Understanding Terror Depravity is a choice. By Cynthia Ozick
http://www.weeklystandard.com/understanding-terror/article/2000198
On a New Yorker panel nearly a dozen years ago, in the wake of the publication of his novel Snow, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk set forth an emphatic credo. “Our moral duty,” he said, “is to pay attention to the humanity of everybody.” And since the subject of the panel was “Literature and Politics,” this comment was altogether in keeping with Pamuk’s remarks elsewhere, on the responsibility of the novelist: “I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it is a limited capacity, to be able to identify with the ‘other.’ . . . It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us.”
But in 2004, this anodyne and conventional literary conviction, addressed to the New Yorker’s loyal audience, rang out with an unexpectedly unsettling force. The motivations and influences and inmost desires and doubts and dreams and fevered schemes of invented characters in a novel, however pleasing or villainous, make up the very essence of what we derive from storytelling. We want to understand Isabel Archer and Mr. Kurtz (who are so different from us), we want to know them to the deeps of their marrow. The glory of literary modernism especially— the revelatory dazzle of Joyce and Proust and Woolf — turns precisely on this psychological probing into hidden consciousness. It was a shock, then, to learn that Pamuk’s “everybody,” his requirement of imagination, his “goal of understanding this person who is different from us,” his vaunted “humanity” — all this was meant to reach well beyond his primary literary argument. It was meant to include terrorists. Are not terrorists a portion of humanity? A challenge came from a fellow panelist: What about suicide bombers, are they to be similarly understood by the humanely embracing imagination? Pamuk’s response was quick and sharp and dismissive: “We have to base our judgment on moral essential things rather than on what we see on TV the other night.”
Three years before, in 2001, writing in the New York Review of Books in an attempt to explain the sources of terrorism, Pamuk had already made this judgment explicit:
The Western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world’s population. . . . And it is while living within this private sphere that most people in the world today are afflicted by spiritual misery. The problem facing the West is not only to discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of which city, but also to understand the poor and scorned and “wrongful” majority that does not belong to the Western world. . . . It is the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation, the failure to be understood [italics mine], and the inability of such people to make their voices heard. . . . Nothing can fuel support for “Islamists” who throw nitric acid at women’s faces so much as the West’s failure to understand the doomed of the world.
One need not be a novelist conversant with imagination’s psychological impersonations to be carried away by such an analysis. These notions of imperious context — impoverishment, grievance, impotence at the hands of powerful faraway forces, humiliation, spiritual misery (a fresh coinage particularly worthy of the novelist’s art) — have become unassailably commonplace to the point of vacuous triteness. And more: Terror can now be counted among matters urgently spiritual.
What comes of these divinings is, finally, a confusion of categories. The Paris atrocities, the Jerusalem stabbings, the San Bernardino shootings are not chapters in a novel to be intensively parsed. A novel is a cultural artifact. A human mind, whatever culture it is born into, is privately, even instinctively, free to enact individual will. Everyone — Pamuk’s own wide-ranging “everyone” — can choose whether to murder or not to murder.
Here, accordingly, one may be driven to ask: Is there no infamy so depraved that it can escape explanation, apologia, vindication verging on exoneration, all under the gentle rubric of “understanding”? The terrorist’s mind: Let us strive to understand it — what shall we find there? Deformations of humanity, corruptions neither inborn nor bred, but chosen. If pornography can be defined as avid curiosity focused on distortions of appetite, then the urge to understand the terrorist is indisputably a kind of pornography — a desire to penetrate what Mark Twain uncannily names “evil joy.” And we have, yes, on TV the other night, seen evil joy in action: the corpse of the Palestinian “martyr” as he is “escorted to his wedding,” accompanied by ululations and his honored mother’s camera-ready avowal of pride and jubilation, yearning to offer the next-in-line killer son.
At bottom, an open-hearted willingness to understand “everyone” is an appalling distraction from the intrinsic depravity of the act of premeditated murder. The evil deed speaks for itself; to search out the evildoer’s “backstory,” to look for some exculpating raison d’être, is no more useful or edifying or moral than an attraction to pornography. Pascal’s aperçu — to understand is to forgive — comes perilously close to our current penchant to treat terrorists as interesting characters in a novel. True, Conrad did it in The Secret Agent; James did it in The Princess Casamassima. But let the Roman poet Terence have the last (Latin) word: Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi. What is permitted to the gods is not permitted to pornographers. James and Conrad, after all, understood that a terrorist in a novel is not the same as a jihadist spree in California or a terror massacre in Paris; and that murder, contra Pamuk, deserves no artistic credo.
Cynthia Ozick’s most recent book is the novel Foreign Bodies. Her new collection, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, will be published next year.
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