Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Page 16 of 148

Robert Bork: In Memoriam

bork_robert-19871217036F.2_png_300x373_q85When Richard Nixon died, some op-ed or other bemoaned that his death was used as an occasion to forget, not to forgive. I thought the same when William F. Buckley died, and even Christopher Hitchens (a few people like Katha Pollitt excepted).

With that in mind, here are some Robert Bork quotes not to forget. Many are taken from his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah. This man has had a greater impact on the world than almost any other modern writer I’ve written about.

Be sure to read the last quote on the Port Huron Statement even if you skip those in the middle. It’s the punchline.

Robert Bork on gun control:

As the carnage continues, the public is offered such false panaceas as “midnight basketball” and gun control. Midnight basketball is so obviously a frivolous notion that it need not be discussed. Gun control is no less frivolous.

As law professor Daniel Polsby demonstrates, “the conventional wisdom about guns and violence is mistaken. Guns don’t increase national rates of crime and violence – the continued proliferation of gun control laws almost certainly does.” Gun control shifts the equation in favor of the criminal.

Robert Bork on feminism, choice, and sexuality:

Feminist gatherings within traditional denominations celebrate and pray to pagan goddesses. Witchcraft is undergoing an enormous revival in feminist circles as the antagonist of Christian faith…The feminists within the [Catholic] church engage in neo-pagan ritual magic and the worship of pagan goddesses.

The fact that men, who did not cry ten years ago, now do so indicates that something has gone high and soft in the culture.

Kate O’Beirne, Washington editor of National Review, said, “In the end, our girls are going to have to fight their girls.” True, but after that, some males in the academic world, in the military, and in Congress are going to have to summon up the courage to begin to repair the damage feminism has done.

Radical feminists concede that there are two sexes, but they usually claim there are five genders.  Though the list varies somewhat, a common classification is men, women, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.

But it is clear, in any event, that the vast majority of all abortions are for convenience. Abortion is seen as a way for women to escape the idea that biology is destiny, and from the tyranny of the family role.

As one might suspect from their hostility to men, marriage, and family, radical feminists are very much in favor of lesbianism. They want not only lawful lesbian marriages but “reproductive rights” for lesbians.  That means the right to bear children through artificial insemination and the right to adopt one’s lesbian partner’s child.  Since sperm is sold freely in the United States, much more freely than in other nations, there are lesbian couples raising children.  It takes little imagination to know how the children will be indoctrinated.

Cornell’s training session for resident advisers featured an X-rated homosexual movie.  Pictures were taken of the advisers’ reactions to detect homophobic squeamishness.

Robert Bork on women in the military:

The armed forces have been intimidated by feminists and their allies in Congress…In physical fitness tests, very few women could do even one pull-up, so the Air Force Academy gave credit for the amount of time they could hang on the bar. During Army basic training, women broke down in tears, particularly on the rifle range.

The Israelis, Soviets, and Germans, when in desperate need of front-line troops, placed women in combat, but later barred them.  Male troops forgot their tactical objectives in order to protect the women from harm or capture, knowing what the enemy would do to female prisoners of war.  In the Gulf War a female American pilot was captured, raped, and sodomized by Iraqi troops.  She declared that this was just part of combat risk.  But can anyone suppose that male pilots will not now divert their efforts to protecting female pilots whenever possible?

Robert Bork on multiculturalism:

Though many Hispanics are white, the law in its impartiality treats them as though they were not. Hispanics, who will outnumber blacks in the United States by the end of the century, often do not regard this country as their own.

Americans of Asian extraction had seemed to be immune to this rejectionist impulse. Yet, perhaps feeling ethnic grievance is necessary to one’s self respect, Asian-American university students are starting to act like an ethnic pressure group.

So far as I know, no multiethnic society has ever been peaceful except when constrained by force. Ethnicity is so powerful that it can overcome rationality. Canada, for example, one of the five richest countries in the world, is torn and may be destroyed by what, to the outsider, look like utterly senseless ethnic animosities. Since the United States has more ethnic groups than any other nation, it will be a miracle if we maintain a high degree of unity and peace.

Robert Bork on religion:

Culture’s affecting the churches more than churches are affecting the culture. But you can see how for example, the abortion rate is higher among Catholics than it is among Protestants or Jews. I picked that because the church’s opposition to abortion absolute opposition is well known, but apparently it is not affecting the behavior of the Catholic congregations. And I think similar examples could be drawn from Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues.

It is not helpful that the ideas of salvation and damnation, of sin and virtue, which once played major roles in Christian belief, are now almost never heard of in the mainline churches. The sermons and homilies are now almost exclusively about love, kindness, and eternal life. That may be regarded, particularly by the sentimental, as an improvement in humaneness, indeed in civility, but it also means an alteration in the teaching of Christianity that makes the religion less powerful as a moral force. The carrot alone has never been a wholly adequate incentive to desired behavior

Robert Bork on cultural decline, music, and censorship:

The very fact that we have gone from Elvis to Snoop Doggy Dogg is the heart of the case for censorship.

One evening at a hotel in New York I flipped around the television channels. Suddenly there on the public access channel was a voluptuous young woman, naked, her body oiled, writhing on the floor while fondling herself intimately…. I watched for some time–riveted by the sociological significance of it all.

alt.sex is on the Internet. That’s a category. They have a variety of things under alt.sex, which is alternative sex. Particularly horrifying was this alt.sex.stories. I don’t know how to work the Internet yet, but I did that research. I found it written up.

Irving Kristol was going through Romania back when it was a Communist dictatorship, and he learned that, of course, they banned rock ‘n’ roll on the grounds it was a subversive music. And it is, but not just of Communist dictatorships. It’s subversive of bourgeois culture, too.

Dixieland music had real themes to it, had often a very complex musical form. The music of today, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about rap seems to be nothing but noise and a beat without any complexity or without any I don’t understand why anybody listens to it. Well, rock ‘n’ roll still had some melody and I don’t think it could express a lot of emotions that the music before that could express. But it still had some melody and some distinction. And the melody gradually dropped out until we just have this rap.

A lot of people comfort themselves with the thought that this is confined to the black community, but that’s not true — some of the worst rappers are white, like Nine Inch Nails.

Radical individualism is the handmaiden of collective tyranny.

Robert Bork on science:

The fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory. Michael Behe has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it. Scientists at the time of Darwin had no conception of the enormous complexity of bodies and their organs.

Upon fertilization, a single cell results containing forty-six chromosomes, which is all that humans have, including, of course the mother and the father. But the new organism’s forty-six chromosomes are in a different combination from those of either parent; the new organism is unique. It is not an organ of the mother’s body but a different individual. This cell produced specifically human proteins and enzymes from the beginning…It is impossible to say that the killing of the organism at any moment after it is originated is not the killing of a human being.

Physician Heal Thyself  Dept:

The Port Huron Statement is a stupefyingly dull document and full of adolescent self confidence and arrogance about their ability to change the world and their superior wisdom about how to change the world and what it should look like.

Books of the Year 2012

So many books, so many books. I consciously tried to expand my reading horizons this year, which has helped to swell my reading list to unmanageable lengths.  Sifting out worthy entries in disciplines with which I’m not especially familiar is not at all easy, so sometimes I just have to go on faith that apparent hard work, diligence, and care have resulted in an enlightening end product.

Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is certainly for me the book of the year, though in its way Lucan’s Civil War was as well, and I was very happy to have William Bronk‘s later poetry collected.

I have hardly read all of all of the nonfiction selections–I’ll be lucky if I ever read the Bailyn book cover to cover–but they have all been of note to me at least as reference or inspiration. Some stragglers from 2011 have snuck in as well.

If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Reviews on a couple are forthcoming.

(As always, I do not make any money from these links–this was just by far the simplest way to get thumbnails and metadata.)

Literature

Satantango

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Galley Slave (Slovenian Literature)

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Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems

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Wild Dialectics

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Leeches

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Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I

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Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

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The Snail's Song

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An Ermine in Czernopol (New York Review Books Classics)

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Berlin Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

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Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts

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Happy Moscow (New York Review Books Classics)

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Civil War (Penguin Classics)

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Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

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Tyrant Banderas (New York Review Books Classics)

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The Person I Am Volume One (Laura (Riding) Jackson series Book 1)

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The Person I Am Volume Two (Laura (Riding) Jackson series Book 2)

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The Holocaust as Culture

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Minuet for Guitar (in Twenty-Five Shots) (Slovenian Literature)

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Mathematics: (French Literature)

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The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

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Comics

Black Paths

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Ralph Azham: Why Would You Lie To Someone You Love (RALPH AZHAM HC)

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Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes

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Nonfiction

Oral Literature in Africa (World Oral Literature Series Book 1)

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Modernism

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Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition

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Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography

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Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850

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Memory: Fragments of a Modern History

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The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

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Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature

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German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and beyond

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Reality: A Very Short Introduction

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American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

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Augustus

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Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

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Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame

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More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India

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Governing the World: The History of an Idea

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Truth and Muddlement

The main reason why I pursued philosophy alongside literature was my increasing certainty that the closer I looked at words and sentences, the less idea I had of what they meant. The apparent correspondence between my thoughts, our language, and the world fell apart as I matured, in much the same way that Kafka described in Diogenes:

Diogenes

In my case one can imagine three circles, an innermost one, A, then B, then C. The core A explains to B why this man must torment and mistrust himself, why he must renounce, why he must not live. (Was not Diogenes, for instance, gravely ill in this sense? Which of us would not have been happy under Alexander’s radiant gaze? But Diogenes frantically begged him to move out of the way of the sun. That tub was full of ghosts.) To C, the active man, no explanations are given, he is merely terribly ordered about by B; C acts under the most severe pressure, but more in fear that in understanding, he trusts, he believes, that A explains everything to B and that B has understood everything rightly.

Franz Kafka (tr. Kaiser/Wilkins)

Where A is thought and mind, B is language, and C is the world, including our physical selves. It would be so much simpler if there were only two pieces to the puzzle and we could measure one against the other, but since each is a medium onto the other two, stability seems absurdly out of reach.

Yet analytic philosophy was disappointing in that the grave problems of correspondence between language, mind, and reality had given way in the 80s and 90s to a neo-Aristotelian essentialism, which once again wished to see language as a transparent window onto the world. Its counterpart in poststructuralism was equally disappointing, positing that meaning was endlessly deferred or wholly constructed, something which was rather evidently not the case. The world has some pull on language, though that pull is slippery, non-atomic, and ever-shifting.

And at the center of it (or perhaps the bottom of it) lies that big notion of truth. There are so many hazy concept around today that I hesitate to single out any one as being overridingly problematic, but of all the concepts that people simultaneously trumpet and denigrate, while not even being aware of the contradiction, truth must rank damn close to the top.

People claiming to do away with truth produce more heat than light, frequently falling into absolutist claims that would embarrass the targets of their attacks. Meanwhile, attempts to account for truth in logic and positivism have yielded poor results: special cases in which a method for knowing truth is somewhat more available than usual.

Attacks on scientism are really just attacks on the claim of special access to truth that that has been made by every dominant methodology, from animism to shamanism to alchemy, since the beginning of time. If science today provides the clothes with which educated people dress up would-be truths, that says nothing more about the worth of science than it said about alchemy. Other considerations factor into those assessments. But truth requires some methodology in order for us to see it as truth, and so you get what Polanyi calls “dynamo-objective coupling”:

These supposedly scientific assertions are, of course, accepted only because they satisfy certain moral passions. We have here a self-confirmatory reverberation between the theory of bourgeois ideologies and the concealed motives which underlie it. This is the characteristic structure of what I shall call a dynamo-objective coupling. Alleged scientific assertions, which are accepted as such because they satisfy moral passions, will excite these passions further, and thus lend increased convincing power to the scientific affirmations in question—and so on, indefinitely. Moreover, such a dynamo-objective coupling is also potent in its own defence. Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings. Each of the two components, the dynamic and the objective, takes it in turn to draw attention away from the other when it is under attack.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

Polanyi was referring to Marxism but the sentiment applies just as easily to the rhetoric of countless other ideologies, Ayn Rand being one crude example. And “science” can just as easily be swapped out for the previous justificatory methodology of your choice. And that makes the problem that much worse since the methodology now remains under question itself.

Now, science works and alchemy (or augury, or poetry) does not. But when reduced to its seemingly essential components, science does not yield anything so lofty to be called truth, at least not in the sense of a human truth graspable by anyone meeting the basic criterion of being human. Robert Musil phrased the disappointment like this:

It is hard to say why engineers don’t quite live up to this Vision. Why, for instance, do they so often wear a watch chain slung on a steep, lopsided curve from the vest pocket to a button higher up, or across the stomach in one high and two low loops, as if it were a metrical foot in a poem? Why do they favor tiepins topped with stag’s teeth or tiny horseshoes? Why do they wear suits constructed like the early stages of the automobile? And why, finally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside than the epiglottis? Of course this is not true of all of them, far from it, but it is true of many, and it was true of all those Ulrich met the first time he went to work in a factory office, and it was true of those he met the second time. They all turned out to be men firmly tied to their drawing boards, who loved their profession and were wonderfully efficient at it. But any suggestion that they might apply their daring ideas to themselves instead of to their machines would have taken them aback, much as if they had been asked to use a hammer for the unnatural purpose of killing a man.

But one thing, on the other hand, could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate “scientific outlook” into “view of life,” “hypothesis” into “attempt,” and “truth” into “action,” then there would be no notable scientist or mathematician whose life’s work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds in history. The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: “You may steal, kill, fornicate–our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams.” But in science it happens every few years that something till then held to be in error suddenly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward like a Jacob’s ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

In its most distilled form, science (and especially mathematics) provides a certain temptation toward pristine and unvarnished truth that I have never experienced anywhere else–unfortunately, some have taken this to mean that science provides the complete vision of what truth can be and so we’d better get used to it. At least in its present form, science does not do that, because I have had enough glimpses of it through other methodologies to know that science, at least in its common naive sense, is not sufficient.

The better answer, at least from those who see what a mess science is and has always been, is that “science” is a broad enough methodology to encompass these other methodologies as well, if the criteria of science are restricted to what seem to be its core essentials: fallibilism, skepticism, and provisionality. (You could say humility and modesty, except that these traits are often applied without much of either.) More and more I see these traits in most of my favorite literary authors, and I also see their absence in a great many writers I disdain.

Here is a scientist speaking of how little we are privileged to know, something you would never guess at were you to find yourself reading Henry Miller, Max Stirner, or Christopher Hitchens:

We walk through the world as the spectator walks through a great factory: he does not see the details of machines and working operations, or the comprehensive connections between the different departments which determine the working processes on a large scale. We do not see the things, not even the concreta, as they are but in a distorted form; we see a substitute world–not the world as it is, objectively speaking.

Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction

Reichenbach’s statement at the beginning is not just about science, but about our observation and study of anything. We are tearing our way through thick layers of the gauze of preconceived notions and biases instilled in us by seemingly every single damn thing in the universe. We won’t pass the final layer (probably not ever, though hope springs eternal I suppose), so the myriad disguised claims of truth that constantly shriek and harangue us would do better to come clean and be exposed for the false promises they are. Our tub is full of ghosts.

This is what I’ve learned in my years (today is my birthday). The more I’ve held to this sort of a systematic, coherent system of fallibilism in every aspect of my life, particularly with regard to myself and my beliefs, the better off I have been.

Abandoned People: Shohei Imamura’s Documentaries at Anthology

Shohei Imamura (Photo Courtesy of Icarus Films & Imamura Productions)

Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) is, for me, one of the greatest filmmakers, possibly the very greatest, with films like Pigs and Battleships, The Insect WomanEijanaika, and especially The Ballad of Narayama being some of the most unflinching and incisive depictions of the struggles of the wretched of the Earth ever filmed. (On his death, I wrote an overview of Imamura’s major films.)

I had seen some but not all of his documentary work. More rough visually, the documentaries still make Imamura’s obsessions quite clear and are as crucial as his fictional films. I am very happy that Icarus picked up six of them (the incredible History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) is sadly not included) which will be showing at Anthology Film Archives next week. They are stunning. Imamura’s genius for extracting and showing the overlooked and filthy parts of human existence is always at hand.

A Man Vanishes (1967) is the most bizarre and cinematic of the lot, one of the first documentaries in which the filmmaker is not just a hidden presence but an active participant. (A friend enjoyed the movie but found it contrived, because she hadn’t realized that it was a documentary at all.) Imamura sets about exploring the case of a Japanese businessman who has disappeared from his home, his work, his fiancee, his life. The documentary was commissioned with the expectation that they would find the man, but Imamura realized two things: first, they would not be able to find him, and second, he had clearly disappeared because his fiancee, Yoshie, was fairly unbearable.

But this was hardly sufficient for the movie, so Imamura changed tactics, focusing more on Yoshie and on the process of making the documentary itself.

I always try to talk to people myself as much as I can. That can get boring sometimes. I sense that there’s something that needs to be explored further behind what they’re saying. While making A Man Vanishes, my crew and I stayed in the room next door to Yoshie Hayakawa for a whole year. She had every imaginable bad quality, and none of us could really stand her. And yet I wanted to understand why I found her so disturbing, and that was enough to keep me going.

Imamura does not broadcast any of his opinions about Yoshie, however, instead retaining the pretense that the man’s disappearance is a puzzle and using the situation to capture more aspects of Yoshie, who is far more fascinating than the purported story.

Yoshie from A Man Vanishes (Photo Courtesy of Icarus Films & Imamura Productions)

Imamura begins manipulating events, instructing the “detective” (actually an actor) to spend more time with Yoshie as she seems to be falling for him, and staging several scenes. It is left unclear to what extent these interactions are scripted; even Yoshie at times seems to be aware of what is going on. Yoshie does not become likable but neither is she repellent. She’s a symbol of certain contemporary processes in Japan that remain unclear but disturbing.

The result is not merely forward-looking but bizarrely ambiguous both in content and tone. Peter Watkins was working in similar territory but A Man Vanishes is much weirder.

The remaining films are all more straightforward documentaries concerned with “serious” subjects. Rather than the bourgeois subjects of A Man Vanishes, they all focus on outsiders and the oppressed. Imamura’s sympathy with them is blatant. Equally obvious is his disdain for the “normal” society that mistreats them and then forgets about their existence.

Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute (1975) is a documentary of Kikuyo, a Japanese “comfort woman” who was tricked into going into Malaysia in the early part of the century to be in service in Japan, only to end up working at a Japanese brothel there. Japan has entirely forgotten her. Now in her 70s, She has carved out a living for herself in Malaysia and lives with her stepson, her husband having died. Though she speaks cogently and stoically, her friends tell Imamura that she is far less happy than she seems and is mistreated by the family. Her fortitude and calm are tremendously impressive; the injustice and inhumanity of what has been done to her is suffocating.

In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia, In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand (both 1971), and Outlaw-Matsu Returns Home (1973), each 50 minutes long, form a trilogy. The low-key titles belie the anti-authoritarian ethic at work: Imamura wants to find those who were enlisted by their country to fight, die, and murder on its behalf, and then abandoned. The latter two, in particular, contain some quintessential Imamura moments as unsettling as anything in his work.

Malaysia is the most synoptic, discussing the Sook Ching massacre of thousands of Chinese, Indian, and Malay by Japanese soldiers in 1942 and the residual tensions. (An apology has never been issued.) Imamura declares that he feels tremendous shame hearing about the residue of such events. He gives the most time to a soldier A-Kim, who has moved into a wholly Malaysian community and converted to Islam. His interview is the centerpiece of the documentary:

The Malays think the Japanese are a disadvantaged people. The Japanese work very hard and are tough. Always achieving one’s goals. But as for religion, we are very poor. All the good people will die. Those who survive will not be Muslims. Women will be walking the streets naked and most of the men will be dead, because of all the battles and war.

Muslims only follow one god. In Japan there is the Emperor. It’s the same in every country or the world. Whether it’s the king or the emperor, Muslims will not follow them. Because in the end, all leaders and even citizens are human. And humans cannot help other humans. What the emperor says sounds really nice. ‘Follow me, then you will be happy.’ But you don’t really know if that’s true. Every human has two sides in his heart. One is goodness or justice. The other side is greed. Japanese people were tempted by greed. That’s why the war began.

I know now as a Muslim, Christians and Muslims do not rush into things. We are much more flexible, and we take lots of time to think before we take action. That is how the Muslims are like by nature. Japan is now a huge industrial country. Right when the Pacific war began we forced ourselves on to enemy lands in one step. That’s how I see it. I think one day Japan will have to pay for it. That is my personal opinion which often gets me worried. When that time comes I think the Japanese will all suffer.

Imamura says: “He must have come to his ideas on war not just as a Muslim but as an individual whose entire youth was stolen by war.”

In Thailand, Imamura hit gold: three soldiers of widely differing temperaments discuss their experiences with each other, often contentiously. Most of the film is devoted to the gripping and revelatory conversation between Fujita, Toshida, and Nakayama.

Fujita, from Kyushu, is a farmworker and ardent nationalist, bemoaning Japan’s loss and intolerant of any criticism of the Emperor. He collected thousands of dead soldiers’ fingers to bring home to widows in Japan, only to be told to stay in Thailand for 13 years, after which Japan would return for him. (That did not happen.) He also tells openly of war crimes:

Chinese children had to be killed. I must have done 30,000 of them. I put them in a concrete hole and poured oil and burnt them alive. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t about good or bad. If I didn’t kill them, I would have been killed. That’s how it was. I was a man born wild in Kyushu. I had to do what I had to do. So I killed them.

Those men with ranks, they’d have lots of money coming from somewhere. What right do they have to have mistresses? They raped the women and forced them to be mistresses. Those men were a disgrace to the Japanese army.

I’m hoping the younger generation will become more respectable with a strong Japanese spirit like the old generation. The basis of the Japanese spirit is, put simply, honoring the Emperor. We must be loyal at all times.

The other two are doctors, with little else in common. Nakayama remains silent for much of the film, though he tries to get Toshida removed at one point, and he comes across as fairly scummy, someone who has lived for himself without much care for others.

Toshida, however, is an irreverent, impassioned, and empathetic doctor who has turned pacifist, assimilated into the Thai community, and is aghast at the horrors of the war. He anticipates the title character of Imamura’s later Dr. Akagi (1998), the single-minded doctor only concerned with helping the sick and unfortunate, one at a time.

Toshida is tormented, though: he describes his war experiences, saying it has ruined his life.

I was in the guardhouse for disobedience. They forced me to do things that didn’t make sense. So I tried to escape. It made me hate my own country. Its stupidity. Nothing ever made sense.

Toshida listens sadly to Fujita, saying little, but seems more angry with Nakayama for neglecting his duties as a human being:

The greatest people are those who live and feel as a human. You might not understand this now, but you will soon.

I’m saying justice is greater than the Emperor. If you want to live an honest human life, you need to see things clearly. Do you understand? Do you?

Nakayama is like, “Banzai Emperor.” He’s an idiot! Idiot! I wish he’d use his brains and think.

[To Nakayama] You really need to think. Money has nothing to do with living a good life. It’s not about having more money than you need. You need to rethink humanity. I don’t take money from poor patients. They just thank me. I don’t take money from the poor. That’s inhuman. Even if it means my loss. You should travel through the countryside of Thai.

Toshida laughs that the other two are upset that he’s abusing the Emperor. Fujita simply tells Imamura: “If we were still soldiers, I’d kill him.”

Outlaw-Matsu Returns Home is about Fujita. (Outlaw-Matsu is Imamura’s nickname for him.) After Thailand, Imamura kept in contact with Fujita and helped reconnect him with his family in Japan, so that he could return home two years after the first documentary, only to find a horrible family drama there.

His parents and the family of one brother died in Nagasaki. One brother, Fujio, and sister, Fujiko, survive. Fujiko is divorced from her alcoholic second husband and has difficulty supporting herself and her children, but Fujio now refuses to help her, and has even hit her over things like failing to say “Hello” to him. Fujio has grown cynical like Nakayama, but as the documentary continues, far more ugly dealings come to light, to the point where Fujita told Imamura that he was going to kill Fujio.

Imamura says flatly: “Fujio had joined with the people who abandoned others.”

But Fujita is at the center, holding on to outdated notions of honor that lead him in two wildly different directions: family loyalty toward Fujiko, but toward strident nationalism. Imamura makes this paradox comprehensible as the tragedy of a person whose ideas of good and evil have been so wrenched from him that he can no longer wholly accept them nor reject them.

He tells Imamura in one unguarded moment: “I’m looked down on wherever I go. Even my brother looks down on me. I’m so confused.”

Yet nonetheless he rages against Fujio as he did with Toshida for disrespecting the Emperor. Imamura provokes Fujita (ingeniously, it must be said) by bringing him to the Imperial Palace, where Fujita is finally able to articulate his own confusion:

He lives in such a big palace. He doesn’t consider our hardship at all. So I didn’t want to come. Take him as your father. We gave up our real parents and considered the Emperor as our real father. Then why must he abandon his children? If we’re left in foreign countries, he ought to bring us back home. To show us how developed today’s Japan is. That’s only human. That’s how an Emperor or Minister should be. How can he be so arrogant, living in his own palace? An emperor should sell his own house if he has to rescue us.

IMAMURA: You got terribly mad when Fujio abused the emperor.

That’s because I’ve the right to abuse the emperor. But Fujio was in Japan. Abusing the Emperor is like him throwing mud at his own father. I may well have complaints against the Emperor. We were at war for several years. Nobody cried ‘Hurrah for the Emperor’ when they died. Now I understand why Japan has developed so much. The war was for money, wasn’t it? The Emperor must have started the war because he wanted money too. I think Japanese people are all insane with greed. That’s how I feel.

They’re all thriving on greed. They’re such big fools. They’re crazy, because they don’t have peace.

The complexity of Fujita’s feelings and psychology defies any easy conceptualization. Such insights, Imamura suggests, are available far more to the outcast than to the mainstream of society.

What remains unsaid in this film is the accounts of the horrors of war, which still remain out of Fujita’s reflections, which do not seem even to trouble him. When he speaks to another injured soldier from his troop, he emphatically says, “I’d like to join the Third Operation to kill the English or the Chinese again.”

I think Imamura was right not to press him on it. Toshida only pushed him into a more defensive and reactionary position. Taken on his own terms, Fujita remains a disturbing figure, yet his care for his sister is as genuine as his nationalist hatred.

So Imamura makes sure there are no clear lessons to be drawn, only brilliantly assembled portrayals of the mixture of atrocity and tenderness that constitutes humanity. And what could be learned from these portrayals is being ignored. Imamura concludes, “What I see are heaps of abandoned people as the super-express train Japan speeds away.”

The Case Worker, by George Konrád

The true symbol of the totalitarian state is not the executioner, but the exemplary bureaucrat who proves to be more loyal to the state than to his friend.

George Konrád, “The Long Work of Liberty”

Harry Kent’s cover for the Korean edition of The Case Worker

The Case Worker (1969) is a short and brutal novel by George Konrád (1933-). Konrád is a Hungarian Jew who barely escaped the Holocaust. He stayed in Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1955, eventually becoming a dissident whose works could only be published samizdat. The Case Worker was his first and only novel to be published publicly in communist Hungary. It is not explicitly political, but the graphic bleakness of the novel does its country of origin no favors.  I’m a bit surprised that it was published.

Konrád was a case worker himself for a time, and I fear that the novel has an autobiographical basis. The narrator is sort of a social worker who takes down the reports of the lowlifes, unfortunates, and madmen who come to him: suicides, domestic violence, sexual abuse, murders. Sometimes he takes further action; often he does not. The early part of the novel is a sequence of disconnected, brutal stories of violence and perversity, chronicled in a sober, semi-detached voice. The narrator is explicit that his dissociation is a coping mechanism so that he does not go insane from overempathizing with the hopeless cases he sees, but even from the beginning, there is too much humanity in his voice for us to ever think that he will succeed in disconnecting completely.

At the beginning of my career, I thought: It’s like swallowing fistfuls of mud; I can neither digest it nor vomit it up. IN the last ten years I must have said, “Have a seat, please,” thirty thousand times. Apart from colleagues, witnesses, informers, prying newspapermen, and a few inoffensive mental cases, it was distress that drove most of them to my desk. In most instances their anguish was massive, tentacular, and incurable; it weighed on me in this room where people cry, “Believe me, it hurts,” “I can’t go on,” and “It’s killing me,” as easily as they would scream on a roller coaster. ON the whole, my interrogations make me think of a surgeon who sews up his incision without removing the tumour.

The plot arrives in the form of a brain-damaged four-year-old child. His barely functioning parents have committed suicide, and the narrator is unable to find anyone to take care of the child. The parents raised him feral in the hopes of toughening him up, and he is more animal than human, incapable of any emotional relationship to another person. No institution will admit him, so the narrator takes him in, while continuing his work.

The narrator grows sicker from hearing more horrific stories. His care for the child is a mechanism not to alleviate guilt, but to remove the jarring transition between the damaged world which he views in his work and the safe, sane world in which he otherwise lives:

I would merely wave a token farewell to the child, certain that the meaning of my gesture would not get through his vacuous gaze to his consciousness, and after shaking hands with the staff, hasten down the steps of the pillared portico to where the taxi driver, impatiently drumming his fingers on the half-open window of his car, would be waiting to take me back from this morgue, which humanitarianism had disguised as a home, to the city that tramples its misfits and castaways, the city where both of us have our jobs and families and friends capable of articulate speech, and where more or less efficient organizations segregate the untouchables, the maladjusted, the waste products of a society that maintains order by violence, from us free citizens with our inborn sense of duty: the sight of their repulsive existence must not be permitted to remind us that we and they might have anything in common.

So the novel becomes a chronicle of a seriously divided consciousness. Half of the narrator is the functioning member of society, while half of him is the feeling, bleeding, and dysfunctional empathizer, who takes care of this child because it is the only way he can feel any meaning in the world. This is no budding revolutionary consciousness or political awareness. That sensitivity does great damage to the narrator, and only serves to disconnect him from any sort of functioning social realm. The social realm, through organizational necessity, squashes such sentiments as he has.

Taking the handy legal shortcut rather than the roundabout path of sympathy and indignation, dealing superficially with thousands of clients instead of giving three or four, or even one, the attention they deserve–all this, I sometimes think, is plain fraud.

Actually, what I do amounts to nothing. I regulate the traffic of suffering, sending it this way and that, passing on the loads that pile up on me to institutions or private citizens…There’s no hurry, no situation is irreversible, today’s mortal danger will be nothing tomorrow and vice versa, today’s nothing will be death. If I don’t help my client, someone else will; if nobody helps him, he’ll help himself; and if he can’t, he will learn to bear his lot. But try as I may to encourage myself with such phrases, this child has undeniably become my lot.

Society, which treats him as an interchangeable part in one structure or another, a representative member of one class of people or another (be it occupation, economic class, gender, ethnicity, etc.), entices him to remove responsibility that goes beyond what he is tasked with in that part. With the arrival of the child, his unsocialized half rebels and will not permit him to remain in his part. But to do so is to isolate himself from society and ally with the wretched ones who come to his office.

I have been deleted from their schedules; they transfer their emotions to some worthier object and discover with relief that I can be replaced. That is as it should be–I feel the same way. If I live to old age, I shall love only the interchangeable.

The novel ends, sort of, with a great statement of solidarity for the broken people of the world. Konrád proclaims the impossibility of any institutionalized system of empathy, and thus the need to preserve unregimented empathy no matter what the cost. And the cost is great; the narrator is cut off, at least for a time, from his family and any institutionalized aspect of culture, including sex itself, which becomes to him a meaningless, socialized form of affection. For the case worker, only incommensurable, non-interchangeable emotion can grant meaning.

It’s a remarkable and powerful novel, particularly for amassing such volatile emotional material into a cogent moral and social statement. (It is that last element that is completely lost in a book like his countryman Attila Bartis’s Tranquility.) I think it shares a sensibility with Ludvik Vaculik’s The Guinea Pigs, but it is far more overwhelming and less allegorical. It works with the bare stuff of pain.

A final note on culture: Irving Howe writes in the introduction to the 1987 edition that Konrád’s communist Budapest does not seem so different from capitalist Manhattan. I’m not sure quite how he draws the comparison: more than any political difference, the tonal and stylistic differences between Konrád and literally any American writer I’ve read are so blatant as to make it extremely difficult to compare the underlying socio-political circumstances between The Case Worker and an average 20th century American novel. It’s possible that the American institutionalizing of individualism has made it that much more difficult to draw out that unsocialized empathy, and so works that ask us to empathize beyond any reasonable expectation have become rather rare in American society.

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