Crisis 22

With Open Eyes

Overview - A Literary Premise - Waking Up

🌗

Overview

This section (A Literary Premise) introduces the structure of Crisis 22 and illustrates its main arguments.

This page (🌗 With Open Eyes) and the next two pages (🌘 Gogol & Co., & 🌒 Down South) introduce the main sections and arguments of Crisis 22. 🌗 With Open Eyes supplies a brief overview of every page of the project and suggests the various ways the pages fit into the overall design of Crisis 22.

The next four pages (🗝 The Time is Out of Joint, 📺 Vicarious Experience,🪞 Mirror, 📚 4 Types of Narrative) go into greater detail about the way the three genres of literature can address the present crisis.

The final three pages (💥 Exceptional Violence, 🟢 Fog & Shadow, & 🌏 The Global South) go into more detail about the Cold War II situation and about Russia’s claim to speak for the Global South.

🌗

A Literary Premise

🍏 Preface explains ❧ the way I explore this crisis (through the lens of literature), ❧ the way I see the present geopolitical situation (it's basically Russia's fault), ❧ the way this project is structured (in six sections), and ❧ the way I've gone from a fondness for Russia (based largely on enthusiastic travel and reading) to a profound disappointment (because of its selfish, bloody-minded, brutal invasion of Ukraine).

🌗 With Open Eyes (this page) gives an overview of the first two sections of Crisis 22: A Literary Premise and Waking Up. I see literature as a borderless merging of disciplines and perspectives, yet also as a holistic realm of exploration which allows the individual to confront any topic, including politics, global conflict, and war.

🌘 Gogol & Co. introduces Gogol's Dead Souls as well as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita. These novels suggest that Russians understand their cultural and political shortcomings. In applying these novels to the present situation, we find that Putin’s war merely exacerbates their social and structural problems.

🌒 Down South introduces Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously, which is about Indonesia in 1965 and about the way we understand cultural and political difference. I also introduce Rushdie’s fiction, which uses southern non-European paradigms to champion liberal and democratic forces in the Indian subcontinent.

🕰️ The Time is Out of Joint uses Gogol and Shakespeare 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. It also explores our psychologies — the flow of our thoughts & feelings, our natures, identities, etc. — and it allows us to peer into other identities, cultures, ideas, political visions, etc.

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: his war is a special operation, his enemy is a vile Nazi, and his goal is for the good of Russia.

If only someone would play for him a drama in which he could see himself more clearly, as clearly as Gogol's reader does, with the benefit of a critical, vicarious distance. Perhaps putin would then see himself as clearly as Claudius does when Hamlet's actors play a scene in which a king kills his brother --  his brother is Danish, not Ukrainian, we remind ourselves -- 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:

🌗

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.

🌗

Next: 🌘 Gogol & Co.

Back to Top

♦️Fiction♦️Poetry♦️Politics♦️Crisis 22♦️