Ukraine Crisis 22
A Literary Premise
The Play’s the Thing - Mirrors - Tragedy & Comedy - Achilles & Arjuna - Nine Novels
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Crisis 22 explores the Ukraine War from a wide range of angles: ❧ from the shock of it while dreaming about Cuban beaches, to the reality of it while watching glide bombs do their worst, ❧ from 19th century novels set in rural Russia, to 20th century novels set in the Soviet Union and Asia, and ❧ from definite moments in time, to the less definite tenses of poetry, religion, and art.
This project highlights literature, which is particularly effective in ❧ exploring history and culture, ❧ delineating new and foreign perspectives, ❧ making in-depth arguments about freedom and democracy, and ❧ urging critical distance and a sense of humour — which are increasingly important in a crisis that’s both serious and grim!
Like film and TV, literature has the almost magical virtue of putting us into someone else’s shoes, so that we can develop understanding, sympathy, compassion, and empathy. Even for our enemies. By putting us into situations we wouldn’t otherwise experience, literature unlocks a personalized perspective on culture, history, and politics. This literary ‘experience’ is of course vicarious and second-hand, yet it allows us to see the historical moment in our mind’s eye. We see this bigger picture, yet we see it from an individual perspective, from the point of view of a person (or several people) caught up in the whirl of current events.
One might object that this vicarious experience is subjective and mediated, rather than objective and immediate. Yet we live life subjectively, not just through objective logic or truth. And we understand the larger world through the images and narratives that circulate in our media, not just through direct experience.
Who better to illustrate this point than the bard?
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The Play’s the Thing
In Shakespeare’s famous play, Hamlet suspects that his uncle killed his father, yet he isn’t completely sure. He therefore gets his theatre friends to play a scene in which a king kills his brother and then marries the queen, as his uncle has done. In coming up with this plan, Hamlet recalls that “guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have, by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their malefactions.” Hamlet’s reasoning turns out to be effective: his uncle is so disturbed by the performance (often referred to as the play within the play) that he shouts at the actors to stop, and he runs madly from the stage.
Hamlet comes up with his plan “to catch the conscience of the king” by recalling how skillfully an actor played the role of Hecuba (the Trojan queen who witnessed the killing of her husband Priam). He recalls how powerful the performance was, and asserts that only a person without emotions could fail to be moved by it: “The instant burst of clamour that [Hecuba] made — / Unless things mortal move them not at all — / Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven [Would have made weep the sun and stars].” Hamlet marvels at the ability of an actor to almost become another person:
Is it not monstrous [shocking] that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
When we see moving scenes, we too are moved. These scenes can of course be real scenes — say, of a child’s coffin outside a Kiev hospital — yet they can also be fictional scenes, for we sense that whatever realistic fiction depicts could be real somewhere else, or at some other time.
While journalistic scenes are invaluable, the unique feature of literary scenes is that they’re embedded within a larger superstructure of narrative and meaning. Hamlet’s need to verify his uncle’s guilt brings us back to the opening scenes in which the ghost of his father walks the ramparts and begs Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet fears that the ghost may be a demon, urging him to murder. He therefore decides to get “grounds more relative than this.” The this here is a big one, referring not just to a ghost walking around a rampart, but to the very notion of a ghost or soul, and to the connected notions of salvation and damnation, forgiveness and revenge, all of which concern the question of justice beyond the grave.
We see this connection most clearly in the uncle’s attempt to pray and repent, where he notes that in this fallen world one can use one’s power to escape punishment (as Putin has done so far!), and yet, however so much one succeeds here down below, “‘Tis not so above.” That is, the same principle of might makes right doesn’t operate on the higher level of Justice or God’s law:
May one be pardoned and retain th’ offense? / In the corrupted currents of this world / Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice, / And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself / Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above. / There is no shuffling. There the action lies / In his [its] true nature, and we ourselves compelled, / Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, / To give in evidence.
My point here is that Hamlet’s play within a play tells us much about art, but it also widens into a wider cultural panoply, telling us a great deal about the beliefs and struggles of real people in the Renaissance world. The superstructure of the play takes individual aspects of character and plot and weaves them into a larger canvas — of history, personal development, political theory, critical distance, philosophical meaning, or any number of larger scenarios or themes.
We see this same point about the serious cultural function of literature in the more recent Cold War context of the film The Year of Living Dangerously, which is based on Christopher Koch’s 1978 novel. In the film, we see the despair of the cameraman Billy Kwan not just in an abstract sense, but as if he were a real person, stuck in an impossible dilemma. One particularly moving scene occurs just after Billy finds out that Udin, a boy from the slums who he’s been supporting, has died from drinking canal water. The drama is fictional, yet it has a realistic base, so we’re moved emotionally, especially when Billy despairs because Sukarno, who he once idealized, appears to have turned his back on the poor. We could ask, What’s Udin to the actor, or what’s the character to us, / That we should care? Yet we do care, unless things mortal move us not at all.
This scene is part of a larger fabric, woven from multiple character and plot developments, rising conflicts, intercultural commentaries, mythic and literary narratives, and national politics that are themselves wrapped up in the international drama of the Cold War. The meaning of the individual scene gains in depth from such context, and the viewer can make something of it all because it presents a vision, perhaps even an argument, for empathy, social equality, duty, dignity, etc.
Real world journalistic scenes of course move us too, and sometimes even more because they are shockingly real. Yet there’s a place for the literary scene, embedded as it is in an understandable fabric, one that opens up a world to us so that we can see the relation of part to part, and so that we can advance ideas about what it means.
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Mirrors
Hamlet tells his actors to act realistically, so that the king will be moved to show his guilt. He then comments on the value of literature: it shows us our very nature, as well as the nature of the world we live in:
[…] suit the action to the word, the word to the action […] for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her [its] own feature, scorn her [its] own image, and the very age and body of the time his [its] form and pressure.
Expanding on Hamlet’s suggestion, we might see literature as a diverse and free-floating set of well-placed mirrors that continually reflect what people are thinking and feeling.
In this analogy, a play is like a large mirror that allows us to see the interaction of humans in real space (although of course the stage is a special sort of real space, configured by specific words and actions along a specific plot line). A poem on the other hand is like a smaller mirror: it reflects an image, metaphor, symbol, or idea which everyone can see even though it may have seven (or seven hundred) types of interpretation, depending on our point of view in time and space.
The more the metaphor is extended, the more it becomes specific, that is, the more it mirrors an extensive yet precise scenario which starts to look like real life.
A novel is like a very long sequence of mirrors, reflecting a more detailed sequence of thoughts and feelings. This long sequence gets us closer to the complex structures of such things as psychological landscapes, cultural narratives, political ideologies, and philosophical theories that deal with who were are (ontology) and what we can know (epistemology). The number of novel mirrors required to do this is astronomical, and the more mirrors the author uses the more the readers get a precise geolocation of the historical moment.
In this project I’ll be looking at novels which peek into important historical moments in Russia: Nikolai Gogol holds up a quaint mirror to rural 19th century Russian society in Dead Souls (1842); Fyodor Dostoevsky holds up a grimy mirror to 19th century Saint Petersburg in Crime and Punishment (1866); and Mikhail Bulgakov holds up an unnerving sorcerer’s mirror to Soviet Russia in The Master and Margarita (1967). The other novels I look at put an even greater emphasis on the historical moment and on the flow of history from one decade to the next: Graham Greene mirrors the mid-1950s transition from French to American violence in Vietnam in The Quiet American (1955); Christopher Koch holds up a puppet theatre screen of shifting images that intimate the transfer of power from Sukarno to Suharto in 1965 Indonesia in The Year of Living Dangerously (1978); Salman Rushdie holds up a magical and at times terrifying mirror to 20th century subcontinental history in Midnight’s Children (1981)and Shame (1983).
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is perhaps the most curious novel I’ll look at in Crisis 22. Vonnegut sets up two complex sets of mirrors that face each other, one in Germany and Dresden in 1945, the other in and around New York State in the 1960s. These mirrors allow the reader to see World War II Germany in light of Vietnam War America, and vice-versa. In addition, he places a tiny mirror deep in space, allowing the reader to see the events of this world from the imaginary planet of Tralfamadore, which is itself a reflection of the cracked mind of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim.
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Because we use words, images, ideas, and narratives in understanding reality, the words, images, ideas, and narratives of writers respond to our basic psychological makeup. Good writers also combine thought with feeling, so that we can feel what they’re writing about in our mind’s heart as well. A hundred years ago T.S. Eliot called this connection of thought to feeling unified sensibility. One might also call it being in touch with our feelings, being a whole person, Romanticism, yoga, etc. Literature doesn’t just urge us to see and feel the moment; we’re also urged to ponder its meaning as well, and to compare it with other situations that press upon us in the real world. Literature directly pushes us to do this through setting, character, configuration of scene, etc., and it subtly pushes us to do this though image, symbol, paradigm, ambiguity, etc. According to Eliot’s theory, all these elements combine to connect our thoughts and feelings, and to connect our inside world with outside reality. Because this outside reality is always changing, and yet at the same time always entering into us, we too are always changing:
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. (T.S. Eliot, East Coker II)
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A powerful instance of the way literature can mirror a personal sense of history and politics can be seen in the fifth and sixth stanzas of Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” In this poem Thetis (the mother of the great warrior Achilles) looks at a shield Hephaestus (the blacksmith god) is making for her son. Auden contrasts the beautiful things Thetis sees on the shield with the images of war and suffering that Hephaestus also depicts. Hephaestus includes a haunting mini-scenario, which is at once universal and self-contained, ordinary and extraordinary, vague and concrete, brutal and understated:
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
Auden skillfully sets the tragic personal within the grand historical, playing the grubby horror of a public torture scene against the mass and majesty of the world.
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Tragedy & Comedy
Two revitalizing qualities of literature are catharis and humour. In catharsis a writer reworks a difficult experience so that we can grasp it and at some point (or in some way) also leave it behind us. In this context, humour allows us to distance ourselves emotionally from the predicament, seeing it as quaint, absurd, or incongruous. We can therefore see this predicament as something we don’t necessarily need to be caught up in or overwhelmed by. Writers such as Bulgakov, Vonnegut and Rushdie are particularly skillful at finding humour in the grimmest of situations, allowing us an inner release which the reality of war and tragedy seldom allow in real life.
For instance, in Shame (1983), Salman Rushdie depicts a well-intentioned, idealistic cinema owner named Mahmoud, who dares to show a Hindu-Muslim double bill in pre-Partition India. The “double-bill of his destruction” is at once humorous and tragic, allowing us to bear to look at a paradoxical and terrifying situation in which people kill other people because they have different ideas about a benevolent and merciful God. Highlighting the ludicrous degree to which religion divides the citizens of pre-Partition Delhi, Shame’s narrator remarks that “going to the pictures had become a political act. The one-godly went to these cinemas and the washers of stone gods to those; movie-fans had been partitioned already.” Mahmoud revolts against this division, asserting that it’s time “to rise above all this partition nonsense.” So he plays a film in which cows are set free along with another film in which cows are eaten — what Rushdie comically calls the “non-vegetarian Westerns.” Mahmoud thus indulges his “mad logic of romanticism” and dares to exhibit a “fatal personality flaw, namely tolerance.”
Another instance of using comedy to plunge deep into tragedy occurs in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). For such a short novel, it does an amazing job of bringing its reader into the trenches of World War II and into the bombing of Dresden (which the author himself experienced). Vonnegut constantly juxtaposes the comic mundane and the tragic extraordinary, urging his reader to see as insanity what we we accept as normality. For instance, in his description of a sci-fi novel “about a robot who had bad breath” and “who became popular after his halitosis was cured,” he suggests that the horrors of napalm bombing are happening not just out there in a science-fictional cosmos and not just over there in some fantastical futuristic dimension, but right here in 1969, the year the novel was published:
But what made the [sci-fi] story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.
The above scenario is also a good example of how literature supplies us with paradigms of perfection and patterns of imperfection. These help us to develop critical and contextual understandings, and to sort out exactly what it is we’re fighting for and against. By likening American use of napalm in Vietnam to a crazy sci-fi scenario, Vonnegut’s American readers see a model of imperfection more easily, much more easily than if they were given a lecture on the ethics of their foreign policy. Satire is often seen as showing society a mirror, within which people see everyone’s faults except their own.
The opposite paradigm can be seen toward the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, after the Americans, Canadians, and Brits have bombed Dresden to rubble. The survivors ascend from the bomb shelters into the landscape above, which resembles the surface of the moon. Where are they to eat or sleep? Vonnegut is an infamously secular and iconoclastic author, yet he answers these questions with reference to one of the most fundamental narratives in Christianity. He displaces a specific element of the Nativity — the decency of the innkeeper — two thousand years into the future, into a time and place where, like in Ukraine today, Christians are bombing their brothers to smithereens:
There was a blind innkeeper and his sighted wife, who was the cook, and their two young daughters, who worked as waitresses and maids. This family knew that Dresden was gone. Those with eyes had seen it burn and burn, understood that they were on the edge of a desert now. Still — they had opened for business, had polished the glasses and wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come. […]
The blind innkeeper said that the Americans could sleep in his stable that night, and he gave them soup and ersatz coffee and a little beer. Then he came out to the stable to listen to them bedding down in the straw.
"Good night, Americans," he said in German. "Sleep well."
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Achilles & Arjuna
The unifying elements of ✅ identifying with characters and ✅ seeing situations within larger frameworks of culture and history are as old as literature itself. We see them in the world’s oldest epic, Gilgamesh, and in the foundational epics of early Greece and India. In the Iliad we’re placed in an early Greek world of warring city-states, where the virtue of honour is paramount. Yet after a decade of war, we’re urged to feel the sorrow Priam feels when he visits his enemy Achilles, who in his outrage has just killed Priam’s son and has dragged the body across the battle field. Honour, it turns out, isn’t as important as compassion and love. In the Mahabharata we’re placed in a north Indian war around the start of the Mauryan Empire (322–184 BC), a time when the ideal of dharma or duty was prominent. At a key moment in the epic, we’re urged to feel the anguish Arjuna feels at having to go to war against his cousins and uncles. Although it tears him apart, Arjuna learns from Krishna that his dharma, his duty to what’s just and right, trumps his loyalty to family.
These two foundational epics are rife with outrage, anguish, and sorrow, feelings which many Russians and Ukrainians are no doubt feeling in the course of the present war between erstwhile Slavic brothers. I try to get at something of this internecine tragedy in my poem “The Tao of Putin,” where I contrast the mystical butcher depicted by the Daoist writer Zhuangzi to the imperialistic butchery of Putin. The former has an intuitive insight into the anatomy of nature, while the latter cuts “with the sharpest of blades, extracting the vile Nazi within.” While the Daoist sage sees the world around him as an uncarved block of simplicity and peace, Putin sees it in hierarchical nationalistic terms:
As a result of his vision of the world, Putin wages war on his closest neighbour, on the people he believes are fundamentally like him: Russian.
Auden’s poem gets powerfully at the futility and the tragedy of war, whether it’s the millions of troops lined up by Hitler or the hundreds of thousands lined up by Putin:
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
Poetry manages in a phrase or stanza to sum up things in a succinct way, using density of symbol and ambiguity of meaning. For instance, “nothing was discussed” sounds simple enough, and very vague, yet it can be applied to the fundamental differences between democratic Ukraine and authoritarian Russia, and to the basic reasons we’re willing to back Ukraine: democracy, free expression, and the international right to territorial sovereignty.
I also use Thetis’ gaze at the end of my poem “The Tao of Putin.” Here the Greek goddess morphs into the Chinese goddess of mercy, Guanyin. She looks over the shoulder of Putin as he butchers his fellow Slavs. She worries about Taiwan and about what Xi might do to it. The ghost of the philosopher Zhuangzi — who is famous for his extended conceit in which a man wakes up and wonders if he’s the butterfly he just dreamt — flits over the present crisis, as over a nightmare:
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Nine Novels
In Crisis 22 I often use poetry, yet my main focus is on the novel, which tends to give a more detailed and personalized take on history and politics. For instance, in the section, Cunning Plans, I use Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, and The Master and Margarita to peer into Russian culture and into Russia’s past. I do this so that I can then identify the internal flaws in the Kremlin’s logic: Putin presents himself as a champion of liberties and morals, yet he perpetuates the same old czarist authoritarian muddle and the same old Soviet repression that we see lampooned and excoriated in the novels of Gogol and Bulgakov. One difference between the novelists in this regard is that Gogol and Dostoevsky suggest that beneath the tyrannies of the Russian system lies a special Russian identity, salvation, or soul. Bulgakov on the other hand says, Let the Devil take it!
While Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov help us see into Russia’s past, the other novelists I refer to deal with recent problems located primarily in the global south. This may seem like a geographical and cultural deviation from the Ukraine War, yet I believe that Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously, Greene’s The Quiet American, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Haroun can help us see new ways to contextualize the Ukraine War. They can also be used to counter the Kremlin’s claim that it champions the global South against the evil West. The novels of Koch and Rushdie in particular supply us with paradigms — the Indonesian shadow theatre, the Sufi conference of birds, and the Hindu ocean of stories — that give us insight into the global south, and also into ways of resisting repressive and authoritarian regimes like that of Putin.
I see each of these novels as a unified, contextualized world that we can use to understand our own world. Each one gives us an artistic vision of alternatives, as well as a critical distance from the world of pain we see today. The novels of Gogol, Bulgakov, Vonnegut, and Rushdie also contain deep comic elements, which can help us deal with a Russian brutality that might otherwise make us boil up in anger or break down in tears.
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Next: 🌗 Shadow Stories