Nobody in Disgrace understands anyone else. Lurie does not understand Melanie, the student he seduces, nor she him. He doesn’t understand Lucy, his own daughter, and she finds his deeds and his “case” for his actions beyond her. He doesn’t understand himself at the beginning, nor does he get any wisdom by the novel’s end.
Inter-racial relations are conducted at the same level of ignorance. The whites don’t understand the blacks and the blacks aren’t interested in understanding the whites. Not one of the novel’s black characters—not Petrus the “gardener and dog-man” who works with Lucy, and certainly not the gang of assailants—is developed into a living, breathing character. Petrus comes closest, but his motives remain enigmatic and his presence grows more menacing as the novel proceeds. To the novel’s whites, its black inhabitants are essentially a threat—a threat justified by history. Because whites have historically oppressed blacks, it’s being suggested, we must now accept that blacks will oppress whites. An eye for an eye, and so the whole world goes blind.
This, then, is the novel’s acclaimed revelatory vision: one of a society of conflicting incomprehensions, driven by the absolutes of history. Certainly it’s coherent enough—coherent in its privileging of incoherence, striving to make of its blindness a sort of metaphorical insight.
When a writer’s created beings lack understanding, it becomes the writer’s task to provide the reader with the insight lacked by the characters. If he does not, his work will not shine a light upon darkness but merely become a part of the darkness it describes. This, alas, is the weakness of Disgrace. It doesn’t, finally, shed enough new light on the news. But the news does add a bit to our understanding of the book.
JUNE 2000: FIJI
They are trying to steal our land.” Such is the emotive accusation made by the failed businessman George Speight and his gang of hooligan usurpers against Fiji’s Indian community in general and the deposed Mahendra Chaudhry government in particular. By one of the bitter ironies of the Age of Migration, Speight’s insistence on the basic cultural importance of land is very easy for people of Indian origin to grasp. (However, he goes too far, and by his insistence on what might be called the racial characteristics of land—for Speight plainly assumes that the land is, in its very nature, ethnically Fijian—he tips over into bigotry and folly.)
Land, home, belonging: to Indians these words have always felt more than ordinarily potent. India is a continent of deeply rooted peoples. Indians don’t just own the ground beneath their feet; it owns them, too. An orthodox Hindu tradition goes so far as to warn that anyone who crosses the “black water”—the ocean—instantly loses caste. The so-called Indian diaspora, which has taken Indian communities and their descendants from their over-populous country across the world in every direction and as far as, well, Fiji, is therefore the most improbable of phenomena. Yet the journeyings of Indians all over the planet is one of the great sagas of our time, an epic replete with misadventures. Idi Amin’s vicious expulsion of the Ugandan Asians, the tensions between the black and Indian populations of Trinidad and South Africa, “Paki-bashing” in Britain, the tough treatment of Indian workers in Gulf states, and now Fiji—it’s tempting to conclude that the world has it in for these hardworking migrants and descendants of migrants, that their single-minded dedication to bettering their families’ lot somehow comes across as reprehensible.
In the United States, many Indians speak almost shamefacedly of their lack of racially motivated trouble; not being the target of American racism, they have been until recently almost invisible as a community, and this invisibility has perhaps excused them from persecution. But there have been triumphs, too. With each generation, Indians have become more fully a part of Britain without losing their distinctive identity; while in America, the virtual takeover of Silicon Valley by Indian whiz-kids has got people’s attention and earned their admiration.
In Fiji, the century-old Indian presence has been a success story. Indians have built the sugar industry that is the country’s main resource; and—as the ethnic Fijian opposition to the Speight coup demonstrates—relations between the communities are by no means as bad as the rebels make out. In the Fijian Parliament, the Chaudhry government was supported by fifty-eight out of seventy-one members. Twelve out of eighteen members of the sacked cabinet were ethnic Fijians. Even among Speight’s hostages, fourteen of the thirty-one prisoners are ethnic Fijians. Thus the Chaudhry government was in no sense a sectarian government of Indians lording it over Fijians. It was a genuine cultural mixture. Since its deposition, however, the Speight rebels, abetted by the craven Great Council of Chiefs and by the martial-law regime of Commodore Bainimarama, have dragged Fiji back toward its racially intolerant past. There has been much violence. Many Indians now say they’ll have to leave. Meanwhile, the quality of debate deteriorates by the day. Speight’s mob points approvingly to Mugabe’s land grab in Zimbabwe, and says that the British should be responsible for the Indians they brought to Fiji, just as they “should” recompense the dispossessed Zimbabwean whites.
The fundamentals of the land question have been thoroughly obscured by such nonsense. The obvious truth is that, after a hundred years, Fiji’s Indians have every right to be treated as Fijian, as the equals of ethnic Fijians. Preventing Indians from owning land was and is a great injustice—most of Fiji’s land, particularly on the main island of Viti Levu, is owned by Fijians but held by Indians on ninety-nine-year leases, many of which are coming up for renewal—and the Speight idea of taking over the sugar farms as the Indians’ ninety-nine-year leases expire compounds that injustice.
British Indians have fought to be recognized as British; Uganda’s Indians were grievously wronged when Amin threw them out as “foreigners.” Migrant peoples do not remain visitors forever. In the end, their new land owns them as once their old land did, and they have a right to own it in their turn. “We don’t want Fijians fighting Fijians—our common enemy is the Indians,” Speight says, but the final irony may be that his brand of ethnic cleansing is leading Fijians and Indians in western Fiji, the most prosperous part of the country, with most of the sugarcane operations, some gold mines, and the best tourist resorts, to make common cause against him. Secession is being seriously discussed. The choice facing Fiji’s remarkably inept political class may therefore soon become a stark one: abandon the fundamentally racist notion that your land is ethnically tied to one racial group, or lose the best of that land to those who find your bigotry, and your weakness, impossible to bear.
JULY 2000: SPORT
France is the most powerful nation in Europe and probably, at present, the world; though Brazil would dispute that. The Germans, usually so organized and efficient, are in an uncharacteristic mess. Italians have flair but are profoundly defensive by nature. The Dutch are sometimes quarrelsome but, at their best, by far the most artistic of the Europeans; Belgium is dull by comparison. Spain is highly gifted but consistently under-achieves at the highest levels. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden seem to be in decline. Yugoslavia and Croatia can both be guilty (like Argentina) of hidden brutalities. Turkey, Nigeria, and the leading Arab nations are rapidly approaching parity with Europe and South America, while Japan and the USA remain very much second-class nations. And the English—alas, the English!—are pedestrian, tactically naÏve, and, of course, hooligans.
The world according to soccer, like the whole sports-page cosmos, differs somewhat from the picture of reality to be found on the news pages but is instantly recognizable, except in the few remaining soccer-free corners of the globe. And in our sound bite–dominated era, the crude national stereotypes generated by sport have begun to inform the way we look at the “real” world as well as the narrower arena of sport itself. They even affect the way we—including those of us who lack any vestige of sporting prowess—look at ourselves.
Sporting success can have the most astonishing social, and even political, effects. A couple of years ago there was much talk of France’s loss of cultural and nat
ional confidence, of a sort of crisis of French identity. The World Cup victory two years ago, and the Euro 2000 triumph last week, has silenced all such talk. And the genius of the French Muslim superstar Zinedine Zidane, scorer of the goal that won the World Cup and now the inspiration of the European champions, has done more to improve France’s attitude toward its Muslim minority, and to damage the political aspirations of the ultra-right, than a thousand political speeches could hope to achieve.
Sporting failure likewise generates ripples far beyond the playing field. Thus England has reacted to its soccer team’s mediocrity and its supporters’ violence by plunging into a what’s-wrong-with-us fit of self-criticism reminiscent of the gloomy worldview of A. A. Milne’s immortal donkey, Eeyore. Not only can England’s soccer players not play soccer, their tennis players can’t play tennis, and one of them’s Canadian anyway. In this Eeyore-ish mood, even victories look like less extreme forms of failure. The England cricket team actually wins a Test match, but the true Eeyore points out that when England lose, as they usually do, they get thrashed, but when they win, which is rare, they win by a whisker. The England rugby team beats mighty South Africa; Eeyore ripostes, ah, but they can’t do it regularly, it’s just a flash in the pan. The world heavyweight boxing champion is British, but Eeyore points out that Lennox Lewis, too, speaks with a transatlantic twang.
About one thing all commentators seem clear. A nation’s sporting performance, its prowess or its ineptitude, like the behavior of its fans, has origins far removed from the closed universe of sport itself. It has deep roots in the Culture.
Culture is what we now have instead of ideology. We live in an age of culture wars, of groups using ever narrower self-definitions of culture both as a shield and as a sword. Culture is touchy. Use the wrong word and you’ll be accused of racism by some cultural commissar or other. (In Philip Roth’s magisterial new novel The Human Stain, the word is “spooks”; in a New York Times report from Akron, Ohio, last week it was “niggardly.”)
These days everything is culture. Food is culture and religion is culture and so is gardening. Lifestyle is culture and politics is culture and race is culture and then there’s the proliferation of sexual cultures and let’s not forget subcultures, too. Sport, of course, is major culture. So, when British (and, to a lesser extent, other) louts were misbehaving in Holland and Belgium, it was their culture that was held responsible, and nobody saw the irony of using the term to explain the actions of such profoundly uncultured individuals. But if hooliganism is also a culture now, then the word has finally lost all meaning. Which matters only if you think that culture is something else, something to do with art, imagination, education, and ethics, something that broadens perceptions rather than narrowing them, which enables us to see beyond national stereotypes to the richer complexity of real life, in which not all Italians are defensive, not all Germans are efficient, and England, poor England, is not defined by its sportsmen, thugs, and Eeyores; in which “spooks” and “niggardly” are not racist words, and subtlety is valued more highly than sound bites, and a game is just a game.
AUGUST 2000: TWO CRASHES
The speed of life is now so great that we can’t concentrate on anything for long. We need capsule meanings to be attached to news events instantly, explaining and pigeonholing their significance, so that we can move on, secure in the illusion of having understood something. In the days after two catastrophic crashes, of the Middle East peace process and the Air France Concorde, an army of commentators has been trying to come up with (on a postcard, preferably) the brief sound bites that bite.
Of the two disasters, the Concorde crash yields up its Instant Message more easily. It represents, as a thousand pundits have told us, the End of the Dream of the Future. In a world in which no Concorde had ever crashed, this most graceful of aircraft embodied our dreams of transcendence. In the new reality that is still smoldering on the ground in Gonesse, France, our expectations must be lowered. Transcendence kills. The pictures tell us so. In our airplanes, in our lives, in our fantasies of what we might be, we must give up the idea of breaking barriers. For a brief, fabulous period we exceeded our limits. Now we are gripped once more by the surly bonds of earth.
Unfortunately, the other crash seems, after analysis, to insist on meaning exactly the opposite thing. Everywhere I’ve been in the last week or so, and in much of what I’ve seen, heard, or read, one question has kept coming up: if it were left to you, how would you solve the riddle of Jerusalem? And the op-ed and dinner-table consensus seems to be that the old place must become a free city, a World City, neither Israeli nor Palestinian but capital of both. Seems fair and ultimately do-able. Yes, we like that idea . . . What’s that you say? There’s a hot breaking news story? Quick, switch on CNN.
Oh, very well, we can go into this a bit more if you absolutely insist. It’s simple, really. Barak’s government has already given ground, but Israel must have its arm twisted by the United States until it agrees to this essential further concession. And, yes, Arafat was intransigent, in part because Hosni Mubarak persuaded his major backers to insist on the hard-line, we-get-East-Jerusalem-or-bust position. So, the Arab states must have their arms twisted by the United States until they agree to the Only Possible Solution . . .
You see, sometimes people just have to be bigger than what holds them back. We, they, just have to find it in ourselves, themselves, to transcend. Because peace is the Dream of the Future and cannot be denied . . .
Instant analysts are thus faced with an apparent black-and-white Message Contradiction. If the “meaning” of the Concorde crash is right, then the puncturing of human dreams is inevitable. There will therefore be no peace in the Middle East. And when the intifada returns in a more violent form—because now the Palestinians can fight with guns, not stones—Israel will retaliate with maximum force, and the region will slip toward war. But if, on the other hand, the post–Camp David, free Jerusalem can be conjured into being, it will give us all new hope, and reinvent the idea of the future as a potential Star Trek utopia in which technological marvels—safer, cheaper Concordes, perhaps Concordes for All—arrive hand in hand with a universalist, brotherhood-of-man philosophy of human relations.
In reality, however, the contradiction doesn’t exist. In the real world the present is always imperfect and the future is (almost) always a region of hope. The problem lies in the way we all now insist on reacting to the news. Is it a Good Thing? Is it a Bad Thing? What’s in it for us? What do they tell us about ourselves? Or about the other guys? Where’s the angle? Who’s to blame? Gimme the zapper. Let’s surf! In her famous essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag pointed out the dangers of thinking in this quasi-mystical way, of, for example, seeing curses and judgments in sickness and disease. This argument also applies to the news or, rather, the current obsession with finding symbolic meaning in headline-worthy events. News as Instant Metaphor turns a random catastrophe like an air crash into a generalized cultural signifier or, more dangerously, over-interprets events like the Camp David negotiations until the overlaid resonances and echoes complicate and obscure the difficult, half-resolved, half-stymied thing itself.
News as Instant Metaphor is excessively emotive, often politically slanted, inevitably shallow. It idealizes or demonizes its subjects and dulls or inflames our responses. (The vile murder of young Sarah Payne in Britain, totemically represented as a symbol of innocence endangered by evil, has turned sections of the British media into a frothing lynch mob.)
The British government—among others—has recently been attacked for its preoccupation with spin rather than substance, presentation rather than reality; with, in other words, Government as Metaphor. But if the comment-heavy news media themselves—provocative opinion columns, however glib, are so much cheaper than old-fashioned journalism—were less eager to spin the news the moment it happens until it becomes a dazzling, hypnotic blur, we might see more clearly through the political spin doctors’ smoke and mirrors.
/> SEPTEMBER 2000: SENATOR LIEBERMAN
According to Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic manual of realpolitik, The Prince, a prince ought not to be religious but should be adept at simulating religiosity. It would come as something of a relief in this year’s god-bothered American election campaign if it turned out that when the various candidates profess their various degrees of spiritual devotion, they don’t really mean it. If they were just trying to look good in the eyes of the notoriously religious American electorate, one might almost be able to forgive them their protestations. To be cynical is merely to be a politician, after all, and anyhow, cynicism is greatly preferable to sanctimony.
No such luck, I’m afraid. Bill Clinton may very well be the most devout of believers, but the sheer enthusiasm and frequency with which he has confessed his sins, the brilliant volubility and star-quality performance of his fallen-sinner-sees-the-light act, has elevated the belief practices of the Leader to the level of major showbiz. His successors, none of them blessed (or cursed) with the fabled Clintonian charisma and pizzazz, have no option but to say what they mean, which means, unfortunately, that they also mean what they say.
The truly Machiavellian candidate would, for example, have noted the opinion polls that followed the announcement of Al Gore’s selection of Senator Joe Lieberman for the second spot on the Democrat ticket. This American Prince—spotting that, while more than 90 percent of eligible voters said they had no difficulty in imagining themselves voting for a black, Jewish, or gay presidential candidate, only half of them were willing to consider voting for an atheist—would instantly pump up the spiritual volume, and if he wasn’t already adept at feigning a deeply held faith, he would make darn sure he learned how to do so double quick.
So here, right on cue, comes Senator Joseph Lieberman himself, hauling George Washington out of his grave to cry that where there is no religion there can be no morality. But while Senator Lieberman may be many things, he’s no Machiavelli, as is amply demonstrated by the two-left-feet clumsiness of this attempt to make religion even more important an issue in American public life than it already is. After the Anti-Defamation League’s attack on his remarks, he’s been backtracking fast. Now he’s all for the separation of Church and State, always was, always will be, and no, he doesn’t think that people without religious belief lack moral conviction, even though he did raise poor old George from the dead to say exactly that.