Crisis 22

Section 1: A Literary Premise

With Open Eyes

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This page, 🌗 With Open Eyes, overviews the first two sections of Crisis 22 — Section 1: A Literary Premise, which illustrates how poems, plays, and novels can deepen our understanding of the present crisis, and Section 2: Waking Up, which documents the shock of Russia’s sudden attack on Ukraine. Most of us were busy living our lives, and didn’t realize that we ought to be watching Russia more closely. We ought to have been taking a look at where it came from and where the Kremlin wants it to go.

🌘 Gogol & Co. argues that Gogol's Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita explore some of the problems in two previous versions of Russia: the slippery nature of social morality in czarist Russia, and the lack of individual freedom in Soviet Russia. From this angle, the Kremlin and its Ukraine War exacerbate the deep-rooted moral and political problems that have plagued Russia for the last 150 years.

The larger argument I make in Section 3. Cunning Plans is that the Kremlin presents Russians with a strange version of morality and politics: ❧ it takes advantage of the Russian people’s historic detachment from politics, thus allowing an individualism which excludes itself from the morality of government; and ❧ it uses violence to impose its will both on its people and on its neighbours, thus denying Russians and Ukrainians freedom and agency. Another way of putting this is that because Gogol and Dostoevsky don’t come up with a way of balancing individual freedom and governmental control, they end up 1. retreating into religion and 2. leaving the government free to follow its own version of social and political truth, which is a pravda far closer to elite and oligarchic expediency. This allows Russia to transition from the authoritarianism & imperialism of the czarist period to the authoritarianism & imperialism of the Soviet period to the authoritarianism & imperialism of the present 21st century period.

My final overview page, 🌒 Down South, introduces Christopher Koch's 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously, which is the main text I use in Section 4. Puppet Masters and Section 5: Fearless Leaders. Year deals directly and with great subtlety with ❧ the politics of Indonesia in 1965 and ❧ the Wayang theatre of shadow puppets, which opens up to Western readers a new way of understanding cultural and political difference. I also introduce several novels by Salman Rushdie, who uses the southern, non-European paradigms of the Mountain of Qaf and the Ocean of Stories to champion liberal and democratic forces in the Indian subcontinent.

The next seven pages illustrate my premise that poems, plays, and novels can help us identify and understand the situation of those who are caught up in complex political problems.

🕰️ The Time is Out of Joint uses Dead Souls and Hamlet to further illustrate my premise: because serious literature integrates personal, cultural and historical dimensions, it can help us appreciate the type of complex scenario we find in the Ukraine Crisis. Literature does this by supplying a personal entrance into situations we normally wouldn’t encounter, allowing us to see into the complexities of different psychological and political points of view. Gogol and Shakespeare are experts in bringing their audiences into situations they might never encounter, and in making them think about how such situations might be more than just about entertainment.

For instance, Gogol's Dead Souls lets us see a 19th century Russian swindler up close. We see him as a real person, and we see in detail that his arguments are so faulty and amoral that they start to sound like those of Putin and Lavrov, who insist that their war is a special operation, their enemy is a vile Nazi, and their goal is for the good of Russia. If only someone would play for them a scene in which they could see themselves as clearly as Shakespeare’s Claudius sees himself — for the fratricidal, regicidal king he is. In the famous play within a play, Hamlet directs a scene in which a king kills his brother, after which Claudius stumbles screaming from the room.

📺 Vicarious Experience uses Hamlet and two scenarios (in Russia and Indonesia) to illustrate how drama engages us and urges us to sympathize with the struggles and hardship of others. Whether it’s the death of a legendary queen in Greece, a Russian pianist who protests Putin’s war, or an Australian cameraman who documents the slums of Jakarta, literature allows us not only to understand, but also to indirectly experience the tragedies faced by others.

🪞Mirrors illustrates how literature deals with difficult issues like tragedy, catharsis, morality, and war, and how it can help us retain a critical distance and a sense of humour. More specifically, it illustrates how drama, poetry, and prose mirror our lives and our problems in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” Rushdie’s novel Shame, and Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

My goal here isn't to advance a literary theory, but to note how the qualities of literature help us get at the present crisis: Putin acts like the regicidal Claudius in Hamlet, except that he never repents; Putin's decision to go to war and his repetition of bitter, self-serving reasons is reflected in Auden's dystopia where "nothing was discussed," where hundreds of thousands line up to kill each other, and where the mad logic of war leads entire nations not to glory but to disaster: “Out of the air a voice without a face / Proved by statistics that some cause was just / … Column by column in a cloud of dust / They marched away enduring a belief / Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief."

The present situation is so grim that it would require a Rushdie or a Vonnegut to find a compassionate or humorous angle among the dooubling down on lies, the multiplication of manipulation, and unforgiving brutality of violence. And yet Rushdie does just this amidst the communal horror of Partition. And Vonnegut presents us with a vision of simple redemptive decency immediately following the aerial devastation of Dresden.

The situations that Rushdie and Vonnegut deal with are close to us historically, yet Shakespeare's Renaissance Hamlet and Auden's Classical Achilles remind us that the mirroring quality of literature isn't something new. It goes way back — to the first great works of Western and Indian literature, the Iliad & Odyssey, the Mahabharata & Ramayana. These poetic epics focus on specific wars, yet they also supply wide-ranging insights into psychology, culture, philosophy, religion, etc.

📚 4 Types of Narrative explains my emphasis on complex novels that deal with opaque scenarios. In particular, I look at Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously, where the Australian author urges us to ponder President Sukarno’s behind-the-scenes manipulations in 1965 Indonesia. Koch’s novel supplies us with a shadow puppet theatre paradigm for the type of shady operations that are no doubt taking place in the hidden corridors of the Russian FSB and the American CIA.

💥 Exceptional Violence summarizes the superpower conflict as I see it in August 2024. While I think Russia and the U.S. made big mistakes in Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Russia is making an enormous mistake in Ukraine.

🟢 Fog & Shadow and 🌏 The Global South look at why I think it’s important to understand foreign ways of looking at the world. I suggest that paradigms such as the Indonesian shadow theatre can help us see conflict in a new and holistic light. Understanding this type of paradigm might also help us communicate more effectively with the global south, which largely shares our beliefs in democracy and national sovereignty. Certainly this is the case demographically, since the most populous countries are all democracies: India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil, as well as almost all the countries of Latin America.

Note: I find the term global south to be a bit odd, since much of it lies north of the equator. Also, Australia and New Zealand clearly are in the south yet they aren’t part of that group. And yet global south does get at the basic idea of a swath of countries that are generally to the south and that have consistently resisted falling into the orbit of the U.S, Europe, Russia, or China. Perhaps a better name for this area might be the old term non-aligned nations. Or, if one wants a more geographical name, the central wave or the middle fin:

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Waking Up

In this section I look at the way many of us were shaken by the Russian invasion, and at ways we might cope with crisis overload.

The first three pages in States of Mind chronicle my long-standing fear of nuclear war, my attempt to ignore the latent problems within Russia, and my shock at the events of 2022.

⏳ The Ghost of Crises Past compares my fears today with 1. Shelley’s mix of pessimism and optimism in early 19th century England, and 2. my fears during the Cold War in the 1980s.

✈️ Dream Vacation 2005 is a nostalgic take on travelling to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vladímir, and Suzdal. I look back at that 2005 trip and sigh. I think Ah, a Russia that could have been...

In⛱️ Rip Van Winkle I illustrate how I went abruptly from 30 years of self-induced dreaminess to a present state of high anxiety — as if a siren blasted a tsunami alert while I was sitting comfortably on a Cuban beach smoking a cigar and drinking a rum and coke, in the early evening, as the sun set over the fine sands of Playas del Este…

In 🌉 Jovanka on the Bridge (July & October 2023) I stress how disturbing it is to follow the news about an asymmetrical war in which thousands are killed every day, and in which Russian priests are blessing bombs.

☯️ Both In and Out of the Game argues that we can’t ignore the Ukraine War, and yet we can’t let ourselves get swallowed by it either. I suggest a third option, a mode of being in which we engage and disengage at the same time. Walt Whitman provides one version of this: he faces “the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events” yet also remains “Apart from the pulling and hauling […] both in and out of the game.”

❄️ Political Modes of Being explores similar modes of engaging & escaping, this time in the poetry of Eliot & Keats, in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, and in any religious philosophy which allows for the defensive use of violence.

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Next: 🌘 Gogol & Co.

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