Dear Gentle Readers,
as well as novels in the ‘war novel’ genre, there are uncountable other novels that touch on war from every possible angle, in every possible way. Of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, there seems to be great disagreement on whether it’s pro-war (for its association of war with maturity, for its lack of connection with the ideological context in which the war in question—the American Civil War—is fought) or anti-war (because of its lack of romanticism and its realism about the actual experience of battle).
Even the last lines can be interpreted either way.
Certainly, they seem to suggest that even if one matures (or is aged) through the experience of being a soldier in war, ultimately all anyone wants is to live in peace, and the beauty of nature:
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
As Adam Gopnik sees it, in his review of a Paul Auster biography of Crane, The Red Badge of Courage is
relentlessly apolitical, in a way that, as many critics have remarked, removes the reasons for the war from the war. It’s a work of sheer pointillist sensuality and violence: no causes, no purposes, no justifications—just a stream of consciousness of fear and, in the end, deliverance through a kind of courage that is indistinguishable from insanity.
Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, which I started rereading a few weeks ago with my son (we’ve been interrupted with some other great reading, though), builds on the insanity aspect of it, though I wouldn’t say that removing the reasons from war from a war in your retelling of it should be seen as apolitical, not if you see its waging as (whether invariably, or in a particular case) a cynical and unjustifiable exercise by the powerful in causing premature suffering and death. To wit,
What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.”
And here:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
And here:
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
But here we are still talking about people who signed up—or were conscripted—to fight.
My interest—and an experience I have pursued vicariously through more novels than I can count—has always been in a different sort of courage. The other day, I went to pick up coffee from a cafe near my house that will grind it for me. I ended up talking with the owner, whose previous venture turned out to be the restaurant, long-shuttered, now, where my husband and I went for a celebratory dinner upon learning I was pregnant with our first child. Anyway, we got into conversation, and he explained to me his difficult and honourable family history, including a parent who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil war (and who was psychologically destroyed as a result) before going on to train resistance fighters in France.
Resistance to war and oppression by ordinary people who want nothing more than to live in peace, to maybe open a nice little restaurant with wine that makes you think of the soil it’s grown on, but that doesn’t taste of blood—this is the sort of courage that I’ve always admired and always feared I lack. Courage, especially, to take action to protect others and to speak up for those with less power in a given situation, to take the side of the underdog in a solidarity in which the goal is that no one should have to be underdogs in society. One day.
In José Saramago’s great plague novel, Blindness, the doctor’s wife (as she is described throughout the book) is the only one not stricken blind by a mysterious sickness. She makes the love-driven choice to pretend to be so anyway.
When she rejoined her husband, she asked him, Can you imagine where they've brought us, No, she was about to add, To a mental asylum, but he anticipated her, You're not blind, I cannot allow you to stay here, Yes, you're right, I'm not blind, Then I'm going to ask them to take you home, to tell them that you told a lie in order to remain with me, There's no point, they cannot hear you through there, and even if they could, they would pay no attention, But you can see, For the moment, I shall almost certainly turn blind myself one of these days, or any minute now, Please, go home, Don't insist, besides, I'll bet the soldiers would not let me get as far as the stairs, I cannot force you, No, my love, you can't, I'm staying to help you and the others who may come here, but don't tell them I can see, What others, You surely don't think we shall be here on our own, This is madness, What did you expect, we're in a mental asylum.
Later, though, the courage she shows, as society descends into grasping, mistrusting, power-mad barbarism, isn’t just about marital loyalty and her relationship with her husband, but about allegiance to humanity and to the human capacity for moral courage, however rare it may be, especially under great pressure or in the face of the temptation to self-interest.
To return for a moment to Catch-22, where Joseph Heller’s Yossarian muses,
What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.
The rarity of moral courage in Saramago’s novel echoes the cynical thinking of this passage—but perhaps it puts that rarity in a better light. And, maybe, it also suggests (especially given author Saramago’s known political leanings< discussed in their social & literary context at that link) that a less exploitative and cut-throat society might make it easier or harder for people’s better natures to emerge.
We should also remember that, as Primo Levi argued, the extreme bad environment, such as the death camp, is not natural, is not the ‘state of nature’. Our lives do not have to be Hobbesian nightmares and what occurs under such extreme conditions does not reflect what is ‘natural’ in humans. We should perhaps not judge human nature as a whole by the extremes, then. We must, however, do everything possible to prevent people having to live in such a way (suffering excessive, sociopath-breeding privilege, or enduring oppression and privation of basic needs and pleasures) as to make moral courage require such a high cost that few are able or willing to pay it, or that teaches people to devalue the lives of their fellow humans.
At least, that’s the ‘should’ that experience through novels has instilled in me, although it did so in the subtle, insidious, un-ideological way of fiction, not via the persuasive essay, educational text or manifesto.
In Albert Camus’ The Plague, writes novelist Walter Moseley in his wonderful short book, Elements of Fiction,
We see the worst sides of humanity, while social institutions slowly disintegrate. It isn’t until we’re far into the book that we discover that the mildest, most hapless of the characters is destined to become the hero of the story. This slowly evolving reveal is designed to show us that there has always been hope, even in the darkest moments; and the potential for that hope resides in all of us, no matter our foibles, shortcomings or even our cowardice.
This is a bit of an unfair reach, using the word ‘hope’ to describe Camus’ great struggle against absurdity in a world without hope—or, rather, where in the absence of hope we must invent it ourselves. But other than the unreflective term, it certainly describes the gorgeous, universal feeling in this novel, in Blindness, and in other novels that show how humans are crushed and distorted under pressure. Realism shows us the worst, and maybe it’s a slight escape into fantasy—at least, the fantasy of the rare exception—to show us the moral courage and thus the beauty that can exist even in the most appalling and soul-destroying of settings.
It’s something to aspire to, anyway.
The graffiti in the photo above strikes the same note as the famous phrase used widely in protest and social justice movements—“they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds”. Apparently the phrase originates with a couplet by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos, whose resonant words were actually (originally) directed at the Greek literary community rather than at oppressive regimes:
what didn’t you do to bury me
but you forgot that I was a seed
Just as another aside, I appreciate this guy’s attitude. He rejected a major award for his writing on the following grounds (described here by Greek media scholar Alexandra Boutopoulou in an interview about the origins of the phrase following its use in “Families Belong Together” protests in the United States against the Trump policy of family separation as well as against the Supreme Court’s upholding of the same government’s travel ban, also known as the “Muslim ban”):
Having always been controversial and unconventional, Christianopoulos made very clear through his poetry that he is against all awards because they diminish human dignity, something he expressed in the first issue of Diagonal. For Christianopoulos, giving an award means to recognize the value of somebody who is my inferior; and according to him, we should cast off the need to be approved by big bosses of any kind. Receiving an award means that I do accept intellectual bosses and, at some point, we should dismiss those bosses from our lives.
I would not have thought of writing awards—and the rejection of one—as relating to moral courage, but I think he’s right in the deeper issue. Dismissing such intellectual bosses from our minds may indeed be necessary in order to make clear decisions about right (in a maybe-Freudian slip I first wrote that as write) and wrong, unaffected by the desire for recognition or the intellectual and moral servitude that may be required to receive it.
The bravest people in the world right now might be the doctors and other healthcare workers who have refused to leave their hospitals and patients under bombardment and impossible evacuation order in Gaza and who are still, somehow, working under unfathomably desperate conditions. For many, or maybe most, this is a last stand that they, like their patients, are unlikely to survive.
I haven’t done anything useful so far (or at all), but I did offer myself up to do some basic writing work for Glia, a very practical humanitarian organization whose medical director is someone I worked with ten years ago at an open access medical journal. They design cheap, locally-3-D printable, clinically effective medical equipment like stethoscopes, and distribute open-source designs and equipment to under-resourced communities around the world, including in rural Canada, Kenya, Zambia, Ukraine, and Gaza after clinical trials and peer review publication where relevant (some of their designs remain works-in-progress—for example, a high quality but inexpensive pulse oximeter, also designed to improve on the frequent poor accuracy of results of these devices when used on patients with melanated (dark) skin, was in clinical trials in Ontario before the pandemic, when it was forced to pause the trials for a couple of years).
In September, Glia’s Gaza office gave away their entire stock of 3-D printed tourniquets, which are designed to be easy to use, and to adjust to the smaller size requirements of women and children.
By this time what we see in the news must surely not accurately describe the magnitude of suffering and death in Gaza, especially in the north where even the wispy promise of aid isn’t allowed in although the injured, elderly, very young and disabled were largely unable to evacuate as ordered. Still, I believe that there will be people to treat, lives to save and communities to rebuild and for that, medical equipment (and the staff currently under bombardment) will be needed. You can donate to this cause here.
If Israeli civilian victims of Hamas needed donations for this most basic of medical care I would share links for that as well. That’s not the situation now though.
Gentle readers, I’ll see you next week. May you read well and be well till then. If there’s no hope, says Camus, it’s incumbent upon us to invent it.
-Carlyn