Crisis 22

Glaciers & Novels

Writing Against War - The Depth of Novels

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Writing Against War

On the opening page of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut tells us that a film producer recently asked him what he was working on. Vonnegut responded that he was writing an anti-war book about the bombing of Dresden. The producer then asked, “Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?”

In some ways the producer was right: an anti-war book and an anti-glacier book are both desperate attempts to stop the unstoppable. From Mesopotamia to Ukraine, for the last five millennia, war has continued to ravage the human race. It has been an unwanted companion of civilization, perhaps the worst expression of its discontent. Only recently, however, have we armed ourselves to the point of our own extinction.

Vonnegut’s film producer had a good point. Yet I’d add four caveats. 1) It’s not as if there aren’t successful films about war. Would we say that Dr. Strangelove or Apocalypse Now weren’t worth producing? 2) It’s worth trying to understand the causes and effects of war, and it’s worth trying to mitigate the extent or severity of war even if we can’t eliminate it. From Lysistrata (411 BC) to The Things They Carried (1990), literature has helped humans see that war comes at an exorbitant cost. If books had no effect, why would the 1928 novel All’s Quiet on the Western Front have been banned and burned in Nazi Germany? 3) As Camus’ Sisyphus concludes, even in an absurd world our struggle for freedom constitutes its own type of meaning and freedom. 4) Despite the producer’s skepticism, Vonnegut nevertheless went on to write Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the finest anti-war books ever written.

The film-producer’s defeatist attitude may seem particularly appealing now, given the brutality of the Russian Army and given how hard it is to send it packing. Yet abandoning Ukraine in this war, and letting the Russians win, means allowing them to take their neighbour’s land, steal their children, and destroy their identity.

Allowing Russia to take over Ukraine will mean that the powerful are free to prey on the weak, thus validating Thucydides’ sad maxim, The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. It will say to China and other nations: You’re free to prey on weaker nations. Take what you feel entitled to take.

Finally, Russia’s victory may cause an exceptionally dangerous arms race. If the Russians take over Ukraine it will be because they have successfully threatened the West with nuclear war. Smaller nations will argue that nukes are indispensable for their safety. And the sad fact is, they’ll be right.

Defeatism in the face of Russia’s aggression is thus unacceptable. Yet there’s also a type of defeatism that comes from feeling overwhelmed, confused, and impotent. As mere citizens, what can we do?

I can think of several things. First, we can support politicians who 1) speak against Russia and stand up for the liberal democratic world order, and 2) send Ukraine the weapons, medicine, and money it needs to defend this order. We can do this despite the equivocations and backsliding of our most powerful ally, the US. When Trump says that Zelensky is a dictator and that Ukraine started the war, we wonder what on earth went on in the minds of American voters. How could they have voted for a politician that is so badly informed? Yet to borrow from John Bolton, a hard-right, old-time Republican, Trump is an aberration, and the US will eventually get back on track. We can only hope he’s right. In any case, the more Trump withdraws from supporting Ukraine, the more Europe and the rest of us wake up to the fact that we shouldn’t be relying on the US. And we certainly shouldn’t be freeloading. Nothing is stopping us from doing more ourselves. Why not, say, elect politicians who are committed to adding a 1% Ukraine War Tax to everything we buy? On the personal level, we can also send money, arms, and medicine through NGOs and other organizations.

Finally, we can arm ourselves with insight — about Ukraine, Russia, Europe, war, and the complexity of global conflict. We can read non-fiction books, listen to podcasts, and watch TV programs & Youtube videos. We can also read serious fiction, by which I mean literature that explores in-depth scenarios relevant to the complicated relations between Russia, the West, and the Global South. We can garner insight from Russian novels like War and Peace and postcolonial novels like The Year of Living Dangerously. Such novels provide an immersive, prolonged, and unified type of experience, similar to a good TV series.

In reading such novels, we get to know characters who have the same type of feelings and thoughts and relationships that we do, and yet they’re also confronting large-scale geopolitical crises. They become flesh and blood examples that we can relate to, and they suggest various ways that we can come to grips with geopolitical problems that remain beyond our control.

Reading a novel may even have some advantages over other media when it comes to forming a deep understanding of complex events. While a novel is similar to a TV series that contains complex characters and complex situations, a novel gets more exclusively at language-driven parts of our brain. It encourages deep and complex reflection, unhurried by a director’s pace. When we read, we think actively and creatively. We take in words and create scenarios in our heads. We also have time to ponder what these scenarios mean.

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The Depth of Novels

Novels aren’t likely to have an effect on the battlefield, and perhaps they can’t even expose the war in a startlingly clear light. Yet they can help us to contextualize our understanding of war. They can provide us with larger, integrated contexts in which we can see war not in isolation, but in interpenetrating patterns of psychology, culture, language, history, personal relations, family, cultural norms, etc. In this sense novels can enrich our understanding, which is often pared to the bone by political realism, harsh economic facts, media rhetoric, and the brutality of battle. Serious novels deal with these tough realities, yet at the same time they contextualizes our understanding of them, giving them flesh and blood.

Seeing in this way, we might avoid the trap the Kremlin has set ❧ to divide us from Russia ❧ to divide us among ourselves, and ❧ to divide us from the rest of the world. For instance, if we follow the debate about Napoleon in the opening pages of War and Peace, we can get a glimpse into the way Russians have dealt with war in the past. We can see how they deal with their fear, how they disagree on what to do about it, and how their fears and debates come from and affect their personalities, families, and societal norms. Or, following the trajectory of Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, who starts by murdering an old pawnbroker and ends by turning himself in at the police station, we might think differently about that notorious Russian bullishness that knows only to double down and never to repent. Even the scoundrel Chichikov, who in Dead Souls tries to hoodwink buyers and cheat the State, starts to change his ways.

The Quiet American and Slaughterhouse-Five are two novels that exemplify the way literature can help us ❧ look at the brutality of war and ❧ feel close to those who are close to this brutality. In his 1955 novel The Quiet American, Greene’s protagonist comes upon a dead Vietnamese mother and child:

They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child might have been sleeping. He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up. ‘Mal chance,’ the lieutenant said. He bent down and turned the child over. He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five also finds empathy beneath the insanity of war. Vonnegut understood the necessity of fighting Hitler and (later) the Soviets, yet his 1969 novel shows that he was also wary of demonizing Germans and Russians. In one moving scene, his POWs come up from their underground shelter, up into the rubble of devastated Dresden, a landscape resembling the surface of the moon. Where will they eat or sleep? Vonnegut is a secular and iconoclastic author, yet he answers these two basic questions with an allusion to the Nativity:

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.

Vonnegut also evinces sympathy for Russians, 25 million of which died in WW II. In one scene, the protagonist Billy is wounded and doped up on morphine in a prison hospital. The prison has a barbed-wire fence dividing Western from Russian POWs.

[Billy] suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it, but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then that way, then returning to the beginning again.

A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing — from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian undid the snags one by one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night again without a word of thanks.

The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, “Good-bye.”

The humanizing effect we find in The Quiet American and Slaughterhouse-Five can also be found in film and TV. The principle is the same: readers or viewers are brought into a world they initially find foreign and strange. Bit by bit they start to relate to the characters and to their problems, which are now human problems, not just the national or ethnic problems of people “over there.” Over there. Them. Through art — whether it’s a novel or a play, a painting or a song — them vs. us becomes us & them:

Us and them / And after all, we're only ordinary men / Me and you / God only knows it's not what we would choose to do […] With, without / And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about? — [Pink Floyd, “Us and Them,” 1973]

I also have a very personal example of how art can heal wounds and increase our sympathy and humanity. In 1989 I was beaten, robbed, and thrown into a small room in Istanbul. It was the scariest, worst experience of my life. Yet lately I watched Intersection, a Turkish TV drama set in Istanbul. It gave me a diverse sense of Turkish people, and helped me work through negative feelings that I could never articulate or get hold of. In watching the melodramatic series, I became involved in the lives of the brooding Ali Nejat and the intelligent, sensitive, beautiful Naz & Eylül. I was entertained and intrigued by the love between Genco & Gökçe, by the destiny of little Kaan, by the strange outbursts of the misfit Isot, and by the relation between the fiery Umut & the resilient Neslihan. I forgot that I once had a terrible experience in their city. Only months ago the names Umut and Gökçe sounded strange. Now they don’t. They’ve become names of real people — well, acted characters — who I’ve come to know. I’m now moved by their plights, fascinated by their language, and intrigued by their music.

Looking through the medium of film, TV, or novel, we might come to feel that the world isn't divided up by nation, race, language or culture, but instead is unified by common need, fear, strength, weakness, courage, and doubt. With this type of understanding, we're less likely to set ourselves apart from other people, and less likely to demonize Russians. And if we understand the Russians better, we might even find a way to stop them from killing their neighbours. We may not go as far as Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov — who believes that we’re all responsible for the sins of everyone — yet we may start to wonder if such a universal forgiveness wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

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