Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  Menem’s revisionist attempt is not original. One of the earliest instances of perfecting the present by erasing the tensions of the past took place in the year 213 B.C., when the Chinese emperor Shih Huang-ti ordered that every book in his realm should be thrown to the fire so as to destroy all traces (legend has it) of his mother’s adultery. But no deed, however monstrous or trivial, can ever be abolished once committed—not even by a Chinese emperor, even less by an Argentinian president. This is the adamantine law of our life. The immutability of the past does not depend on the volubilities of government, nor on cravings for revenge or for diplomacy. No deed can be undone. It can be pardoned, but the pardon must come from the offended person and from no one else, if it is to have any emotional validity. Nothing changes in the deed itself after a pardon: not the circumstances, not the gravity, not the guilt, not the wound. Nothing except the relationship between the torturer and the victims, when the victims reaffirm their sovereignty, “not weighing our merits,” as the Book of Common Prayer has it, “but by pardoning our offences.” Pardon is the victim’s prerogative, not the torturer’s right—and this Menem’s government and his supporters, such as Vargas Llosa, have apparently forgotten.

  The pardon granted by a victim—the dripping quality of mercy—has no bearing on the mechanics of justice. Pardon doesn’t change or even qualify the act, which will cast its shadow forward, throughout eternity, into every new present. Pardon doesn’t grant oblivion. But a trial, according to the laws of society, can at least lend the criminal act a context; the law can contain it, so to speak, in the past so that it no longer contaminates the future, standing at a distance as a reminder and a warning. In a mysterious way, the application of a society’s laws is akin to a literary act: it fixes the criminal deed on a page, defines it in words, gives it a context which is not that of the sheer horror of the moment but of its recollection. The power of memory is no longer in the hands of the criminal; now it is society itself that holds that power, writing the chronicle of its own wicked past, able at last to rebuild itself not over the emptiness of oblivion but over the solid, recorded facts of the atrocities committed. This is a long, dreary, fearful, agonizing process, and the only possible one. This sort of healing always leaves scars.

  Menem’s amnesty, bowing to the demands of acknowledged murderers and torturers, has postponed the healing for what appears to be a very long time. As it stands today, Argentina is a country bereft of rights: its right to social justice ignored, its right to moral education invalidated, its right to moral authority forfeit. The need to “carry on,” the need to “reconcile differences,” the need to “allow the economy to flourish once again” have all been invoked by Menem as good reasons for forgiving and forgetting. Supported by literate voices such as that of Vargas Llosa, Menem apparently believes that history can be paid off; that the memory of thousands of individuals like my friend from school can be left to yellow on forgotten shelves in dim bureaucratic offices; that the past can be recovered without expenditure of effort, without making official amends, without redemption.

  While waiting for the act of justice now denied, the victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship can still hope for another, older form of justice—less evident, but in the end longer-lasting. The maze of a politician’s mind has seldom held the promise of redemption, but that of a gifted writer is almost exclusively built on such a promise, and in spite of Auden’s dictum, it allows no forgetting.

  Thanks to certain books (a catalogue too long and personal to be of use here) both the torturers and their victims may know that they were not alone, unseen, unassailable. Justice, beyond the requirements of literary conventions that demand a happy end, is in some essential way our common human bond, something against which we can all measure ourselves. As the old English law has it, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done.

  Auden’s lack of confidence in the writer’s ability to change the world is apparently a modern perception. Robert Graves noted that the Irish and Welsh distinguished carefully between poets and satirists: the poet’s task was creative or curative, that of the satirist was destructive or noxious, and both changed the course of worldly events.9 Even nature was supposed to bow to Orpheus’s words, and Shakespeare recalled the power of the Irish bards, “rhyming rats to death”; in the seventh century, the great Seanchan Torpest, having discovered that rats had eaten his dinner, slaughtered ten on the spot by uttering a verse that began:

  Rats have sharp snouts

  Yet are poor fighters.

  Whether against rats or dictators, writers can bring about a wild form of justice in their role as God’s spies. “Many brave men lived before Agamemnon’s time,” wrote Horace in the first century B.C., “but they are all, unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lacked a poet.” As Horace implied, we are luckier. Poems and stories that will redeem us (or in which we will find redemption of a kind) are being written, or will be written, or have been written and are awaiting their readers and, throughout time, again and again, assume this: that the human mind is always wiser than its most atrocious deeds, since it can give them a name; that in the very description of our most loathsome acts something in good writing shows them as loathsome and therefore not unconquerable; that in spite of the feebleness and randomness of language, an inspired writer can tell the unspeakable and lend a shape to the unthinkable, so that evil loses some of its numinous quality and stands reduced to a few memorable words.

  1 Reprinted in Harper’s, New York, July 1995 (trans, by Alex Frankel).

  2 This figure is the estimate of the National Commission on Disappeared People, quoted in Nunca Más (Never Again): A Report by Argentina ‘s National Commission on Disappeared People, ed. and trans, by Nick Caistor, Faber & Faber; and in Index on Censorship, London, 1986.

  3 R. Scott Greathead, “Truth in Argentina,” The New York Times, 11 May 1995.

  4 Mario Vargas Llosa, “Jouer avec le feu,” Le Monde, Paris, 18 May 1995.

  5 Juan José Saer, “Mario Vargas Llosa au-delà de l’erreur,” Le Monde, Paris, 26 mai 1995.

  6 Nunca Más (Never Again): A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People, ed. and trans, by Nick Caistor, Faber & Faber and Index on Censorship, London, 1986.

  7 G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” in The Defendant, London, 1901.

  8 Julio Cortázar, “Negación del olvido” in Obra Crítica, vol. 3, ed. Saúl Sasnowski, Alfaguara, Madrid, 1983.

  9 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: Amended and Enlarged Edition, New York, 1996.

  The Age of Revenge

  Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

  PAUL GAUGUIN

  1. On the third Arabian Night,

  Scheherazade tells this story:

  A FISHERMAN, OLD AND VERY POOR, Was in the habit of casting his nets no more than four times a day. One evening, after casting his nets three times and pulling out nothing except mud and stones, he begged God to forgive his impatience and to remember that the next casting would be the last of the day. Then the fisherman threw his nets out for the fourth and last time. The nets felt heavy, and when he pulled them in he saw that he had netted a small copper bottle. Curious to see what it contained, the fisherman picked the lid off with his knife and shook out the bottle’s contents. To his amazement, a thick smoke poured forth, collected into a cloud and formed the figure of a colossal efreet or genie who towered over the fisherman and said: “I am one of the heretical djinns whom King Suleiman imprisoned in a bottle as a punishment for not submitting to his will. Cast in my prison to the bottom of the sea, I remained there for one thousand years, and promised to whoever would free me all the riches in the world—but no one came. For the next one thousand years, I promised him who would save me all the wisdom in the world—but still no one came. For the third one thousand years I promised him who would deliver me to perform any three wishes—and still no one came. I then fell into a violent rage, and said to myself, Whoev
er frees me now, I shall kill. Prepare then to die, Oh my saviour!”

  Maybe we too have reached that fourth millennium, the point when patience comes to an end. Now, with the advantage of hindsight, it’s obvious that we had every indication that this would happen. Our history, everywhere and at all times, has been one of such abuse, such injustice, such cruelty, that reading through it I wonder why the cesspool of hatred we have produced as a result hasn’t yet welled up and drowned us. For centuries and centuries, just like the genie, the victims have told their victimizers: let us be free and we’ll all prosper, let us be vocal and we’ll all become wise, let us be equal and we’ll all try to live together in some sort of rational harmony. But not any longer. Now, finally, the victims have decided that the time for patience is over. Remember the title of James Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time? This is the next time.

  One of the many ways in which the fiction we call history can be visualized—as Ariel and Willy Durant naively imagined—is through the typical moods of each so-called period, through the sense that apparently permeates a decade, a century, an age—the Age of Reason, the Age of Uncertainty, and so on. For our time, for this “end of the millennium,” I believe that the prevailing sentiment would force us to call this the Age of Revenge. Now, louder and louder, millions of voices seem to be saying, “It’s our turn.” They are not pleading, they are not trying to convince, they are not even demanding justice. They are simply torching their way to the front. They are certainly not using the fire to enlighten anyone. They fight intolerance with intolerance. And they want no camaraderie.

  I am not an advocate of tolerance in the sense in which we’ve often used the word. (“We must be tolerant of homosexuals, because their sexuality is in an arrested state,” pleaded a leading Argentinian psychiatrist in 1992; “We must tolerate the Jews or they will declare themselves the world’s martyrs,” argued Martin Heidegger in 1933.) Tolerance, which in the past usually implied an anti-hierarchical stance, now often implies a hierarchy, someone condescending “to be tolerant” of someone else and demanding gratitude for it. Tolerance is a kind of philanthropy that ends up by consuming itself. “Tolerance,” wrote E. M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy, “merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.” But intolerance too is self-destructive. Intolerance (as the genie found out) is a form of suicide.

  In this sense, both tolerance and intolerance reject the notion of equality. You cannot be tolerant—or even intolerant—towards someone you perceive as possessing identical rights and responsibilities as yourself. Our history, in spite of the brave motto of the French Revolution, seems to confirm this. We appear to be condemned by arrangements, or disarrangements, made before we were born, and of which we are the heirs, whether we want it or not. History would have us believe that the fisherman is condemned to the traditional tricks of his abused class, as Solomon and the genie were to theirs, inheritors of their roles as king and slave. In The Muse of History, the poet Derek Walcott says, “But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or revenge?”

  Intolerance breeds intolerance. After General Perón demoted Borges from librarian to poultry inspector at a municipal market, Borges said the following: “Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they breed stupidity.” Intolerance is a form of stupidity, in the sense that it is unable to see individual richness and is only able to deal in stereotypes. It belongs in the same category as prejudice, whereby rational process is supplanted by a cliché, an idée reçue.

  And yet intolerance, like the genie’s response, comes from people at their wit’s end. We may not feel guilty for the sins of our fathers, or even for those of our contemporaries, but because the established rule is to identify individuals by the characteristics of a predetermined group—the method of racism—those individuals in turn identify us in exactly the same way. Such stereotypes are always bred from ignorance. And ignorance, as Montesquieu put it, is the mother of tradition. For Solomon, the genie is traditionally just one of the slaves; for the genie, Solomon is just one of the oppressors. Because for centuries blacks were seen as herds of cattle by the members of white society, the members of white society are seen (Louis Farrakhan’s description) as “a pack of wolves” by blacks, and every act that affects the blacks is seen as part of an overarching racist attitude. Our society has established generalities as the norm, and now generalities are the norm. “The norm is never normal,” wrote the Aboriginal novelist Mudrooroo.

  Up to a certain degree, prejudice is a question of pronouns. The stress of “We” is exclusive; that is to say, “We” means “Not you.”

  All good people agree,

  And all good people say,

  All nice people, like Us, are We

  And every one else is They:

  But if you cross over the sea,

  Instead of over the way,

  You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

  As only a sort of They!

  This was written by Rudyard Kipling in 1919.

  What those in power seem to forget is that the formation of any group for the purpose of exclusion—blacks, women, Jews, gays, any segregated ethnic or national group you may care to think of—instantly grants that group the selfsame methods. By excluding someone from us, we exclude ourselves from that someone. When we say “you are not us” we are also saying “we are not you.”

  The same can be said of the books we read. The act of reading lends us a peculiar kind of knowledge, which can result in a transformation of the surrounding world and of ourselves, can mysteriously effect a profound epistemological change; or else it is an action in itself, a sort of Moebius strip of experience, endlessly stroking its single side. For Shelley, poetry laid out the laws by which we understand the world; for Tristan Tzara, poetry had no role to play except to distract us from the world. Shelley was right in that we, the readers, can make sense of the chaos of the world through those scribbles; Tzara was right in that a poem is nothing but the scribbles on a page.

  I myself have always seen literature, its conversion through the act of reading, as a process of expansion in which the text becomes a palimpsest as I read through its words the many layers of my other readings. Even if this has had no immediate, visible effect on our society, I still believe in the effectiveness of the “scribbles,” because they empower the reader to act differently—to read “revenge,” for instance, where another has written “forceful pursuit of justice.” Literature redefines itself out of its own materials, not by rejecting but by rereading, and I suggest that our task is to keep proposing new points of view, so that the presences and absences from which we now suffer can be more clearly seen—and to afford them ultimately their proper and common place.

  But are there limits to this process of redefinition, to the renewed use we can make of these scribbles? A classic example may be useful here. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been read by Chinua Achebe as a racist text, in spite of its literary merit, so much so that Achebe says he is appalled that such a text can be considered an “English classic.” All the elements Achebe recognizes as racist are, certainly, in Conrad’s novel. For instance:

  Marlow, the narrator, is describing a crowd of African people: “a mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies.” In the front are three men, “plastered with bright red earth from head to foot.”

  They faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendant tail—something that looked like a dried gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.

  Compare this to another example, t
aken from a less classic text:

  Mark Brendon was old-fashioned and the women born of the war attracted him not at all. He recognized their fine qualities and often their distinction of mind; yet his ideal struck backward to another and earlier type—the type of his own mother who, as a widow, had kept house for him until her death. She was his feminine ideal—restful, sympathetic, trustworthy—one who always made his interests hers, one who concentrated upon his life rather than her own and found in his progress and triumphs the core of her own existence.

  Mark wanted, in truth, somebody who would be content to merge herself in him and seek neither to impress her own personality upon his, nor develop an independent environment. He had wit to know that a mother’s standpoint must be vastly different from that of any wife, no matter how perfect her devotion; he had experience enough of married men to doubt whether the woman he sought was to be found in a post-war world; yet he preserved and permitted himself a hope that the old-fashioned women still existed, and he began to consider where he might find such a helpmate.

  The source is one of the most famous of the British detective novels of the Golden Age, Eden Phillpotts’ The Red Redmaynes, published in 1920.

  As a reader, I can make any number of choices. The elements of the text—according to my reading tone, sense of humour, experience, knowledge of context, and more—can be transformed in a number of different ways by what Giovanna Franci calls L’ansia dell’interpretazione, the anxious desire to interpret. Umberto Eco, in The Limits of Interpretation, suggests that the “open” interpretation, what he once called “the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation,” is limited by the reader’s common sense; that there is a basic common response to a text, a response that allows for a modicum of communication.