“The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge,” Nabokov wrote. “This is mere human frailty and thus excusable.” Western works of art that dealt with India were riddled with such mistakes. To name just two: the scene in David Lean’s film of A Passage to India in which he makes Dr. Aziz leap onto Fielding’s bed and cross his legs while keeping his shoes on, a solecism that would make any Indian wince; and the even more unintentionally hilarious scene in which Alec Guinness, as Godbole, sits by the edge of the sacred tank in a Hindu temple and dangles his feet in the water.
“The next step to Hell,” Nabokov says, “is taken by the translator who skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers.” For a long time, or so I felt, almost the whole of the multifarious Indian reality was “skipped” in this way by writers who were uninterested in anything except Western experiences of India—English girls falling for maharajas, or being assaulted, or not being assaulted, by non-maharajas, in nocturnal gardens, or mysteriously echoing caves—written up in a coolly classical Western manner. But of course most experiences of India are Indian experiences of it, and if there is one thing India is not, it is cool and classical. India is hot and vulgar, I thought, and it needed a literary “translation” in keeping with its true nature.
The third and worst crime of translation, in Nabokov’s opinion, was that of the translator who sought to improve on the original, “vilely beautifying” it “in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public.” The exoticization of India, its “vile beautification,” is what Indians have disliked most. Now, at last, this kind of fake glamorizing is coming to an end, and the India of elephants, tigers, peacocks, emeralds, and dancing girls is being laid to rest. A generation of gifted Indian writers in English is bringing into English their many different versions of the Indian reality, and these many versions, taken together, are beginning to add up to something that one might call the truth.
In dreams begin responsibilities. The way we see the world affects the world we see. As our ideas of female beauty change, so we see different sorts of women as beautiful. As our ideas of healthy living change, so we begin to look at the things we eat differently. Our dreams of our own and our children’s future shape the everyday judgments we make, about work, about people, about the world that either enables or obstructs those dreams. Daily life in the real world is also an imagined life. The creatures of our imagination crawl out from our heads, cross the frontier between dream and reality, between shadow and act, and become actual.
Imagination’s monsters do the same thing. The attack on the World Trade Center was essentially a monstrous act of the imagination, intended to act upon all our imaginations, to shape our own imaginings of the future. It was an iconoclastic act, in which the defining icons of the modern, the world-shrinking airplanes and those soaring secular cathedrals, the tall buildings, were rammed into each other in order to send a message: that the modern world itself was the enemy, and would be destroyed. It may seem unimaginable to us, but to those who perpetrated this crime, the deaths of many thousands of innocent people were a side issue. Murder was not the point. The creation of a meaning was the point. The terrorists of September 11, and the planners of that day’s events, behaved like perverted, but in another way brilliantly transgressive, performance artists: hideously innovative, shockingly successful, using a low-tech attack to strike at the very heart of our high-tech world. In dreams begin irresponsibilities, too.
I am trying to talk about literature and ideas, but you see that I keep being dragged back to catastrophe. Like every writer in the world, I am trying to find a way of writing after September 11, 2001, a day that has become something like a borderline. Not only because the attacks were a kind of invasion but because we all crossed a frontier that day, an invisible boundary between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and it turned out to be the unimaginable that was real. On the other side of that frontier, we find ourselves facing a moral problem: how should a civilized society—in which, as in all civilizations, there are limits, things we will not do, or allow to be done in our name, because we consider them beyond the pale, unacceptable—respond to an attack by people for whom there are no limits at all, people who will, quite literally, do anything—blow off their own feet, or tilt the wings of an airplane just before it hits a tower, so that it takes out the maximum number of floors?
The evil that men do lives after them,
the good is oft interrèd with their bones.
It is not surprising that the word “evil” has been used a great deal these past months; perhaps too often. The terrorists became “the evildoers,” their leader became “the evil one,” and now comes the discovery of that unusual phenomenon, an “axis of evil,” on which the president of the United States is threatening to make war. It’s an oddly contradictory word, “evil,” too freighted with absolute meaning to be an appropriate description of the messy relativity of actuality, too debased by over-use to mean as much as it should. Thus the comedy website SatireWire.com reveals that
bitter after being snubbed for membership in the Axis of Evil, Libya, China, and Syria today announced that they had formed the Axis of Just as Evil, which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran–Iraq–North Korea axis. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia, and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable. Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren’t the Worst but Certainly Won’t Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice but Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Sometimes Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick.
“That’s not a threat, really, just something we like to do,” said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.
I wish, myself, that the president had not promised to “rid the world of evil”—that’s a big project, a war he probably can’t win. “Evil” is a term that can obscure as well as clarify. For me, the greatest difficulty with it is that it dehistoricizes these events, depoliticizes, and even depersonalizes them. If evil is the devil’s work, and in this deeply religious administration one must assume that many people in high places think it is, then that, to my unbeliever’s way of thinking, actually lets the terrorists off the hook. If evil is external to us, a force working upon us from outside ourselves, then our moral responsibility for its effects is diminished.
The most attractive thing about the Shakespearean attitude to evil is its emphasis on human, not divine, responsibility for it. “The evil that men do,” Mark Antony says, and that’s the only kind that interests Shakespeare. The conspirators in Julius Caesar are obsessed with omens and auguries. “Never till now,” says Casca,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
And that’s not all.
Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.
And yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
“These are their reasons, they are natural”;
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
The conspirators talk themselves into believing that the omens and portents, the signs from the gods, justify, even necessitate, their crime. To read the transcript of the so-called smoking-gun bin Laden videotape, the notorious “giggling” video in which he laughs about his crimes and t
he deaths of his own men, is to be struck by the similarities between the mind-set of Al-Qaida and that of Caesar’s murderers. The tape is full of talk about prophetic dreams and visions. Bin Laden himself says: “Abu al-Hasan al-Masri told me a year ago: ‘I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!’ He said the game went on and we defeated them. So that was a good omen for us.” Or, again: “This brother came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America. . . . I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream.” At this point, on the tape, another person’s voice is heard recounting yet another dream about two planes hitting a big building.
Dreams and omens are murderers’ exculpations. Shakespeare knew better. It is again Casca, portent-ridden Casca, who speaks: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, / but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He’s talking about the need for a coup. But after the assassination, we forget the final clause; it is the first part of the couplet, the part about responsibility for one’s own actions, whose truth we are made to feel. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, / but in ourselves.” It is Shakespeare’s genius to put in the mouth of an assassin the very thought that will damn him afterward. Shakespeare doesn’t believe in the devil’s work. In the last scene of Othello, when the Moor finally learns how he has been duped by Iago, he says, “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable.” No cloven hoofs protrude from the villain’s hose. “If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.” The world is real. There are no demons. Men are demonic enough.
The evil that men do, in Shakespeare, is always a kind of excess. It has to do with the denial of limits, the willingness to cross any moral frontier. Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth, Iago: for them, the end justifies everything. By any means necessary. Whereas Hamlet is the opposite: a man so beset by moral qualms that it takes him an eternity to act. The great question of action and the frontiers of action—how far can we go? How far is too far, how far is not far enough?—is at the heart of Shakespeare’s world; also, now, of ours.
The problem of limits is made awkward for artists and writers, including myself, by our own adherence to, and insistence upon, a no-limits position in our own work. The frontierlessness of art has been and remains our heady ideology. The concept of transgressive art is so widely accepted—“if it isn’t transgressive, it isn’t underground”—as to constitute, in the eyes of conservative critics, a new orthodoxy. Once the new was shocking not because it set out to shock but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new; and shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily. Like the children in the Disney movie Monsters, Inc., we don’t scare as easily as we used to. So the artist who seeks to shock must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence. And now, in the aftermath of horror, of the iconoclastically transgressive image-making of the terrorists, do artists and writers still have the right to insist on the supreme, unfettered freedoms of art? Is it time, instead of endlessly pushing the envelope, stepping into forbidden territory, and generally causing trouble, to start discovering what frontiers might be necessary to art, rather than an affront to it?
The British writer (and lawyer) Anthony Julius addresses such questions in a new book, Transgressions: The Offences of Art. Dealing mainly, but not only, with the visual arts, he valuably reminds us of the word’s arrival in English in the sixteenth century, “freighted with negative scriptural overtones,” and its rapid acquisition of other layers of meaning: “rule-breaking, including the violation of principles, conventions, pieties, or taboos; the giving of serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries.” He examines the transgressive art of Edouard Manet in the 1860s; in Olympia, a picture of a whore to which Manet gave a name often used by the whores of the period, he visited the frontier between art and “pornography”—which literally means “whore-painting,” and is another new word hailing from the same epoch—crossing the boundaries between the nude (an aesthetic, unerotic idea) and the naked woman, gazing out of the picture with frankly erotic intent. In Dead Christ with Angels, Manet questioned the resurrection, and the painting caused great offense. Even Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was accused of “transgressing the laws both of perspective and morality.” Now that time has installed Manet and his great contemporaries as the art world’s blue-chip masterworkers, we have one answer to those who would reimpose limits on art: which is, that one age’s pornography is another’s masterpiece. In 1857, after all, Madame Bovary so outraged conventional, decent people that Flaubert was prosecuted for writing it. Guardians of the frontiers of public morality should always beware, lest history make them look like fools.
Julius rightly credits the twentieth-century French writer Georges Bataille with the formulation of much of our modern idea of the transgressive. It is interesting, however, that Bataille believed that the breaking of taboos was both a necessity and a “reinscription” of the violated border. “Transgressions suspend taboos without suppressing them.” Julia Kristeva amplifies this: “The issue of ethics crops up wherever a code must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity, need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again, although temporarily.” Here, then, is a second possible answer to the would-be censors in our new, more timorous age: artworks, unlike terrorists, change nothing.
On the five defenses of art, Julius is excellent: the First Amendment defense; the “aesthetic alibi”—“art is a privileged zone in which the otherwise unsayable can be said”; the “estrangement defence” (it is the job of art . . . to alienate us from our preconceptions, by making the familiar strange and the unquestioned problematic); the “canonic defence” (works of art exist in a tradition of such works and must be judged and understood in relation to that tradition); and the “formalist defence” (that art has its own distinct mode of existence and is not to be confused with cognate but distinct works of the imagination, such as propaganda and polemic). As someone who has had some experience of transgression and its consequences, I have at different times employed all these defenses, as Julius is kind enough to note. He concludes, however, that “the aesthetic potential of the transgressive has been exhausted.” In this I am not sure he is right.
Even before the attacks on America, I was concerned that, in Britain and Europe as well as America, the pressures on artistic and even intellectual freedoms were growing—that cautious, conservative political and institutional forces were gaining the upper hand, and that many social groups were deliberately fostering a new, short-fuse culture of easy offendedness, so that less and less was becoming sayable all the time, and more and more kinds of speech were being categorized as transgressive. Outside the Western world—across the Arab world, in many African countries, in Iran, China, North Korea, and elsewhere—writers and intellectuals are everywhere under attack, and more and more of them are being forced into exile. If it was important to resist this cultural closing-in before 9/11, it’s twice as important now. The freedoms of art and the intellect are closely related to the general freedoms of society as a whole. The struggle for artistic freedom serves to crystallize the larger question that we were all asked when the planes hit the buildings: how should we live now? How uncivilized are we going to allow our own world to become in response to so barbaric an assault?
We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the Cold War, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the Human Genome Project; in the minus column, a new kind of war against new kinds of enemies fighting with terrible new weapons. We will all be judged by how we handle ourselves in this time. What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we giv
e the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like his hate-filled, illiberal mirror-image, or will we, as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged lands of plenty, go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice? Will we become the suits of armor our fear makes us put on, or will we continue to be ourselves? The frontier both shapes our character and tests our mettle. I hope we pass the test.
February 2002
ENDNOTES
To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or "Return to text."
*1 See Aljean Harmetz’s definitive The Making of the Wizard of Oz (Pavilion Books, 1989). Return to text.
*2 When I first published this essay in 1992, the idea of “home” had become problematic for me, for reasons I have little interest in rehearsing here. (But see Part II, “Messages from the Plague Years.”) I won’t deny that I did a great deal of thinking, in those days, about the advantages of a good pair of ruby shoes. Return to text.
*3 According to some contemporary revisionists, Major Doyle never got the 350 Munchkins, and the filmmakers had to settle for 124. Return to text.
*4 After the publication of an earlier version of this essay in The New Yorker, I received an appreciative letter from the Munchkin Coroner, Manfred Raabe, now living in a Penney Retirement Community in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He liked what I had to say so much that he sent me a gift: a color photocopy of a picture of his big moment on the steps of the Town Hall, holding up that big scroll with its Gothic lettering reading “Certificate of Death.” Under this lettering he had painstakingly filled out my name. I don’t know what it means to have a Munchkin death certificate, but I’ve got one. Return to text.
*5 There were those who criticized me for making this comparison. Apparently I am the only person not allowed to make fatwa cracks. My job, no doubt, is to be the butt of them. Return to text.
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 Page 44
