The Art of Cruelty Read online

  “Do you, Isabel?”

  “I don’t know. I have not thought. And I do not intend to think. Probably most of us do the same thing.”

  “That is not a gracious way to talk.”

  “It was not that sort of question. It was one to make people admit what they had better keep to themselves.”

  By the novel’s end, Eleanor’s pitiless quest to merge honesty and “brutal frankness”—to make people admit “what they had better keep to themselves,” and to project her own subterfuge onto others—has become one of the book’s most repugnant displays.

  The plot of Parents and Children, which is conveyed almost completely in dialogue (as is the case in most Compton-Burnett novels), is as follows: The father of Eleanor’s nine children has gone on a business trip to South America, where he falls grievously ill. Eventually the family receives a missive saying that by the time this letter reaches them, he will be dead. The children begin grieving, and Eleanor hatches a fast plan to marry a close friend of her husband’s named Ridley.

  Quite some time after the father’s purported death, however, one of his young sons, Gavin, thinks he sees him in town. He rushes home to tell his mother, but Eleanor—who by this point has planned not only to run off with Ridley, but also to leave her whole brood behind—is not interested in the news. After she brushes Gavin off, Gavin asks, in quiet despair, “Why do people speak to each other, if people don’t listen?” “I heard what you said,” Eleanor snaps. “You remember that I answered. But you must know you made a mistake.” “I know that I saw him,” Gavin says. “All my life I shall know.” Later that evening, in the middle of dinner, a still-unbelieved Gavin announces to no one in particular, “I should like to die.” When one of his sisters asks him why, he replies, “Because as long as you are alive, things can happen that you don’t like. Even if you couldn’t bear them, they would happen.”

  If you’re looking for the brutality of fact, look no further. It was unbearable that Gavin’s father died; now it is unbearable that his father has come back to life but no one believes it. Then, when the family is forced to believe it, things become more unbearable still. Here is Gavin, mulling over the effect of the revelation with one of his sisters (and Miss Pilbeam, their governess). He asks his sister:

  “Would you mind as much, if he died now?”

  “I shouldn’t think it was as great a loss. But I should mind more. I couldn’t ever bear it again.”

  “Would you die?” said Gavin, in a grave tone.

  “If that is what people do, when they can’t bear the things that have happened.”

  “Come, don’t forget you are children,” said Miss Pilbeam, who believed that this conversation had been unchildlike.

  The fact of our inevitable deaths, and the pain that ensues for the survivors, begin to seem almost desirable when placed against the alternative laid out here: a scenario in which the return of a beloved only portends a future loss, one made more unbearable by virtue of anticipation and repetition.

  And yet. The father’s return does bring with it something utterly crucial, utterly clarifying. His reappearance rips through the subterfuge that has transpired in his absence. For Ridley knew his friend was still alive, but hid the fact in order to run off with Eleanor. In retaliation for his foiled marital plans, Ridley in turn wastes no time in revealing a paternity scandal that rips down the titular edifice, Parents and Children, like a house of cards.

  And here we are delivered unto the cruel genius of Compton-Burnett’s novels: they fixate so tightly on the parsing of spoken language that their characters and readers alike end up overlooking monumental acts of deceit that have taken place right in front of, or around, them—acts that, in the final hours, no amount of “brutal honesty” can undo or dispel. “I only ask that there should be honesty between us,” Eleanor says to her son Graham at one point, to which Graham snaps back, “I would ask rarer and better things.” Surely one of these “rarer and better things” would be the ability to distinguish between idiot honesty (i.e., “brutal frankness,” honesty employed as a weapon, or as its own version of subterfuge) and an honesty that takes not only truthfulness as its standard, but also usefulness and intent.

  This latter practice resembles what Buddhists call “right speech”—the third principle of the noble eightfold path—which is speech that is not only truthful, but also employed without the intent to divide, abuse, or be frivolous. Of course, “right speech” can be as misinterpreted or abused as any other principle—think of how many infidelities have flown under the cover of “I didn’t want to hurt him,” or of how many self-serving political lies circulate under the guise of protecting a populace (“the Iraqi regime is a threat to any American”—George W. Bush, January 3, 2003). Nonetheless, I find the principle an excellent one, in that it guides gently but firmly away from the fantasy that the most uncompromising, purest form of truthfulness must come at any price, while it also encourages as much honesty—with oneself and with others—as possible.

  All the principles on the eightfold path (such as right thought, right livelihood, and right action—the latter of which includes refraining from stealing, sexual misconduct, and intoxicants) are quite obviously and inevitably open to interpretation. They require inquiry, experiment, and guidance to navigate over the course of a lifetime. The fact that such a navigation may be deeply worthwhile does not mean that it is always pretty. At times, it may even swerve away from the worthwhile. Think, for example, of Wittgenstein, who saw his lapses in honesty, however small, as his greatest defect, and in the 1930s went so far as to undertake a sort of world tour to rectify remembered instances of bad or duplicitous behavior. Like someone locked in a particularly grandiose version of the ninth step of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wittgenstein penned a long confession, then showed up on the doorsteps of friends, family, former pupils, and acquaintances to read it. He told his listeners that their attention to the matter was urgently required, and demanded a rapt audience.

  Of course it was self-obsessed, self-serious behavior of this sort, more than the original “offenses,” that often ended up infuriating, alienating, and sometimes hurting his friends, lovers, former pupils, and acquaintances. It is rare, after all, to experience an uninterrupted, unmitigated flow of love, respect, admiration, affection, and passion for an other over time, but few of us feel that if we fail to announce every dip or gradient in our feelings to that other, we are, in fact, “lying” to him or her. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, worried that these oscillations made him less truthful, and therefore often chose to employ a form of brutal honesty that at times laid waste to his personal relationships. The flagellating effects of Wittgenstein’s self-flagellations on his loved ones are far more painful for me to read about than their effects on Wittgenstein himself. “If ever a thing could wait,” one irritated friend remembered thinking, sitting across from him at a café table at which he read aloud his penance, “it is a confession of this kind and made in this manner.” Or here is a letter from his lover Francis Skinner, in which Skinner is trying to dissuade Wittgenstein from his punishing course: “Whatever you have to tell me about yourself can’t make any difference to my love for you. . . . There won’t be any question of my forgiving you as I am a much worse person than you are. I think of you a lot and love you always.”

  Given self-flagellation’s propensity to beget more of the same—not to mention our capacity to become attached, erotically or otherwise, to its punishment—it comes as little surprise that Witt-genstein’s tour did little to purge him of his need to be purged. As his biographer Ray Monk reports, not long after he returned home, he wrote, “It is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure.”

  “RIGHT SPEECH” adumbrates the concept of truth-telling by introducing questions of purpose and effect. A trickster/activist group such as the Yes Men joyously complicates the conversation by ad
ding the phenomenon of the hoax—specifically, the hoax that has the power to underscore the brutality of facts that certain parties (i.e., the government, corporations, the military, the mainstream media, and so on) would prefer to keep spinning at will.

  Many of the hoaxes orchestrated by the Yes Men replace the notion of “speaking truth to power” with impersonating power: while pretending to be certain officials, they make the humane and just pronouncements they wish the officials themselves would make. When the real officials come forward, as they must, to decry the hoaxers, they are thereby forced to reassert, in the renewed glare of the public eye, their inhumane and unjust policies.

  One salient Yes Men hoax of this nature involved the catastrophic industrial disaster that occurred at a pesticide plant, then owned by Union Carbide, in Bhopal, India, in 1984. A toxic gas leak from the plant exposed up to 500,000 people, killing around 8,000 people in the first few weeks and more than 8,000 in the years since. As I write, up to 120,000 people in Bhopal continue to need and demand medical care and compensation—care and compensation that Dow Chemical, the company that acquired Union Carbide in 2001, has adamantly refused to provide. (Dow Chemical’s official line is that Bhopal was indeed “a tragic event,” but one for which it bears zero responsibility—this despite the fact that the purchase of Union Carbide included the purchase of its liabilities.)

  On December 3, 2004—the twentieth anniversary of the disaster—one of the Yes Men, posing as a spokesman for Dow named “Jude Finisterra,” managed to get an interview on BBC World News. (The Yes Men operate a number of fake Web sites pretending to represent various corporations and organizations; these Web sites provide contact information should the news media, a conference organizer, or any other party wish to get in contact with a representative.) In his BBC interview, Finisterra announced that Dow Chemical was pleased to announce that, on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, it had finally changed its course and decided to do the right thing: the company would “at long last compensate the victims, including the 120,000 who may need medical care for their entire lives,” as well as assume responsibility for cleaning up the many tons of toxic chemicals that continue to pollute the groundwater in Bhopal, producing high rates of disease, disability, and death among the residents. By the end of the day, angry officials from Dow Chemical had alerted the BBC that Finisterra was an imposter with no relation to the company; Dow was thereby forced to reassert, on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy, that the company still had no intention of helping the people of Bhopal, or of detoxifying their land.

  Given this deeply unflattering reiteration—and given how obviously and profoundly the people of Bhopal continue to suffer—the question remains, how would the media spin the hoax to diminish the brutality of the facts? Here’s where the cruelty card comes in. The BBC ran its apology for broadcasting a false report under the headline, “Cruel $12 billion hoax on Bhopal victims and the BBC.” The report focused on the alleged cruelty of the hoaxers, who unconscionably “raised then shattered” the hopes of the people of Bhopal for a half hour, during which time the residents thought Dow was finally going to distribute a $12 billion compensation package to them. In addition to trying to elicit sympathy for itself (as in, “cruel hoax played on the BBC”), the BBC (along with other networks) also attempted to elicit sympathy for Dow and its shareholders, repeatedly pointing out the fact that the hoax caused the company to have a tumultuous day on the stock market, as investors horrified at Dow’s sudden willingness to take responsibility for the disaster drove down its share price for several hours.

  The Yes Men have admitted that, after the BBC and other media outlets played the cruelty card, they too worried that their hoax might have had a negative effect on the people of Bhopal. So they went to Bhopal to ask the people themselves. Their conclusion? “For one thing, [the people of Bhopal] were much more sophisticated about their position in the world than a lot of people would assume,” one of the Yes Men, who goes by the pseudonym Mike Bonanno, said. “Secondly, they basically just told us that they had been hoping for years that Dow would do something, so thinking it was true for less than an hour didn’t hurt them at all. . . . They recognized that we weren’t victimizing them—they knew who was victimizing them, they knew it all too well.”

  In subsequent hoaxes, the Yes Men have become savvier still about the charge of cruelty, and have in fact incorporated it into their stunts. In the months after Hurricane Katrina, for example, when it became clear that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was not going to allow thousands of people who had previously lived in New Orleans public housing to return to their homes (but would instead be possessing or demolishing the homes, and turning the real estate over to the private sector), a Yes Man impersonated a HUD representative at a Gulf Coast Reconstruction Conference held on August 27, 2006. Speaking alongside New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, the imposter announced a total reversal of this policy; he also announced that oil companies would be investing billions of dollars to rebuild Louisiana’s coastline. Both false proclamations were met with thunderous applause of the “it’s about time someone did the right thing around here” variety.

  This time, however, before the media could jump on the “cruel hoax” bandwagon, the Yes Men put out their own press release, which pretended to come from HUD itself and which described the Yes Men as cruel numerous times. “It is terribly sad that someone would perpetrate such a cruel hoax and play on the fears and anxieties of families who are desperate to return to their homes,” the release read, before reiterating all the policy points HUD would like to make “perfectly clear, once and for all,” such as “HUD will NOT let people come home simply because they want to, are part of the city, and constitute a much needed workforce,” and “There is NO partnership between HUD, health departments and the CDC to provide adequate health care to low-income residents.” Statements to the contrary, the press release insisted, are “all lies, monstrously cruel, generative of oceans of false hopes and sadness.” By the time the release reaches its final line—“May God afflict the HUD perpetrators of this cruel hoax with all the varieties of damage they so amply deserve”—the hyperbole finally convinces the reader that the release is yet another hoax, one that takes direct aim at the notion that the alleged cruelty of the Yes Men could be said to exist in the same ballpark as that of official government policy.

  Art may not be a lie that tells the truth. But, as the Yes Men demonstrate, a well-orchestrated hoax may, under the right circumstances, force the spinners and suppressors of certain facts out of the woodwork. The brutality of those facts must then hang anew, in open air, for all to see. This is not an exposure, precisely; the facts have typically been there all along. It is a means of re-attending to that which is already visible, of reconsidering that which we may already know. It is, in short, a recalibration of the function of knowledge itself. And here we find ourselves in yet another newly opened space—a space from which, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has put it in Touching Feeling, we can finally move away from “the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?”

  WHO WE ARE

  WITTGENSTEIN NEVER became what might properly be called a religious believer, despite his self-cajolements to the contrary (“Go on, believe!” he wrote in a note to himself around 1944. “It does no harm”). Nonetheless, he remained as prone to self-doubt and self-abasement as any serious Christian. (It was arguably this propensity that drove him toward Christianity, rather than toward his Jewish roots.) For in Christianity, to “know what you are” means facing the wretchedness of one’s original sin. In which case, the most correct apprehension of our situation on this swiftly tilting planet might be best summarized by the title of Jonathan Edwards’s famous 1741
sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

  In this sermon, Edwards memorably describes the situation of all “natural men” (i.e., nonbelievers) as follows: “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is now made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them.” Speaking directly to the unredeemed, Edwards warns, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you.” To know “what we are” is to know our essential unworthiness, and to believe that is only by the grace of God that we are not dropping, right now, into the pit prepared for us.

  This portrait of the human soul contrasts starkly with the one presented by a certain banner I drove by for a period of time in 2007, one that hung over the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The banner read, in large block letters, “IN VIOLENCE WE FORGET WHO WE ARE.” I later learned that the quotation comes from writer Mary McCarthy, and was rendered into this banner by artist Barbara Kruger.

  The intention behind the banner was, no doubt, virtuous. Nonetheless, every time I drove by I found myself in loose, if inchoate, disagreement. For many have argued precisely the opposite: that it is through violence that our souls come, as it were, into focus. Greek tragedy likes this idea; it is also a good description of our American mythos of regenerative violence. Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth sets forth something of the same—that it is through “irrepressible violence” that man “re-creates himself,” that “the wretched of the earth” finally “become men.” A well-known recruitment slogan for the U.S. Army underscores and expands the point, in its suggestion that to become a soldier is to “Be All That You Can Be.”