MANY WRITERS ATTEST TO THE INHERENT DIFFICULTY IN THE ACT OF WRITING. George Orwell said, ‘Writing is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing, if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’
However, there is another kind of difficulty: that of writing about ‘harrowing’ and ‘dark’ subjects where words themselves break down. This is an instance where the diabolic appears to have entered into the human life.
Flaubert warned, ‘Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.’ Adorno feared that, when faced with the ultimate evil, the resources of culture and art are no longer adequate. In his words:
‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’
Kafka understood well this blackness when he described writing as ‘the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.’ Yet, writing the difficult thing defines the very creed of the writer. Anaïs Nin said:
‘The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.’
Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet of Jewish origin (1891- 1938), took his poetical mission to articulate the ‘unsayable’ to an extreme level. He chose martyrdom and death when he denounced Stalin in a poem, The Stalin Epigram:
‘Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men . . .’
(Translated by W. S. Merwin)
For this poem, Mandelstam was sent to a labour camp where he died in 1938.
As if to bear witness to Adorno’s disquiet, Primo Levi (1919-1987), a Jewish-Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz, said:
‘I had an absolute need to write. Not only as a moral duty, but as a psychological need.’
His memoir, If This is a Man, recounts his day-to-day survival in Auschwitz. Levi is scrupulously even-handed and describes factually the starvation, the inadequate clothing in freezing conditions, the disease and the routine cruelty and humiliation meted out by the German guards. Levi’s experiences in the death camp ‘turned’ him ‘into a writer.’
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a testimony of Azar Nafisi to the oppression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The book recounts instances of ordinary Iranians being shadowed by the revolutionary guards, women being intimidated to wear the veil and suspected dissidents arbitrarily arrested and executed. For Nafisi and her group of women students (who met every Thursday to read forbidden works of western fiction), Nabokov’s Lolita is a metaphor for life under the tyranny of the fundamentalist state. They liken it to the controlling and predatory Humbert Humbert (HH). Nafisi’s book is her refusal to be a voiceless victim like Lolita. The American writer, E. B. White, observed that writing is ‘both mask and unveiling.’ Thus, in order to protect her friends in Iran (she wrote the book in exile in the U.S.), Nafisi ‘masks’ the addresses and details of their identities.
Andrea Levy’s Small Island depicts the breath-taking racism that was woven into the texture of the white British society. An example is the routine use of the word ‘nigger’ to address Jamaicans and Indians who travelled to Britain in response to the Mother Country’s call for support in WWII. Her other book, The Long Song, tackles slavery: an issue that Levy says is ignored in British schools and universities. The problem is compounded by the reluctance of the Jamaicans themselves to talk about a ‘painful’ and, in their eyes, ‘shameful’ past. In addressing these difficult subjects, it is as if Levy is answering Rilke’s call:
‘Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.’
The World War I poet, Wilfred Owen, made death itself the subject of his poetry: ‘My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’ He trenchantly mocked the glory of war and the notion that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, as expressed by such poets as Rupert Brooke, who also died in the war. This led to his exclusion from the Oxford Anthology of Modern Verse by the editor, W. B. Yeats, who said that passive suffering does not constitute poetry. Yeats himself did write about the experience of war (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death) but tried to find ‘a terrible beauty’ in it. Critical opinion has endorsed Owen over Yeats in this matter. The French-Jewish mystic, Simone Weil, later pointed out that the glorious epic of war, the Iliad, was one of the profoundest anti-war poems ever written. The refugee from that conflict, the great warrior and founder of Rome, Aeneas, according to Virgil, official chronicler of the Roman Empire, could only contemplate the ‘lacrimae rerum’: the sorrow at the very heart of things.
As Hardy said, ‘The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.’
– Golden Langur
