Category Archives: Books

“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured”

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I’d like to draw attention to – and recommend — “Living with the Enemy,” an essay by Susie Linfield, which applies the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to the current challenge of reconciliation in Rwanda. (It appeared in today’s Arts and Letters Daily, my Safari homepage.)

She begins,

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light…

Linfield discusses Améry’s writings, then draws on the trilogy of Jean Hatzfeld (which I reviewed here and in three subsequent posts last March), as well as the work of Primo Levi and photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to remind that “whoever was tortured, stays tortured.”

There’s much that could be said about forgiveness and reconciliation that’s not the least bit glib, but of course Linfield is right. The way we inevitably go at it, in our hopes for — and advice to — others whose torments we have not shared, never mind understood, is too quick. We like happy endings, and the sooner the happier. Linfield’s essay slows our expectations. It challenges our minds about what’s really at stake in a lasting reconciliation.

Wolf Hall

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The book I read on our recent vacation was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This book, big enough to double as a door stop, is set in 1520s and 30s, the time of England’s King Henry VIII– he of the many wives — and tells the story of the English Reformation most particularly through the life of Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. The book is beautifully written, and so rich in detail about characters, land and cityscapes, daily life and life at the court, and the unfolding events of Henry’s divorce of Katherine to marry Anne Boleyn, defying and then breaking with Rome to inaugurate the Church of England, you feel you’ve been taken back in time to be part of it. Mantel effectively establishes a world, a historical fictional world, and well deserves the 2009 Man Booker Prize she won for her efforts.

I was struck by two paradoxical things. One is how large — in their complexity  — the changes that we can later call a Reformation are, and how slowly they happen. We study histories of the church (or other institutions) and give dates for beginnings, usually linked to some piece of paper like Martin Luther’s 95 Theses or  in the case of my little denomination, the Document of Secession, but there is much more going on than that, before and after, personalities intertwined in long and interesting ways, convergences of all sorts, and misses too, which make up what we later name and date in our history books.

(I would have liked a stronger sense, in Wolf Hall, of the religious issues at stake, although they are certainly alluded to often: arguments over the sacraments, vernacular translations of Scripture, spiritual authority, and over on the Continent, religious ferment of all kinds, including those extreme Anabaptists at Muenster. The English Reformation has been described as more political than theological. But perhaps shifts in belief or religious practice are never as purely “contesting for the faith”as we’d like to imagine, but collide and congress within individuals with their varying strengths and weaknesses and needs and agendas. So when we thank God for whatever reformation we’re particularly pleased about, we’ll probably have to recognize and thank for it in forms more human than holy.)

At the same time, I was struck by how small a wheel can make a change. Mantel puts it best herself, in this passage from the book:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtains, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

Alone, but connected

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Most avid readers don’t need much by way of motivation for what they do. Still, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics (University of Alberta Press, 2009), a thoughtful meditation on reading by Daniel Coleman, professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., provides good reasons to keep reading.

Coleman considers what’s going on in the practice of reading, and posits it as both countercultural and spiritually beneficial.

He doesn’t present a romanticized view of reading, however. People can be damaged by it (even by the “Good Book”). And, he says, “readers can be insufferable.” But what’s both countercultural and spiritual about reading is its slowness, its emphasis on critical alertness, and its way of humility. “The desire to read emphasizes a basic generosity toward the Other that is the condition of all language.”

One of the strongest arguments Coleman makes is that reading, although private and solitary, actually brings us outward toward others.

…reading does a painful and positive thing at once. It creates the isolated individual who extracts herself from the group, but that isolation is not as alienated as it looks, for reading is also a connection to others, an imaginative connection to the writers and to other readers by means of the tracks the writer has left on the page.

Coleman discusses the “right posture” of reading (charity, as per Augustine), how we encounter the “absent Other” in reading, and reading’s “wide-ranging social and political effects.” The latter are especially emphasized by stories from Ethiopia and the context of slavery in which people gain literacy for the first time.

In summary of this aspect of reading, he says,

[R]eading is a process that simultaneously individualizes us by placing the words on the page between us and the world and connects us by drawing us out of ourselves through imaginative projection toward the thoughts and experiences of others. At one and the same time, reading is a technology of alienation and a maker of new community…. For reading can give us a role to play, a direction for our energies, a way to channel our spiritual hunger that takes us into the social and political worlds in which we live.

I believe he’s right.