions he has not personally experienced. Even if what he writes is fabrication, it has its starting point in real perceptual experiences and the writer continually returns to these so that the imagination is not cast adrift to get lost in sheer fantasy. Of course, the writer does not simply depend on the experiences of his own life; he can draw from the experiences of others. However, such indirect experiences must arouse authentic feelings in the writer before they are introduced to a work; otherwise, they will only be so much dead matter. Inspiration is an intuition that, when stimulated, suddenly illuminates the inherent road to truth. While in this state of high concentration, the writer’s perception becomes extremely sharp. Everything suddenly becomes lucid, and the writer can almost physically experience even that which he has never experienced. This sort of awareness is like a scientific discovery and is not something concocted. Literature can only set out to know human life by using the individual’s perceptions as a starting point. Hence, it always starts from the cognitive subject, which predetermines the impossibility of inheriting experience. If the experiences and teachings of others do not pass through the filter of the writer’s own lived experiences, they remain bookish knowledge. Deep-rooted defects within man predetermine that it is impossible for him to change, just as there is no immunisation against jealousy and hostility. Mankind will perpetually suffer and go mad, violence and war will be inevitable, and lies constantly repeated will become truth. While education can transmit knowledge, it cannot necessarily awaken the conscience. Literature cannot do this either, and to use literature

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as a means to educate is merely wishful thinking that both exaggerates the function of literature and restricts its freedom. What more can a writer do but leave a testimony of his times? Perfect beings do not exist. In revolutionary practice, the utopian conception of “new people” deprived people of their basic awareness of being human, so they became tyrants, assassins, and hatchet men who turned a whole country into a prison and a hell. However, evil and cowardice are what make people human and are not proof of God. It would be wiser for the writer to give up trying to be a creator, a saviour, or a Superman and to revert to being a frail individual who observes the world and himself. While scrutinising various facets of human life, the writer may become aware that, as an observer, he is in fact not so pure and is, at times, hindered by prejudice and fanciful thinking. If he also scrutinises his own chaotic self that is usually in a blind state of self-love, he will naturally become much more sober. He will be released from stubborn bias and delusion and obtain a more penetrating capacity for scrutiny, which will give rise to feelings of self-deprecation, humour, pity, and tolerance. A writer’s conscience is an awakening from instinctive chaos and blind violence. This conscience is not innate: it is a pair of clearer eyes that transcends the writer’s views of morality and politics, so that what is observed is more profound, more penetrating. The process of writing, not previous training, allows the writer both to realise this observation of the world with clarity and to transcend himself. In other words, the writer’s self-transcendence is an attitude: he actually turns himself into an observer and does not set out to judge. He sustains this attitude throughout the entire writing process in order to maintain the distance necessary for observation. The writer’s concentration allows for an appreciation of beauty that brings joy, revelation, and understanding. This is the reward of the writer who devotes himself to writing that is detached from practical gain. Otherwise,

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it would be difficult for him to sustain such passion while preserving calm. Literature, from ancient times to the present—not only literature as testimony that takes as its material real people and events, but all literature —is a testimony to the existential predicament of human life. All writers live in their own times. The great books in the history of literature are authentic portrayals of their times. In this respect, the myth and the epic profoundly touch upon the truth of human lives, and the poetry that came later on and the fiction later still also capture people’s authentic perceptions. However, history and literature gradually came to be separated, and while the former gradually turns into a record of political authority, the latter increasingly speaks of the true feelings of the individual. Homer’s epic of Ancient Greece, said to be a work controlled by mankind’s collective subconscious, is a work written before the separation of history and literature. The fiction of China in the Ming and Qing periods, and of Europe in the nineteenth century, tell of various facets of human life, based on dispassionate and incisive observations on human relationships in society. Since the advent of modern literature in the twentieth century, concern for the human world has tended to focus on the inner mind, but truth nevertheless remains its most fundamental quality. Other people may be a hell, but so too is the totally chaotic self. People turned schizophrenic by modernity moreover lost their way in linguistic demons they themselves had invented. Using words to debunk words as a substitute for truth is the same as using ideology to reform the world. This is the fallacy of people who think that only they are right. Truth is here before one’s eyes and does not depend upon speech for annotation or explanation: in fact, to introduce semantic analysis to literature only distances it further from truth. Literary theories that employ linguistic concepts can be applied to the literary analysis of a text, but such theories are very remote from literary creation.

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To reach truth, one does not have to depend upon metaphysical speculation. Truth is perceptual and concrete. Full of life, it is available for human perception at any time and in any place: it is the interaction of subject and object. The material world that is external to the subject is the object of science whereas literature can only start from subjective and individual perceptions that affirm truth in human life. To introduce the applied reasoning of science to literature, to turn literary knowledge about people into the construction and deconstruction of concepts, reduces literature to intellectual games and word games. In this age of endless new concepts, any simple idea can be taken into a certain system and developed into a theory. Even before a theory has been formulated, it can be superseded by a newer concept. Modernism that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, initiated reforms in literature and the arts has already succumbed to the mechanism of commodity marketing in the postmodern consumerist society. The fashions continually being created fail to have an impact on society. The principle that only the new is good increasingly becomes an empty, meaningless principle, which cannot generate fresh thinking. The globalisation of the market economy and the information explosion has meant that the world of today is confronted with a growing impoverishment of thinking. Struggles between political powers have led to uncompromising, antagonistic, bipolar positions that have invaded every corner of social life. The necessity of having to choose between either the Left or the Right and of being politically correct has replaced independent thinking. If the voice of the writer is not swept into this global chorus and if he does not give his allegiance to a political party, he will become marginalized. Fortunately, literature is a place of refuge for the free spirit and the last bastion of defence for human dignity. Herein lies the

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gift of the writer: when people have turned mute because of their sufferings, God blesses him with a voice. The language required by literature comes from spontaneous speech that goes straight to truth. Vivid perceptions, in this particular instant of the present, are without “isms” and transcend concepts. People are human by virtue of their ability to go through the process of expressing themselves in language—and, in this manner, become aware of their own existence—and not by virtue of their ability to give definitions and concepts that explain their existence. People are people prior to all the “isms” that are imposed to standardise them. In the same way, literary “isms” attempt to force literature into the theoretical paradigms of ideological or moral teachings so that it conforms to specific social and political structures. However, people become aware of their own humanity because of the uncompromising independence of the individual, so there is a need for self-expression and for literature. When old “isms” have come to an end, there is no need to go searching for new “isms.” Bid farewell to ideologies and instead return to the truth of being human: that is, return to the individual’s real perceptions, return to this instant, stop manufacturing lies about tomorrow. And bid farewell to atrophied historical “isms” that have put aesthetics into chronological sequence and labelled literature as progressive or conservative, avant-garde or passé. Truly profound works about human life are never passé. And also bid farewell to the subversion of language. Introducing the strategies of social revolution to literature and turning literary creation into tumbling word games in fact removes the human content that is inherent in literature. Return to human nature and focus on people. To do this is to transcend ethical judgements, to transcend values, since there is no greater value than truth.

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To focus on people is to transcend all value judgements, and requires only that one grasp the pulse of human life. The throbbing of life is supreme. The tremors of frustration, joy, lust, and of the soul cannot be measured by any system of values. Observation is superior to judgement, because judgement distorts. To consider other people to be a hell is to ignore one’s own cowardice. Moreover, evil manifests itself when one is oneself weak. The steps between serving, giving tacit approval, and complicity are not that far apart. If, in the observation of evil, one pays attention to unavoidable human weaknesses, then one will not stop at making moral accusations but go on to wonder why evil is able to wreak havoc everywhere and why people are not able to rid themselves of such predicaments. The observer has greatness because of his tolerance. The understanding and compassion evoked by observation of and reflection on the human world and the self greatly surpass what is implied in judgements of right or wrong and the settling of grievances. Whether the work is a tragedy or a comedy, if the writer sits in the audience to view his characters, the cleansing and release he experiences will far exceed that of historical testimonies. The writer in the end is an eyewitness to human nature. While thus focused on truth, the writer is no longer concerned with any sort of value. The observation of and search for truth thus becomes the writer’s unique and ultimate ethics. Return to the reality of human life even if this causes anxiety. When the writer concentrates on truth, he may be able to save the literature he writes even if he is not able to save himself. Indeed, literature cannot resolve any problems, nor can people resolve those glaringly big rights and wrongs that have no solutions. Can people abandon war? Or terminate racist massacres, political purges, religious fanaticism, and terrorism? People cannot prevent man-made disasters that are millions of times worse than natural disasters, but can only tell of their experiences and feelings

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about them. While there is discovery, amazement, perplexity, and fear in life, there is also, at times, happiness, encouragement, and excitement as well as the uncertainty and frustration that breed illusions and fantasy. Literature can only provide some sort of reference for the living and for those who have not yet lived enough. However, people do not know where in fact they are heading; they may think they are headed somewhere but cannot get there; or else they know where they are headed and are struggling to get there. But of what significance is this? If people are somehow affected by literature, moved or awakened by something, that is enough. If literature can stimulate thinking, then there is a necessity for it, but if it cannot stimulate thinking, then it could very well be done away with. When literature arouses feelings and induces thinking, immerse yourself in these feelings and experience their meaning. At present, readers and writers probably communicate on a similar level. Every solitary individual hopes that others will understand him. But if a minimum understanding between people cannot be achieved, fighting and violence are unavoidable, and it is pointless even to talk about tolerance and compassion. For people who are locked in their own experiences, mutual understanding is difficult, yet, through literature, there can be a certain degree of communication, so the writing of literature that essentially has no goal does leave people a testimony of survival. And if literature still has some significance, it is probably this.

Translation from the Chinese by Mabel Lee

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CONTRIBUTORS

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, born in England in 1955, is the author of seven books of “the literature of fact,” including The Polish Revolution (1983), The Uses of Adversity (1985), The Magic Lantern (1990), The File (1997), and, most recently, History of the Present (1999). A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and other journals, he has received many awards for his writing. He is a Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford and of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. HORACE ENGDAHL, born in Sweden in 1948, is an author, a critic, and a literary scholar. He has published several collections of essays—Den romantiska texten (The romantic text, 1986), Stilen och lyckan (Style and happiness, 1992), and Beröringens ABC (The ABC of touch, 1994)—and a collection of prose fragments entitled Meteroer (Meteors, 1999). He became a member of the Swedish Academy in 1997 and its permanent secretary in 1999. PETER ENGLUND, born in Sweden in 1957, has written a number of books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history, published two essay collections, and written film scripts. He has also worked as a journalist on short assignments covering the wars in the Balkans and in Afghanistan. His book, The Battle of Poltava: The Birth of the Russian Empire, is being reprinted in English this year. Englund is a currently professor of narratology at the Institute of Drama in Stockholm and will become a member of the Swedish Academy in December of 2002. He lives in Uppsala, Sweden.

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NURUDDIN FARAH was born in 1945 in Somalia. His novels include Secrets (1998), Gifts (1999), and Maps (1999). His next novel will be published in New York in the spring of 2003. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa. NADINE GORDIMER was born in South Africa in 1923 and has lived there ever since, while travelling extensively. She has published thirteen novels, most recently The Pickup (2001); ten short story collections, most recently Jump (1992); and five collections of non-fiction. She has received fourteen literary awards and fifteen honorary degrees, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. GAO XINGJIAN, born in China in 1940, was acclaimed from the early 1980s for his Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction (1981), essays on dramaturgy and modern European literature, and his translations of Prévert’s Paroles (1984) and Ionesco’s Bald Prima Donna (1985). However, the staging of his plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), and Wild Man (1985) in Beijing had a sensational impact on the entire Chinese literary world. In late 1987, he moved to Paris and became a French citizen in 1997. His major works published in English translation include two novels, Soul Mountain (Chinese, 1990; English, 2000) and One Man’s Bible (Chinese, 1999; English, 2002), and a collection of five plays entitled The Other Shore (1999). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000. Gao Xingjian is also a painter. His Return to Painting (2002) contains a lengthy discussion of aesthetics as well as a selection of his Chinese ink paintings. IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. Because of his Jewish origins, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. He was rescued in Buchenwald in 1945. Since 1953, he has been living in Budapest, working as a writer and a translator of works by

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Nietzsche, Freud, Hofmannsthal, and Joseph Roth. From 1960 to 1973, he worked on the novel Sorstalanság (1985), which has been translated into several languages (English Fateless, 1992). His other literary works include Fiasko (Fiasco, 1988), Kaddisch für ein nicht geborenes Kind (1990; English Kaddish for a Child Not Born, 1997), Galeerentagebuch (Galley journal, 1991), Ich— ein Anderer (I-another, 1977), Die englische Flagge, der Spurensucher, Protokoll: drei Erzählungen (The English flag, the tracker, protocol: three tales, 1999), and Die gedankenlange Stille, während das Erschiessungskommando neu lädt (The brief silence while the firing squad reloads, 1999). He has won several literary prizes—the Kossuth Prize (Hungary), Preis für das euopäische Verständnis (Leipzig), Herder-preis (Hamburg-Vienna), Brandenburgischer Literaturpreis (Brandenburg) — and is a member of l’order pour le mérite (Germany). Kertész is the 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. LI RUI was born in China in 1950 and was in high school when the cultural revolution broke out. His parents, both members of the communist party, were imprisoned. Li Rui was sent to a poor mountain village in the province of Shanxi where he lived for six years, working with the village farmers. He has published four short story collections, two essay collections, and four novels. His novel Silver City was translated into English in 1997. HERTA MÜLLER was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf as a member of Romania’s German-speaking minority. After studying German and Romanian literature in Timisoara, she took a job as a translator at a machine factory. She was fired after refusing to act as a spy for the secret police; from then on, she had to earn her living by doing odd jobs in the face of constant harassment by the Securitate. Her first book, Niederungen, was published in Romania in 1982, but only after extensive interventions by the censors. Friends helped smuggle the original manuscript to the West, and

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the uncensored version was published in Germany in 1984, winning Müller several literary prizes (English Nadirs, 1999). The international attention changed her situation, and she was allowed to work as a substitute teacher so that the press could no longer describe her as unemployed. Still, her unadorned portrayal of life under Ceausescu and her openly critical statements in the Western media elicited increased repression up to and including death threats. Ultimately, life in Romania became unbearable. In 1987, it became possible for her to emigrate to Germany, where she continues to live in Berlin. Her other works translated into English include The Passport (1989), The Land of Green Plums: A Novel (1996), and The Appointment: A Novel (2001). KENZABURO OE, born in Japan in 1935, is the author of several novels of political and ethical import, including Aghwee the Sky Monster and A Personal Matter (both 1964), Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969), The Waters Are Come into My Soul (1973), and The Pinch-Runner Memorandum (1983). In the early sixties, he began a series of interviews with A-bomb survivors that were published under the title Hiroshima Notes (1995). Addressed originally to his own generation in a language only they could read, Oe’s work on the periphery has acquired a universal voice. Oe received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.

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