Nha Trang is on the Southern coast of Vietnam. It is a tourist city because the beach is nice. But that can be avoided. You can rent a motorbike for the day and drive around anywhere you please. Your wife can hop on the back and hold onto you as the sun gets to the top of the sky. She can put her chin on your shoulder and the blue ocean can pass by again and again as you circle.

Driving along the sea you can dip into the winding streets of the city. No stop lights, no stop signs, just a whir of vehicles in a mad and ceaseless flow. You can drive up to the ruins of the Cham temple in the city. You can pass from paved roads onto little dirt byways where the people who actually live in Nha Trang go to live in Nha Trang. The nice surprise is that these routes don't hide, necessarily, the squalor that the tourist part of the city feeds off. In fact, the back routes are better. A wedding procession passes by and the red pillows they carry are very red against the white buildings. This wedding party, right now, contains people who are as happy as are any people in the world. At least right now.

Sitting at the beach later you can buy a book. There are always books to buy from kids or old women in Vietnam. The kinds of books you can buy are a testament to how much the people who come to Vietnam want to understand it. They are also a testament to the fact that Vietnam is still thought about through its wars. The Vietnam War (the American War for Vietnamese) isn't the first thing on anyone's mind. But it is there. It is hard to figure out exactly what is foremost on the minds of most Vietnamese people these days, especially because you can't often ask them. So you watch and you read and you pick your spots.

You talk for awhile to a wonderful fellow at a stupid bar in Saigon whose father was ARVN and spent years in a re-education camp after the South fell in '75. The Beatles are playing at the bar. They probably were then too. That is one thing we share. The Marines brought the Beatles with them. Everybody knows the songs, even those born long after the last US soldier left. You can sit in the bar and talk about how things went and there is a sense of understanding for a moment. None of us wanted the tragedy of it all. Everybody wants to think more about the present and the future. But the past is still there.

Then you start reading the book you bought at the beach and you realize that there is another thing we share, everything. There are many books one can buy that attempt to capture the American experience of the war. Many of them are valuable. What has generally been less accessible is the experience from the Vietnamese side. Indeed, many of the American books about Vietnam are partly about that very thing, that 'hiddenness' of the Vietnamese experience. And that 'hiddenness' has fueled the colonial fascination with Vietnam since even before the French made their first foray. But it is probably time for that to end. It is definitely time for that to end. It is only doing damage, only perpetuating old misunderstandings exploited by both sides for their own reasons.

Thus the final point. There is a novel by Bao Ninh called The Sorrow of War. It is a great novel. It isn't a novel specifically for Vietnamese people. It is a novel for human beings trying to understand things. It is a terrifying novel. To read it is to experience for brief moments what it is to lose one's mind in trying to deal with things that can just barely be dealt with. That was how the novel was written. That is how it should be read. And it should be read. Because nobody is really done with Vietnam yet.


- posted by Editor @ 4:37 AM

 
It happens sometimes that a person bumps into a book that page after page speaks what is already in one's head. The exhilaration felt in reading such a work is difficult to describe but it is one of the things that most make life worth living, make it exciting to live. Indeed, the adults I have met who have managed to be continuously surprised and excited by the world, as a child can be by the simple fact that new things are happening all the time, are the ones who continue to find such experience in ideas.

Salam Rushdie's book of collected essays from 1992-2002, Step Across This Line, is more than anything else, to me, a book of ethics. He didn't write it that way and that isn't what is intended of course, but it is true all the same. What I mean by ethics, in this case, is an explication of a set of possibilities. The essays, just below the surface, show us how we can be now, today. The essays looked at as a totality suggest a certain way of life, a certain way of living one's life. It has been noted before that the word 'ethics' finds its root in the Greek word 'ethos', which means something like 'way of life', 'mode of living'. Later, ethics came to take on more rigorous, rule oriented, connotations. But if you take the term in its more ancient sense than Rushdie's book is a book of ethics.

What is Rushdie's ethics saying? That is a little more difficult to describe. It is the nature of an ethics of 'ways of life' that they aren't so readily codifiable into easily stated principles. All the same, there isn't anything mysterious here. Perhaps one of the essays in the book, "Influence," is a good place to start. One thing that you tend to look for in an ethics are virtues. Give me a virtue and I'll give you an ethics, and vice versa. (As a side note: this is another place where Rushdie's ethics has an ancient feel to it. Philosophers often discuss the difference between ancient and modern ethics by saying that there used to be virtue-ethics and now there are not.) In "Influence," Rushdie is speaking about Italo Calvino's work, Six Memo's for the Next Millenium. He is talking, by the way, about Calvino's very modern work and the way it was influenced by the classics, by the ancients, and by Apuleius in particular. A sign, maybe, that we're on to something. But more importantly, Rushdie notes that the thing both Apuleius and Calvino embodied was a set of virtues. He names them: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.

What a wonderful set of virtues. And how apt for a world that finally feels like its greatest promise, though never guaranteed, is the permeability of its borders. Step across this line indeed. But don't even step across the line, dance across it. For there is something Nietzschean in the first two virtues Rushdie names: lightness and quickness. Those virtues are Nietzsche at his best, Nietzsche when he is talking about the light dancing feet of Bizet versus the plodding steps of Wagner. The writer of today one should picture in an airplane or, more fancifully, a space car. This in noted contrast to that other image of the writer or thinker, the solitary genius exiled to his lonely quarters plumbing the depths of the nature of things.

But just when you thought the image was too light, to airy, to post-modern in all its frivolity, we are introduced to the next two virtues, exactitude and visibility. These aren't frivolous, and they show that the lightness and the quickness have a purpose after all. They are meant to get us somewhere. They are meant to get us to something specific, something exact and particular. This is about self understanding, but the kind of self understanding that doesn't come about through deductions and first principles. Gnothi seauton, Know Thyself. But there are so many ways to interpret that imperative. According to Rushdie, you can do it, precisely because it is right there. But you have to be quick and light and you have to be specific and clear. And then you have to move fast because nothing is staying put for all that long. Knowing thyself keeps happening all the time. Thus the fifth virtue, multiplicity. This is the Protean virtue. It is the Heisenbergian principle attached to the self-understanding that we are after, which gets changed by the very activity of talking about it. Not only are we moving, quickly and lightly, but the things we're after are moving too. They are, in themselves, many things. And that is OK.

This brings us to the last point. Virtues often like to come in even sets. Calvino's list was supposed to have six virtues. The sixth was supposed to have been consistency. First, there is probably something interesting in the sheer fact that the list of virtues is tentative and potentially incomplete. Does multiplicity resolve itself into consistency or not? Maybe it shouldn't. That is what Rushdie suggests. Calvino was thinking about consistency in the heroic/tragic sense of the consistency of Bartleby the Scrivener. Rushdie has his doubts. He writes:

"But consistency also may be understood in a darker sense, the consistency of Ahab in pursuit of his whale, of Savonarola who burned the books, of Khomeini's definition of his revolution as a revolt against history itself."

In the end, Rushdie leaves the question open. And he suggests that defining exactly what kind of consistency we are looking for in the new millennium and what kind we aren't is a rather important task. He suggests that his on-going work is partly about that. Which is a good thing for the rest of us.

- posted by Editor @ 6:14 PM

 
Lionel Trilling once suggested that the dynamic of the classical novel was that between individual desires and the social structure of manners and morals (I greatly simplify). The novels that most exemplified this dynamic were the great novels of the nineteenth century. Such novels can never be realized again, if for no other reason than that that social dynamic no longer exists. This is a fine and insightful thesis so far as it goes. It is probably true.
What Trilling was less adept at recognizing is that there are other ways that novels can be interesting. Walter Benjamin proposed a different thesis, though he posed it somewhat less succinctly. But, then again, Benjamin never proposed anything succinctly.
Still, Benjamin recognized that the Proustian model for novel writing was all about remembrance and coming to terms with experience. Some novels are concerned with working memory back into experience. Some novels are concerned with dealing with the traumas and ruptures of historical experience.
It has long been my intuition that a body of fictional work will emerge that attempts to deal with the immense traumas and historical dislocations presented by the lost history of the Soviet Bloc. This will be a new challenge for the novel. It will, in its turn, serve to alter and transform how we define and understand the form of the novels of the future.
In creating this new kind of novel the works of WG Sebald will be constantly consulted.
But the visual arts will also have to be consulted. Perhaps this has to do with the structural immediacy of the visual art. Who knows?
By chance, I recently stumbled into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. There, I discovered the work of Ilya Kabakov. This is a person doing the work of historical remembrance. This is a person doing the labor of working the trauma of experience into something that can be understood.
The installation consists in a number of paintings by the early Soviet painter Charles Rosenthal and then a series of paintings by Ilya Kabakov, a painter who discovered Rosenthal's work and tries to carry their ideas forward in his own work. But it turns out that both Rosenthal and Kabakov are creations of the meta-artist Ilya Kabakov. Rosenthal's paintings are Kabakov(2)'s imaginings of what an artist trying to synthesize social realism and Suprematist style abstraction might have created. The canvasses are a struggle between white and geometric abstract spaces and fragments of the industrial/pastoral style that would dominate post avant-garde Soviet society.
To confess, I did not realize the ruse of the exhibit until most of the way through. I couldn't believe that I had never heard of Charles Rosenthal given how brilliantly the paintings seemed to understand the formal problems of the period as part and parcel of the historical traumas being experienced. Kabakov(1)'s canvasses manage to be exactly what they pretend to be, the continuation of Rosenthal's work by one who knows the history of art and society beyond the early 1930s.
To walk from painting to painting is to take a quick trip through the deepest and most troubling dilemmas of the 20th century. More specifically, it is to be faced with how inadequate our confrontation with the road not taken, the failed Soviet experiment, has actually been. For fifteen years or so we've all been pretending. But it's not going to go away. Experience always comes back a second time.

- posted by Editor @ 1:12 AM