Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

Alberto Manguel

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a con­cen­tra­tion camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a con­clu­sion, but a mad and mean­ing­less state of bru­tal suf­fer­ing, brought on through no vis­i­ble fault and serv­ing no vis­i­ble end. To attempt to sur­vive this night­mare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her mem­ory. Among the texts she forced her­self to remem­ber was a short story by Maxim Gorki, “A Man Is Born.” 

The story tells how a young boy, strolling one day along the shores of the Black Sea, comes upon a peas­ant woman shriek­ing in pain. The woman is preg­nant; she has fled the famine of her birth­place and now, ter­ri­fied and alone, she is about to give birth. In spite of her protests, the boy assists her. He bathes the new­born child in the sea, makes a fire and pre­pares tea. At the end of the story, the boy and the peas­ant woman fol­low a group of other peas­ants: with one arm, the boy sup­ports the mother; in the other he car­ries the baby. 

Gorki’s story became, for Milena’s friend, a par­adise, a small safe place into which she could retreat from the daily hor­ror. It did not lend mean­ing to her plight; it did not explain or jus­tify it; it didn’t even offer her hope for the future. It sim­ply existed as a point of bal­ance, remind­ing her of the light at a time of dark catastrophe. 

Catastrophe: a sud­den and vio­lent change, some­thing ter­ri­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble. When the Roman hordes, fol­low­ing Cato’s dic­tum, razed the city of Carthage and strew salt over the rub­ble; when the Vandals sacked Rome in 455, leav­ing the great metrop­o­lis in ruins; when the first Christian cru­saders entered the cities of North Africa and, after slaugh­ter­ing the men, women and chil­dren, set fire to the libraries; when the Catholic kings of Spain expelled from their ter­ri­to­ries the cul­tures of the Arabs and the Jews, and the Rabbi of Toledo threw up to heaven the keys of the ark for safe­keep­ing until a hap­pier time; when Pizarro exe­cuted the wel­com­ing Atahualpa and effec­tively destroyed the Inca civ­i­liza­tion; when the first slave was sold on the American con­ti­nent; when large num­bers of Native Americans were delib­er­ately con­t­a­m­i­nated with smallpox-infected blan­kets by European set­tlers (in what must count as the world’s first bio­log­i­cal war­fare); when the sol­diers in the trenches of World War i drowned in mud and toxic gases in their attempt to obey impos­si­ble orders; when the inhab­i­tants of Hiroshima saw the skin fly off their bod­ies under the great yel­low cloud in the sky; when the Kurdish pop­u­la­tion was attacked with poi­so­nous weapons; when thou­sands of men and women were hunted down with machetes in Rwanda; and last September, when sui­cide planes struck the twin tow­ers of Manhattan, leav­ing New York to join the mourn­ing cities of Madrid, Belfast, Jerusalem, Bogotá and count­less other vic­tims of ter­ror­ist attacks — in all of these cat­a­stro­phes, the sur­vivors may have sought in a book, as did Milena’s friend, some respite from grief and some reas­sur­ance of sanity. 

For a reader, this may be the essen­tial, per­haps the only jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for lit­er­a­ture: that the mad­ness of the world will not take us over com­pletely although it invades our cel­lars, as the Brazilian nov­el­ist Machado de Assis pointed out, and then softly takes over the din­ing room, the liv­ing room, the whole house. The poet Joseph Brodsky, impris­oned in Siberia, found it in the verse of W. H. Auden. For Reinaldo Arenas, locked away in Castro’s pris­ons, it was in the Aeneid; for Oscar Wilde, at Reading Gaol, in the words of Christ; for Haroldo Conti, tor­tured by the Argentinian mil­i­tary, in the nov­els of Dickens. When the world becomes incom­pre­hen­si­ble, we seek a place in which com­pre­hen­sion, or faith in com­pre­hen­sion, has been set down in words. 

On Tuesday, September 11, hav­ing heard the unbe­liev­able news, I opened Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’outre tombe, writ­ten sev­eral decades after the French Revolution, and came across the fol­low­ing: “The Revolution would have car­ried me along, had it not begun with mur­der: I saw the first head car­ried at the end of a pike and I drew back. Murder will never be in my eyes an object of admi­ra­tion or an argu­ment for free­dom; I know noth­ing more servile, more despi­ca­ble, more cow­ardly, more narrow-minded than a ter­ror­ist.” Across the cen­turies, Chateaubriand speaks to me of my own time and place. 

Every act of ter­ror protests its own jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. It is said that before order­ing each new atroc­ity, Robespierre would ask, “In the name of what?” But every human being knows, inti­mately, that no act of ter­ror can be jus­ti­fied. The con­stant cru­elty of the world — and also, in spite of every­thing, its daily mir­a­cles of beauty, kind­ness and com­pas­sion — bewil­der us because they spring up with no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, like the mir­a­cle of rain, as God explains to Job, falling “where no man is. ” The pri­mor­dial qual­ity of the uni­verse seems to be absolute gra­tu­itous­ness. André Breton, attempt­ing to push the cre­ative act as far as pos­si­ble out­side the con­fines of the ratio­nal mind, to free it from prej­u­dices and con­ven­tions, out­ra­geously sug­gested, in the sec­ond Surrealist Manifesto of 1930, that “the sim­plest Surrealist act con­sists of dash­ing down into the street, pis­tol in hand, and fir­ing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trig­ger, into the crowd. ” He meant the action to exist only in the sphere of the unre­strained imag­i­na­tion. He was writ­ing about lit­er­a­ture; real­ity co-opted his writing. 

Of all of this we are aware, as we are also aware of the old tru­isms: that vio­lence breeds vio­lence, that all power is abu­sive, that fanati­cism of any kind is the enemy of rea­son, that pro­pa­ganda is pro­pa­ganda even when it pur­ports to rally us against iniq­uity, that war is never glo­ri­ous except in the eyes of the vic­tors, who believe that God is on the side of their armies. This is why we read, and why in moments of dark­ness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.