Books reviewed: What makes mankind behave so atrociously? Ian Buruma and Joanna Bourke investigate
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Two books tackle the subject of violence in strikingly different ways
Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film and the Shadows of War by Ian Buruma
Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invade Our Lives
Reading
through these essays reminded me of why, as a teenager, I liked theNYRB.
Why finish school when here was an education in itself, complete with all the
clever titbits one could need in a lifetime of highbrow lunches? ‘Re-reading The
Trial, eh? You know Alan Bennett wrote a great play about Kafka. Two
actually. In his diaries he tells a great story about the time.…’ It also
reminded me that a lot of what ends up in the magazine could have done with
some trimming. Buruma writes well, though, even when his subject is bizarre,
unpleasant or both. Ushio Shinohara’s Mishima-inspired neo-Dadaist canvases
from the mid-1950s, for example, aren’t the sort of thing I’d want hanging in
my living room. But the man, I want to read about. Shinohara, he says,
Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film and the Shadows of War by Ian Buruma
Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invade Our Lives
by Joanna Bourke
Reviewed by Matthew Walther
The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible
involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature, one of the
murderer’s descendants has his arm ripped from its socket by a young warrior
who celebrates his gruesome victory by drinking himself blotto; the next day,
our hero wakes up (not hungover, apparently) and kills his opponent’s mother.
Not my cup of tea, Beowulf, or, perhaps, yours.
But this is what literature was like until the 18th century or so, when the
stakes were lowered and people began writing about inheritances, bishoprics and
low-key adultery. Ian Buruma is interested in the other, older kind of story
because, as he puts it in the introduction to this wonderful collection of his
essays, ‘I am fascinated by what makes the human species behave so
atrociously.’
Buruma, who studied Chinese literature at a Dutch university
before reporting on Japanese politics for a British newspaper and, eventually,
settling down at an American college, seems to have been everywhere and read
and seen everything. It shows in Theater of Cruelty, which gathers
together 28 pieces from the New York Reviewof Books. Few critics
could have written with authority, much less with interest, about half of these
topics: Harry Kessler’s diaries, the films of Leni Riefenstahl and Werner
Herzog and Clint Eastwood, the Nanking
massacre, avant-garde sculpture, kamikazes, the Palestinian economy.
would literally attack the canvas in public performances,
like a boxer or a sword fighter, or throw balls of paint about. Compared to
Shinohara’s ‘boxing art’, the American action painters of the period were
rather tame (and usually better painters, too).
The best thing here
is Buruma’s account of the theatrical history of Anne Frank’s Diary.
The story is too complicated to recount in detail, but it involves, among other
things, a disaffected playwright who went so far as to accuse Anne’s father
Otto of collaboration, even suggesting that Simon Wiesenthal investigate his
conduct at Auschwitz . (Wiesenthal declined.)
The idea that this modest, beautiful book could be the occasion for so much
viciousness and bad faith is enough to make anyone take a dim view of human
nature. Buruma, though, manages a bit of optimism, and praises Otto for his
‘perhaps naive, but nonetheless admirable, wish to put his own grief to a more
universal purpose’ by publishing the diary and allowing it to be adapted.
Thank goodness for
the lighter fare. Buruma is also excellent on Mike Leigh’s England
(‘tiger-skin-patterned wallpaper, dolls of Spanish dancers on beside tables,
male hands groping a large bottom wrapped in pink chiffon’), Christopher
Hitchens, and David Bowie — whom he recalls seeing in the early 1970s, ‘not yet
world-famous, his dyed red hair flopping, dancing away keenly on his long
skinny legs’. He lost me only once, in praising Robert Crumb’s disgusting
cartoons, which ought to be the province of psychiatrists rather than critics.
Joanna Bourke,
Professor of History at Birkbeck College, likes writing medium-length books
about enormous subjects: The Story of Pain, What It Means to Be Human,
Fear: A Cultural History, and now Wounding the World, a
treatise on the social effects of military violence. Disagreeing with a
writer’s premise is always a nasty business, but I can be pretty confident that
she won’t kill me. Bourke is a pacifist who believes that war has insinuated
itself into every aspect of American and British culture. Her thesis is that
our legislatures, presses, schools and churches together form a sinuous
continuum with our militaries: old men reading military history and young men
killing each other over Xboxes and no one caring that our defence budgets are
becoming ever more engorged.
But ‘armed
conflicts between nations are not inevitable’, Bourke says. Soldiers should lay
down their arms; families of the dead should complain about war films, or at
least insist that they be made only by people like Oliver Stone; more songs in
the vein of ‘Peace Train’ and ‘Imagine’ should be composed; radical feminists
should join forces with Ayn Randians and demand that we cease being two nations
of ‘armed philanthropists’. This is not ‘utopian’, she insists, because
‘disobedience and defiance are what it means to be human’, which is true, I
suppose, if a bit narrow. Still, Bourke is a
charming writer. .. read more