“Everyone’s entitled to his opinion!” How often do we hear this—and from those whose entitlement is most in doubt? Laura Ingraham squeezed an entire book out of the slight thesis that entertainers should Shut Up and Sing rather than soak us with their spittle-flecked rantings about international affairs. Curiously, she included “UN elites” in her herd of bêtes noires, though political figures aren’t generally known for their crooning abilities. Dancing abilities, maybe. But what about novelists?
That’s the question the Guardian poses in its review of Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, a collection of writings inspired, or perhaps fired, by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Amis disdains the use of the short form of the infamous date: “There is a long argument about the inappropriateness of the contraction ‘9/11’ to describe the enormity of that day.”)
I think the question is misguided, but not because I feel, in that most irritating formula, “entitled to my opinion.” There are those whose work never draws them into the realm of political thought—the Dixie Chicks, for instance—but the novelist makes his living considering what makes people tick, and no one ticks quite so literally as the suicide terrorist. As Amis writes, “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits and medics’ smocks of the Islamic radical?”
This is not to say that novelists invariably get it right, or even half-right. John Updike didn’t, though his attempt was more than admirable and nothing if not sincere. All the same, there’s a big difference between someone who sings other people’s words, and someone who’s always had his own keenly rendered psychological portraits at the ready, weighing in on the heaviest issues of our day. If novelists feel compelled to delineate this problem, I can think of few more qualified to do so than Amis.
Monica Osborne
Your post is nteresting, as
Your post is nteresting, as is the Guardian review, though for different reasons. You write:
If novelists feel compelled to delineate this problem, I can think of few more qualified to do so than Amis.
Now, I am somewhat of an Amis fan, so mostly out of curiosity, I'm wondering why you believe he is so uniquely qualified to take on the burden of responding to this particular terror/atrocity/tragedy. I think the question of ownership, in the context of these things, is quite complicated. I'm thinking also of Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, which, to me, seems like an appropriation of the 9/11 tragedy that serves only to feed the writer's narcissism, his insistence that he suffered uniquely from the tragedy. My guess, though I haven't read it yet, is that Amis's book isn't about personalizing the event, but rather about attempting to question it and open up a dialogue about it. I wonder if this is the difference?
So who gets to write about these things? What are the ethics of this kind of representation?
Ismail
"I'm thinking also of Art
"I'm thinking also of Art Spiegelman's In theShadow of No Towers, which, to me, seems like an appropriation of the 9/11 tragedy that serves only to feed the writer's narcissism, his insistence that he suffered uniquely from the tragedy."
Don't we all suffer uniquely from any tragedy? Doesn't the very thrill of reading come from apprehending someone else's unique experience ,one that hadn't already occurred to us? Isn't the artist's job to provide us with something that isn't already ours? (Hint: full credit if you answered "yes" to each question).
So I think that Spiegelman's take is not only unobjectionable, but positively laudable. On the other hand, you may have meant that Spiegelman intended to position his suffering above anyone else's, to invest it with greater meaning than anyone else's. I too would find this off-putting, but I didn't get that from his work.
Monica Osborne
In response to Ismail:
I think I had a problem (it's been a while since I looked at it) with one image in particular, where Spiegelman depicts himself falling from the towers. What was offputting to me about his book was the implication that he has ultimate victim status--that because he is a Second Generation survivor he has a perspective that is unique from others even in the case of talking about a tragedy other than the Holocaust. When I read it (and perhaps I am letting other things he has been credited with saying infuse themselves into my reading of the text), I was bothered by what I felt was a bizarre sense of entitlement.
You write: "Isn't the artist's job to provide us with something that isn't already ours?" Well, in many cases yes. But, quite frankly, that experience--the experience of 9/11 survivors/victims or Holocaust victims/survivors--will never and should never be mine, and I should not be so presumptuous as to think it can be, to think that I can actually know, to imagine that I experienced it (9/11) in ways just as traumatic as actual victims/survivors.
Perhaps my wording ("he suffered uniquely from the tragedy") is not quite accurate. I suppose you are right-- that the possibility exists that we all suffer uniquely from any tragedy. I do think, however, that making a tragedy one's own can quickly venture into the realm of the unethical. Much of my work has to do with Holocaust representation, and so this is where my viewpoint is coming from. I think there's something endlessly (and understandably) alluring, to novelists, about things like the Holocaust and now, it seems, the September 11 tragedy. But when we get too close--i.e. insert ourselves into the event literally--it feels, for me, a bit transgressive. I simply wonder if there are other, and more ethical, ways of talking about traged--ways that don't include presuming to know, presuming to have experience what it felt like to fall from the towers.
Ismail
Thanks for your thoughtful
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Monica.
You put me in mind of some related issues, and I hope this will sharpen my thinking. I realized, as I read what you had to say, that I've always insisted on something that sort of resembles your wariness about ownership of tragedy; namely, that gender, race, cultural affiliation, et al, don't confer authority to a speaker. That is, a woman's perspective on abortion has zero epistemic privilege vis a vis a man's. Being African-American confers no advantage upon one's thinking re affirmative action. To use a more homely example, Chinese families may be found enjoying the grub in the shittiest Sichuan joint. Go figure.
So I agree with you that Spiegelman's construal of the holocaust isn't somehow more credible because of his history (or his parents'). And that goes for, e.g., Elie Wiesel also. Note that I'm talking about philosophical or historical matters here, not personal ones. For example, Wiesel imagines the nazi holocaust as unique, unknowable, beyond language, etc. Others, like Peter Novick and David Stannard, disagree. This is an interesting question about which honest scholars may differ, but Wiesel's horrible experience doesn't lend any greater weight to the credibility of his historiographic (not psychological or artistic) position.
Likewise, Spiegelman would have no edge, e.g., in locating 9/11 in history. But I think it's kind of restrictive to say that his trying to render his state of mind by depicting himself plunging from the tower is somehow suspect. I don't think he's saying that he actually knows what it's like to plummet to his death, any more than he thinks that Jews were mice. He's a cartoonist, and finding visual representations of his thoughts and feelings is his job.
One of the things that humans do best is to play. Artists play by imagining nonsense and making it credible. Did Orson Welles know what it was like to be an abandoned child who inherited a silver mine and established an empire? No, but who cares? What does that have to do with Citizen Kane?
Of course I can never know what it was like to be slaughtered by nazis or incinerated in the WTC. But my imaginings, my curiosity, my allusory associations and reactions to these things, if tempered by sufficient craft, may be revelatory. Shall I avoid playing with historical events that fascinate or trouble or terrify me?
I'm struck by your sense that doing so may be unethical, of all things. Why? Which tragic events are off limits and which may one safely pursue? And don't you transgress your own hesitation about the ownership of horror when you suggest that you may legislate which historical events are fair game and which not?
You can see what my thinking is on this stuff, but I'm wondering if I'm understanding your point as you mean it. Where do you see the ethical dimension of artistic efforts emerging from? Besides the nazi holocaust and 9/11, what other events seem sketchy to make art around? Slavery? Hiroshima?
I'm an "anything goes" sort when it comes to intellectual or artistic production, and I'm suspicious of insinuations of propriety as being needlessly constricting. And slippery slopes creep me out.
I know you're not trying to be a commissar and forbid anyone to draw or write what they want, but I am interested to know more about the sources of your ethical concerns.
Thanks for raising a provocative question.
Adam Shprintzen
Hmm, nope, I don't have a fever...
Ismail, I find myself agreeing with you far too frequently lately...maybe I am easily swayed learning that we are CUNY mishpucha?
Ismail
"...maybe I am easily swayed
"...maybe I am easily swayed learning that we are CUNY mishpucha?"
What, it wasn't the irresistible allure of my reasoning and lapidary precision of my prose?
And don't worry, Adam, I assure you that our differences remain manifold and robust (If Arafat had been Gandhi, we'd be looking at an independent Palestine now? I don't think so.)
Nevertheless, I'm always glad to read your intelligent remarks, even when, as in this case,I'm not sure I agree with your analysis. Sounds like artistic expression around any tragedy, unless it were given away free, would be subject to your raised eyebrow. This sounds very limiting to me. I guess a lot hinges on the result/intent dichotomy, though having different intentions seems to distinguish the tee shirt guys from Spiegelman pretty profoundly. (By the way, don't you mean "hawking" t shirts? You'd be the one doing the hocking if you came upon these vultures, no?)
No worries, though. Ideological disagreements aside, in the world of Jewish, CUNY-related, vegetarian academics, you're my boychik.
Adam Shprintzen
Well, perhaps if Arafat was at least a vegetarian...
hock (hŏk) Pronunciation Key
tr.v. hocked, hock·ing, hocks
To pawn: hock a diamond ring.