The Look a Line Contains

Not simply re-reading, but reading as remembrance, with a sense of the inherited layers: measuring the difference between working through W. H. Auden’s canonical poem about “suffering” reduced to “some untidy spot” today and the first time those words were found, twenty years ago. Then it was there to be read precisely because of its canonical status. Still, it immediately struck a nerve of sense. Done with Donne, the romantic bramble cut through, all of Pound’s impossible allusions cast aside, none of Bishop’s demanding banality. Half of a page in the middle of the introductory anthology, it stood plain, clear, and contained.

 

A boy falls from the sky and the ship sails on. The world’s living textures were all so imaginable—the waxen wings gone and the bare boy legs just there in the boat’s white wake.

It was read then on a campus in Santa Barbara, probably in between classes, and there in the plaza outside the library, all around the pavement radiated back the warmth of the slow sunny afternoon. It is easy to recollect such days; the lightness of a backpack, the easy pace, wearing the ratty Converse, a Madness t-shirt, a small, discrete band of leather around the wrist instead of a watch. That talisman was brought back as a gift from Colombia by a girl named Booker whose father was Dutch and mother from South America. (There is a way of inquiring into the transatlantic paths that brought such people together but I didn't know anything about that then.)

 

Sitting in the sun on a wide campus, the textures of daily life were more important than text itself, and certainly more important than figuring out what it might mean that Auden was showing something essential in the citing of Breughel, or what it might mean for him to be in Brussels in 1938: where and when one could buy a postcard of King Leopold III as a pilot adventurer; when the war was coming over the horizon, just a month after Kristallnacht had burned its warning into the Jews of Germany; where and when Paul de Man was himself just a restless student earning a degree in chemistry, two years before he would write collaborationist pieces for Le Soir promoting the rigors of a scientific treatment of literature, and long before he would create the textual alchemy that tried to make history, even his own, disappear into impossible translation.

Auden felt clear then, and he feels right now. The failure of apprehension is common enough, more so when the sun shines or the business at hand turns the eye from other recognitions. So it was that

the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy failing out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Now that it is a colder time, another life being lived, it is easier to hear how such poems gather memories upon them. The words carry their meanings but also the strange and uncanny affects of all those other times, places, and ways of encountering them. Instead of the anthology with its decontextualized, sterilized and fossilized exhibit, now “Musée des Beaux Arts” is seen in its rightful place. It is needed to make sense of the cold currents through which the expensive and delicate sail. So spurred by a reference in another work, one is lead to the volume of collected Auden, where the tale of Icarus is adjacent to a poem called grounded in the date and season of its creation, “Brussels in Winter”:

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,

Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,

The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled

Keep at this temperature a sense of place,

And in their misery are all assembled;

The winter holds them like an Opera-House

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night

Where isolated windows glow like farms,

A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,

And fifty francs will earn a stranger right

To take the shuddering city in his arms.

W. G. Sebald instills such lessons of looking for that history, of looking for the history of man in each look out and back. The past is continually there in both the obvious traces of the photographs he so often uses, but it also saturates his works in the form of other works inherited, absorbed until they form a filter of seeing.

It is common to think of the memories of reading held in marginalia or annotations; underlinings making declarations. The richer sense of the past's return comes through the accreted associations with the words themselves, or the way we create the stories for pictures or the pictures for the stories and then take notice of the world, staring meaning into it.

This kind of memory is necessary, Sebald says, because “it is hard to discover / the winged vertebrates of prehistory / embedded in tablets of slate.” Unlike the absent fossil of the natural world, man’s history is written in a thousand carved scars of the earth, or in each tiny cringe before the self-mutilating memory. It can be seen and felt. It is in the dream of Icarus before that fall, “sailing in the midst of / the currents of light.” Earthbound, it is the great hoping “perhaps” that mirrors his flight, the possibility “you’ll see a golden coast / a land veneered with rain or / a schoolboy on his way home / over a beautiful meadow.” It is likewise in this passage’s echo of Auden; a memory that the suffering is hidden in those brief spells of necessary recovery, which is the mind’s work itself, a small, tentative flight waiting to be hatched.

Tortured Imaginary

Back in 1964, Graham Greene repeatedly saw American and British newspapers printing images of South Vietnamese torturing captured Vietcong. The images were not documentary evidence unearthed. They were taken at the behest of the torturers. Greene, who used his novelist's gift to pursue the gnawed heart of each matter, took note that the captions in the newspapers were descriptive but not marked by any condemnation; editorial approval of the demonstration that the enemy was not human. He wondered if such "honesty without conscience" should not make one prefer the older forms of hypocrisy. By 2007, the old tension between visibility and silence has developed into a more pronounced form of exposure as ideological advertising--vivid vindication of the worst impulses.

This week The New Yorker outlines how a histrionic television show ("24") represents torture in the hands of the righteous, where the pain inflicted is flaunted as the difficult task of the just. In fact, it seems to determine the essence of the righteous purpose itself. Repeatedly, routinely, necessarily disaster inflicted on bodies averts the detonation of the omnipresent "ticking time bomb." The audience is aligned with the torturer since those abused are always guilty (or when innocent, consenting to the process that they too accept as absolutely necessary). The slogan for this process: "everyone breaks eventually." And facts are left to puddle red on the floor.

The scandal in all this is not in the fictional renderings, whatever their politics or perverse appeal. An aesthetic of the tormented body is nothing new. The twisted and broken of medieval art continues along a dense spectrum, all the way to the present; and the eroticization of the torturer also remains a fascinating aspect of fascism, as Susan Sontag suggested.

Such images reverberate, however. According to a Dean at West Point, they are shifting the imaginary of soldiers in training. Many who enter the climate of the military bring with them a culture of torture in the name of the cause. They claim, with conviction, the very myths that would have, once before, betrayed and defined barbarity. They imagine themselves as protector and executioner of the tough decision. The conviction that they dwell and act on truth's side sanctifies the murderous acts and allows for wantonly adopting the ruthlessness that operates "without conscience."

In his novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee writes of the ways power, pain, and paranoia orbit around Empire's nucleus, and its ever-changing dream of "peace." It is a novel about the drives and desire of torture. He puts the insidious words of justification into the mouths of the law-abiding torturers. The very real "pitch of human pain" for the witness is, for the blindly abusive Colonel of the novel, "the tone of truth." There can be no mistake where the failures of proper perception reside.

The perception, though, is of the cries from behind the barred door of the frontier granary where the "barbarians" are taken for their indoctrination to civilized discourse. Coetzee shows very little. Elsewhere he has written about the potential destructiveness of even imagining, in too much detail, such wretched things. It is our conscience, and his own, he is protecting. One must remain capable of flinching, of turning away, of condemning the unbearable. There must be respect for the forbiddenness of forbidden places. He has the authorial voice of Elizabeth Costello suggest that one risks a great deal if they decide to descend down into the torture's cellar, even as a witness.

The "witness" in Waiting for the Barbarians is an ambivalent colonial magistrate. In the wake of the torturing of a family at his outpost he is drawn--against his own impulses to maintain a peaceful state of mind--to the ghosts of those who emerged broken by their contact with the Empire's need for truth.

"Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten. I think of one who despite her age was still a child; who was brought in here and hurt before her father's eyes; who watched him being humiliated before her, and saw that he knew what she saw."

The absence of the details is what rightfully haunts. The truth is in that distanced, struggling apprehension. Everything ill-remembered, "all I see is a figure named father that could be the figure of any father who knows a child is being beaten who he cannot protect. To someone he loves he cannot fulfil his duty. For this he knows he is never forgiven. This knowledge of fathers, this knowledge of condemnation, is more than he can bear."

Coetzee shows us a proper response worming its way through the brain. The tortured imaginary sees clearly and is free from conscience, certain that it takes the painful path out of absolute need imposed on it by others. No responsibility, therefore. Instead, only the glorification of the abuses dispensed, in reality or in dream.

"Case 40/61"

Scattered throughout Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem are several references to the trial reporting of Dutch author, Harry Mulisch. His account of the Eichmann in Israel has finally appeared in English as Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann: An Eyewitness Account (2005, University of Pennsylvania Press). If there is a necessary supplement to the "report on the banality of evil" it is this travelogue by Mulisch. His travels are, like Arendt's, intellectual journeys into the realm of the unprecedented and the implications of such destruction in the nuclear age.

But they are also accounts of his movements through Israel itself, a then-young nation, its multifarious constituencies searching for literal and figurative grounding. Once again that metaphor of foundation and certainty, once again its elusiveness. If Arendt's thinking considers thought itself, Mulisch is a master of living texture. He notes the traces of history pressing into the present. He writes as much about the landscape as the trial. In each image of what he sees, and what the Bible tells him once was, we hear the omnipresent tension that exists between the reality faced and the oscillating play of prophecy and memory. Between those realms there can be no reconciliation.

Two telling passages: the first about the white-housed villages in the hills two hours from Jerusalem. Russians, Moroccans, Poles, Persians, or Yeminites are clustered together in their tiny communities, bound by the respective languages. The center of gravity is the idea of the land they occupy:

"In the center of the circle there is a square nucleus with shops, schools, and recreation center. Only that center is Israel, the mortar, the melting pot, where people meet, where children play, where they are taught int he common language, Hebrew. That is why Israel's dramatic experiment, thought to be impossible, works, and it seems to be successful. Here one can learn the meaning of 'courage from desperation.' It is Sabbath: not a soul outside. Seeing the motionless white villages in the endless landscape, where Joshua once made the sun stop, I am filled with awe, while at the same time desperate desertedness is is creeping up on me, which is hiding behind this pioneer spirit: the double face of the persecutor."

The second from later pages perfectly cast by his ethnographic eye:

"In the hills around the city, there are Bedouin everywhere. There is one walking here, there are two sitting there; one is standing over there; another is riding his donkey. It is as if a movie director has distributed them, with a great sense for harmony, but it is their own instinctive feeling for space that makes them take possession of the landscape, in such a light way, without conquering it, without destroying it, despised by a people that should be able to remember that one ought not despise peaceful minorities."

Against this backdrop, like Arendt Mulisch is searching for a way to make sense of Eichmann's two faces. He uses actual images of Eichmann to suggest a point. One shows Eichmann in harsh shadows, eyes sinking to darkness. The other is evenly lit and presents an unremarkable figure, just a man, and a mood benign. The grim tones of the former picture lead us into the temptation to see the monstrosity emerging from within that man, making its way to the surface.


This, says Mulisch, misses the chilling recognition that it is the cool, distanced face that is the true pose of the killer who looks out quite contentedly, viewing without a flinch an accepted, natural order of destruction. And that image of the face twisted with shadows as if overcome with cancer? That image is the look of the witness, the one forced to grapple with the articulation of the "offenses" and their troubled (and troubling) formations and formulations.

In Arendt the argument is that Eichmann cannot grapple. He cannot think outside himself and therefore never does bear witness to what he has done, the destruction he helped bring about. Mulisch reads him differently. There may not be recognition of the crimes, but there has been, on that human heart, an unexpected "effect" and it demands of us a reckoning: "Now that there is . . . the tormented horror [writ on the face] I for one would not even throw the one-thousandth stone very quickly. This is the enigmatic face of the man, who, in 1939, gave the order to punish severely anyone who desecrated Theodor Herzl's grave in Vienna. Herzl was the founder of Zionism. At the thirty-fifth commemoration of his death, perplexed Jews saw a lone figure in civilian clothes at the tomb. It was Eichmann."

Reading Arendt Reading Eichmann

In his opening remarks during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Israel's Attorney General Gideon Hausner paints a vivid picture of Eichmann as a beast operating with instinctual, predatory passions. He killed with malice, operating with hatred from his marrow, and even with his bare hands did he show himself an enemy of mankind and the Jewish people (part of the accusations is that he once strangled a Hungarian Jewish boy). He was, understandably in the state's view, no longer human.

Certainly the chief complaints about Hannah Arendt's analysis of the 1961 trial is her ability to read Eichmann against the grain of this portrait. Her rendering in Eichmann in Jerusalem does not confirm the monster Hausner offered. It is not that of a beast. In one of the frequent sentences of pique, she suggests that one could likely see him as a "clown"; but even if that is allowed one must, against all revulsion, take seriously his actions and reasoning. And so she thinks seriously about the bureaucrat and "specialist" who severed all ties to what one would normally call the inhibitions of "conscience."

One of the great virtues of her work comes from the refusal to yield to a central expectation that such a horrendous "crime" must emerge from someone who was not "human," or if human, clearly knew, on some fundamental level, that he had committed crimes. It is precisely that refusal, however, which has set her at odds with so many critics, bringing consistent condemnation and confusion. For many, it is simply unfathomable that on the surface of things, Eichmann may have been less than his impact. What they cannot likewise understand is how he represents, in this way, something just as chilling as an openly crude anti-Semite like Julius Streicher.



What confounds so many is that Eichmann appears in the glass booth at once without malice and without remorse. To occupy both positions simultaneously, to present both faces, in the wake of the Holocaust he helped carry out, seems absolutely impossible. For the Israeli court, both positions could only be lies. Both the state prosecution and the judges saw in Eichmann was the decision to participate in spite of what must have been a conscience telling him "Thou shall not kill." This, however, relies on a notion of conscience that remains in all cases steadfast and "unequivocal." The insistence on such universals, says Arendt, "signifies a deliberate refusal to take notice of the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century" (148). That deliberate refusal continues today.

What Arendt saw in that impossible combination of Eichmann is itself two-fold. First was his absolute identification with the genocidal language of the Reich. In Arendt's reading, National Socialism provided "language rules" ideal for someone like Eichmann, who steeped in cliche and formulaic expressions--language as technical assembly--readily escaped "thought." Critiques of Arendt have pounced on this description of Eichmann inability to think and tried to show him as cunning and therefore dangerous. For instance, in his 2005 piece for Commentary, Hillel Halkin says of Eichmann, "far from seeming mindless, he strikes one as impressively capable of analyzing what he is asked; of detecting its hidden traps; of breaking it down into its components; or rearranging these in new sequences that suit the responses he wishes to give; and of replying in complex and sometimes long-winded sentences over which he keeps full logical and syntactical control." None of that refutes Arendt's claim that Eichmann could not think the position of another. This is not to say that Eichmann was completely void, or a mute brute; rather, that he was encapsulated in formulas that, however re-arranged, foreclosed the possibility for understanding.

Secondly, she emphasizes that Eichmann's atrocities were sustained by a complex set of cultural and societal relations which existed before and during the destruction of European Jews. The hierarchy of leaders and their communities, the privileging of the "esteemed" at the expense of the stateless newcomer (as with the Ostjuden), or military veterans earning exceptions not granted to "the recently nationalized" all endorsed the same logic as that of the camp selection. "[Eichmann's] conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which 'good society' everywhere reacted as he did. he did not need to 'close his ears to the voice of conscience,' the [court's] judgment has it, not because he has none, but because his conscience spoke with a 'respectable voice,' with the voice of respectable society around him" (126). Troubling enough was Arendt's willingness to name that appeasing voice "conscience." Worse was her integration of the Jewish Councils' actions with an appraisal of Eichmann.

She adds that his perverse devotions to the concepts of obedience and murderous laws further worked to armor him from recognizing the malignancy of his actions. Arendt shows that it was far more than the argument that he was simply following orders. Instead, by claiming his fulfillment of his "duty" and his "oath" to the "law" as it came from the Fuhrer, Eichmann was not saying he had been compelled against his will, but that he had given his will a new name, allowing it to be subsumed by the concept of obedience. It was through this volatile mix that the assumed inner voice of conscience in someone like Eichmann was smothered, choked to death by "respectable society" and the moral and legal collapse of his nation.

For Arendt, this more than just a diagnosis. As a "report" it collects a certain constellation of related claims and observations. The problem was how to judge Eichmann (and anyone else) so immune to the consequences of actions taken. Eichmann in Jerusalem is a book, therefore, that performs an inquiry not only into the subject Eichmann but into judgment itself in the wake of the Holocaust. She is in search of grounds for a judgment to come.

Is such an approach to Eichmann a form of exculpation? Is this "humanizing"--a dubious description of Arendt's portrait--designed to dilute the burdens of Eichmann's responsibility? It is impossible to engage truly Arendt's reading of Eichmann and come to such a conclusion, and yet it continues to happen. For those of good will, like students coming to Arendt and Eichmann for the first time, such a reaction stems from habits of differentiation that make Eichmann so vexing. If he was incapable of "thought" that does not mean that he was not acting in such a way as to be beneath judgment, only that the judgment must try and account for the particularities of Eichmann's numbed Kadavergeshoram.

For those who ought to know better, political necessities and ideological blindness lead to unnecessary distortions. Consider the tortured responses of the much-cited Walter Laqueur, who was involved in the early '60s U.S. response to Arendt when Eichmann in Jerusalem first appeared. He published his History of Zionism in 1972 and certainly had time to re-think his initial responses. But in 1997 he remains troubled by the status of Arendt. In "The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator," Laqueur tries to offer a thorough cataloging of Arendt's mistakes and lapses. Included in these is the idea that she paved the way for a functionalist interpretation of the Holocaust. This interpretation eschews the notion of German "evil" for a universal explanation of blameless mechanisms. Such an argument, Laqueur says, could only find a home with Germans seeking solace and what he calls, with apparent seriousness, "the moral relativism of the postmodern movement [sic]" in the United States.

By diminishing Eichmann, says Laqueur, Arendt "put the blame for the mass murder at the door of all kind of middle-level bureaucrats." As a consequence, "the evildoer disappears, or becomes so banal as to be hardly worth our attention, and is replaced by all kind of underlings with a bookkeeper mentality with a bookkeeper mentality. Hitler turns into a boring Spiessburger." So according to Laqueur, Arendt's refusal to follow Hausner's lead was an attempt to blanch the whole question: shifting "blame" downward to the underling so that the crime no longer warrants our attention, the rot of this displacement then ascending up the hierarchy so that even Hitler appears guilty of nothing more than bourgeois pretensions. Such a reading is absolutely and appallingly absurd. But it is not, sadly, surprising.

Doesn't Laqueur's position bring us back to Arendt's aim at hierarchies such as those that comfortably categorize the crimes of underlings as "hardly worthy of our attention"? One of the aspects she finds so repulsive in Eichmann is precisely his slavish devotions to matters of privilege and status, positions and roles that are thoroughly social if also sometimes bureaucratic. As she writes of such categories:

"While the veteran and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned [in Germany], the fate of 'famous' Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural elite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius" (134).