Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

The Desire to Be Gisella

If asked to describe the qualities that motivate someone to become an author, the first I’d name would be a strong urge to invent stories: to organize reality, which is frequently chaotic and unintelligible, within a structure of storytelling; to find the visible and hidden contexts that load every event with its particular meaning; to accentuate the shades of “plot” within each such event and coax out its “heroes.”

To me, the urge to tell a story, whether invented or rendered from reality, is almost an instinct: the storytelling instinct. In some people — a number of whom eventually become writers — it is as powerful and primal as any other instinct. Fortunately, it always encounters its counterpart: the instinct to listen to stories.

There is something moving about people’s need to listen to a story. Sometimes I sit on a stage and read to an audience. These readings usually take place in the evening, when the members of the audience, most of whom are not very young, have come from a full day of work, and their lives are not always easy. But when I look up from the page from time to time, I see before me a wonderful sight: within a matter of moments, it is as if these people’s faces have shed the tiredness, the difficulties, the sadness, and sometimes the bitterness, grumbling, and anxieties, and something soft and forgotten comes over their faces. For a moment one can feel — even see — how they used to be as children.

(Perhaps this is the thing: there is something childlike — not childish, but childlike, primal — in the storytelling urge, and no less so in the urge to hear a story.)

Other qualities that might make one become a writer include a desire to explain, through story, the world and the human beings who inhabit it, with all their differences, their travails, and their reversals. One could also add the writer’s desire to know himself, to express all the currents that flow inside him. A person who does not have these desires and primal urges is unlikely to be able — if he is even willing — to invest the vast emotional efforts that writing demands.

But today I would like to talk of a different motive for writing, one that is undoubtedly related in some way to those I have just mentioned. It grows stronger within me as I age — both in life years and in writing years — and as I experience an increasing need for the act of creation and writing as a way of life, as a way of finding my place in the world.

The motive I am referring to is the wish to strip away what protects me from the Other. To remove the usually invisible barrier that separates me from any other person. The desire to expose myself completely, without any defenses, to the individuality and life of another person, to his most elemental inner workings, in their unprocessed, primordial form.

But these wishes are immediately faced with a great obstacle, because the more I examine myself and observe human beings in general, near and far, the more I reach a conclusion that at first surprises and disappoints me, and so I quickly dismiss it as a baseless generalization. Yet it sneaks back again and again, in countless examples and variations, and so I will say it, and you may utterly discount it and determine that it holds not a shred of truth.

My conclusion is that in many ways, we humans — social creatures known for our warmth and empathy toward our families, friends, and communities — are not only efficiently protected and fortressed against our enemies, but in some ways also protected — meaning, we protect ourselves—from any Other. From the projection of the Other’s internality onto ourselves; from the way this internality is demandingly and constantly thrown at us; from something that I will call “the chaos within the Other.”

“Hell is other people,” said Sartre, and perhaps our fear of the hell that exists in others is the reason that the paper-thin layer of skin that envelops us and separates us from others is sometimes as impervious as any fortified wall or border.

If we observe those around us, we will find that even between couples who have lived together for decades — who have lived more or less happily, and who love each other and function well as parents and as a family — there can often be, almost instinctively and unwittingly, a complex unspoken agreement (whose application, incidentally, requires a most sophisticated and nuanced form of collaboration!), the main tenet of which is that it is best not to know one’s partner through and through. Not to be exposed to all that happens within him. And not to recognize these “occurrences” or name them explicitly, because they have no place within the framework of the couple’s relationship, and they might even tear the relationship apart from the inside and bring it crashing down, something neither partner desires.

(“It is only now so clear to me,” writes one man, in one book—Be My Knife, a novel with which I had a complicated couplehood—“that my life with my wife, our love, is so stable and defined that it is impossible to add a new element that is too large, like myself, for instance.”)

Sometimes I look at a couple that has been together for a long time — there are quite a few whom I know; you may have come across some too — and I perform a little exercise of thought and imagination: I try to see what they were like at the moment they were created as a couple. I try to remove all the layers of time and age and weariness and routine, and then I can see them young and fresh, and so innocent. Sometimes I can also observe how, at the moment of their “pollination” as a couple, they seemed to conduct a silent dialogue, like one subconscious talking to another, in which they promptly agreed on the angles in which they would view each other for the rest of their lives, thus instantly entering a complicated life pact, wondrous in its complexity and subtle mechanisms. They may also have determined that their love would always win, at any cost. Because there is always a price to pay for not seeing the person closest to us from all possible angles, not seeing all his sides and all his shadows. There is a price to pay when we animate in our partner — and when our partner animates in himself — only certain “areas of the soul,” which are defined and agreed upon, and therefore restricted.

A similar process occurs, of course, between parents and children. Sometimes, especially when we are very young, it is not easy for us to see our parents from a broad angle. It may also be uncomfortable for us to accept that our parents are “entitled” to their own internal chaos. That Mom and Dad too have not only souls but also — horror of horrors! — a right to their own “psychology.” And that they too had mothers and fathers, and that those parents, in their day, did things that left wounds and scars and aberrations in our parents.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is to expose ourselves to the darkness we often sense in our children, particularly when they are young and tender. It is difficult to admit to ourselves that even in those delicate, innocent souls there may be a dark chasm, whence threatening desires and urges and foreignness and madness may erupt. As a parent, I can attest that even the thought of this is intolerable, perhaps chiefly because of the guilt it arouses.

We can also find this sort of demarcation between friends, even “best friends” or true soul mates. Even in the deepest, longest, and most loyal friendships, a thin barrier is sometimes detectable — a refusal to know everything, a form of protection, transparent but solid, from that unseen darkness within our best friend.

I recall the tragicomic dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. “I had a dream,” says Estragon. “Don’t tell me!” Vladimir immediately retorts. “Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?” Estragon asks. “Let them remain private,” replies Vladimir.

On second thought, perhaps the unwillingness — the fear? — to be exposed to the complexities of people close to us should not be so surprising, for experience teaches us that people are rarely eager to be truly exposed even to what exists within themselves. Perhaps our attempt to avoid being fully exposed to the Other is not so different from the efforts we make — almost inadvertently — to resist being tempted by all the varied “others” within each of us. To keep from crumbling into all the options of existence and the internal temptations, all the forking paths within us. Who can measure the vast efforts we make to maintain these rigid internal frameworks, to preserve the bands that grasp — and sometimes shackle — our many-faceted, oft-deceptive souls?

I will add that I often feel that writing has shown me the enormous effort I continually make, often unconsciously, to resist falling apart into all the possibilities, all the many characters and entities, all the qualities and urges and instincts that act within me, well suppressed yet still pulling me constantly in all directions.

We human beings are uneasy about what truly occurs deep inside the Other, even if that Other is someone we love. And perhaps it is more than unease; perhaps it is an actual fear of the mysterious, nonverbal, unprocessed core, that which cannot be subjected to any social taming, to any refinement, politeness, or tact; that which is instinctive, wild, and chaotic, not at all politically correct. It is dreamlike and nightmarish, radical and exposed, sexual and unbridled, at least according to the social-order definitions that prevail among “civilized” people (whatever that term may mean). It is mad and sometimes cruel, often animalistic, for good or for bad. It is, if you will, the magma, the primordial, blazing material that bubbles inside every person simply because he is human, simply because he is an intersection of so many forces, instincts, longings, and urges. It is a magma that usually, among sane people — even the most tempestuous — hardens and cools when it comes into contact with air, when it encounters other human beings, or the confines of reality, and then it becomes part of “normative” social fiber.

To me, writing, the writing of literature, is partly an act of protest and defiance, and even rebellion, against this fear — against the temptation to entrench myself, to set up an almost imperceptible barrier, one that is friendly and courteous but very effective, between myself and others, and ultimately between me and myself.

I wish to clarify again that the primary urge that motivates and engenders writing, in my view, is the writer’s desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

This may be something we cannot achieve by any other means. We tend to think that when we merge completely with another person, in moments of love and sexual contact, we know that person in an incomparable way. In biblical Hebrew the sexual act is even connoted with the verb “to know”: “And the man knew Eve his wife,” says Genesis. But at the highest moments of love, if we are not completely focused, on ourselves or on a pointed projection of our heart’s desires onto our partner, we are usually directed mainly toward what is good, beautiful, attractive, and sweet in him. Not to all his complexities, all his different tones and shades — in short, not to everything that makes him “an Other” in the deepest and fullest sense of the word. But when we write about the Other, about any Other, we aspire to reach the knowledge that encompasses the unloved parts in him as well, the parts that deter and threaten. The places where his soul is shattered and his consciousness crumbles. The bubbling cauldron of extremism and sexuality and animalism that I mentioned previously. The fount of magma, before it has hardened, and long before it has turned into words.

Even if, almost inevitably, we “project” our soul onto the Other we are writing about, and even if we often “use” the Other to tell stories about ourselves and to understand ourselves, still the wish that I am speaking of, in its purest essence, aspires precisely in the opposite direction: to boldly cast off the shackles of my “I” and reach the core of the Other, as an Other, and to then experience the Other as one who exists to himself and for himself, as a whole world with its own validity and internal logic. It is then that we are able to catch a glimpse of — and even linger in — the place that is usually so difficult and rare to know in another. The place where we are exposed to the Other’s “core,” where dreams and nightmares, hallucinations, terrors, and yearnings are created — all the things that make us human.

What is interesting to discover is that at those rare moments when I manage to make this wish come true and reach that “core” of the Other, it is then that I — the writer — do not have a sense of losing myself, or of being assimilated into this particular Other about whom I have written, but rather I have a more lucid perception of “the otherness of the Other,” of the differentiation of this Other from myself. There is a sharp and mature sense of something I might call “the principle of Otherness.”

I further believe that when we read a book that was written this way, in which the author reached that sought-after place and was able to know the Other from within him but still remain himself, we readers experience a unique sensation of spiritual elevation, of sharing a rare opportunity to touch a precious human secret, a deep existential experience. This sensation is accompanied by another, no less precious and moving, which is a true intimacy with the person about whom the story is told. It is a sense of deep, empathetic understanding of the character and his motives, even if we utterly disagree with them. At these times we catch sight of a similarity — sometimes surprising, sometimes enraging and threatening — between this character and ourselves. And thus, even if the character arouses resistance, aversion, or disgust, these reactions no longer create in us a total alienation to the character; they do not separate us from him. They prevent us from sharply, unequivocally, perhaps uncompassionately condemning the character. On the contrary: we often feel that only by some miraculous twist of fate have we been spared from becoming that detestable character ourselves, and that the possibility of being that character still exists and murmurs within us, in our genetic reservoir.

We must not only embody the soul of the Other when we write of him but also be under his skin, inside his body, experiencing his limitations and flaws, his beauty and ugliness. In this context, I would like to recall a little story.

A few years ago, my book See Under: Love was published. Some weeks later, I was taking an evening bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, listening to the news hour on the radio along with the other passengers. In the “cultural segment” of the program (culture, as we know, should always be confined to a segment, so that it does not swell and seep into the more important news), a stage actor read an excerpt from my novel. The passage described Gisella, Momik’s mother, sitting at her sewing machine, a well-known Singer model, her foot moving up and down on some sort of pedal that Uncle Shimmik had installed for her at the bottom of the machine.

At that moment, the bus driver, who apparently could no longer tolerate the story’s gloom and doom, turned the radio dial and switched us all to a more upbeat channel playing Israeli music. I imagine most of the passengers breathed a sigh of relief, but I was left distraught, because of the private insult — mine and my book’s — but also because I could not understand which pedal the excerpt was referring to, and why on earth Uncle Shimmik had installed an extra pedal. The Singer I remembered had its own perfectly comfortable metal treadle, and I am not in the habit of throwing accessories or instruments into my stories for no reason. I could not comprehend what had made me add this device when I wrote the book.

I was on edge for the rest of the journey. When I finally got home, I quickly opened the book and found the excerpt. Indeed, shortly after the point at which the bus driver had cut the segment off, I found out that Gisella’s foot simply did not reach the original Singer treadle. In another part of the book, I learned something that had somehow escaped my memory: Gisella was an extremely short woman.

I remember being filled with happiness, because I had suddenly discovered something simple and profound about writing. If I had a broken blind at home, for example, or a door handle that needed fixing, it would undoubtedly take weeks before I found the time to repair it. My wife would have to remind me every few days, I would leave myself notes in all sorts of places (and promptly forget about them), and finally, when I no longer had any choice and the family members’ protests were jeopardizing my already rather tenuous standing as head of the household, I would give in and fix it. But when I write a story and a short and stocky woman named Gisella walks around in this story, then, when I write her, I become Gisella. Even if she is a marginal character, even if she only passes through for a few pages, I must, I want, I long to be Gisella. And when I write Gisella, I walk like Gisella and eat like Gisella and toss and turn in my sleep like Gisella. I run after buses heavily, like her, and I measure every walking distance by the steps of her short, thick, bandaged feet. And when I sit my Gisella down at a sewing machine, the extra pedal practically comes into being on its own, because without it she could not reach the Singer treadle. I know full well that if I had not added that extra pedal, most of my readers would not have noticed its absence when they read the description of Gisella using the machine. Moreover, I myself, were I to read the excerpt after some time had passed, would not think anything was missing.

Yet something would have been missing. A small space, the size of one foot pedal, would have been exposed in the story. And poor Gisella’s foot would be hanging forever above the Singer treadle, never able to spin the wheel. It is entirely possible that similar tiny spaces would have emerged in other parts of the book too, and in their quiet, hidden way they would have joined forces to create a bothersome void in the reader’s mind, and a dim suspicion of some negligence on the part of the author, and even of a breach of trust. But if the writer allows himself to be Gisella, in body and soul, if he accepts the rare and wonderful invitation to be such a Gisella, then the extra pedal will naturally occur, as will thousands of other sensations and nuances and accessories that the writer gives the characters.

The materialization of these elements is a process mostly unnoticed by the writer, occurring as naturally as a tree bearing fruit. When it exists, the writer can give Gisella — almost without thinking about it — the extra pedal, and then her foot can reach the machine and she can make it move, and the pedal can move the large wheel on the side, and the wheel can spin, and the wheels of the story can spin too, and the whole fragile and slightly groundless world, born from a marriage of imagination and reality and words, can begin to move fully and confidently.

When I write a character, I want to know and feel and experience as many characteristics and psychic arrays as possible, including things that are difficult even to name. For example, the character’s muscle tone, both physical and emotional: the measure of vitality and alertness and tautness of his or her physical and emotional being. The speed of her thought, the rhythm of his speech, the duration of pauses between her words when she speaks. The roughness of his skin, the touch of her hair. His favorite position, in sex and in sleep.

Not all of these things will end up in the book, of course. I believe it is best for only the tip of the iceberg, only one-tenth of everything the writer knows about his characters, to appear in the book. But the writer must know and feel the other nine-tenths too, even if they remain underwater. Because without them, what surfaces above the water will not have the validity of truth. When these complementary elements exist in the writer’s consciousness, they radiate themselves to the visible aspects and serve as a sounding board and a stable foundation for the character, and it is they that give the character its full existence.

I can attest that when I reach that knowledge of the Other from within him — and this does not always occur, not with every character; I wish I could reach it with every character, but regrettably that does not happen— when I reach that place in the story, I experience one of the greatest pleasures of writing: the ability to allow my characters to be themselves — inside me. The writer then becomes the space within which his characters can fulfill their characteristics and desires, their urges and acts of foolishness, madness, and kindness, which the writer himself is incapable of — because he is a specific, finite person, and because these characteristics, these desires and acts, threaten him or somehow contradict him, even invalidate him.

What marvelous happiness, what sweet reward there is in these moments, when in the very act of writing a character, the writer is also written by him or her. Some unknown option of his personality, an option that was mute, latent, suppressed, is suddenly articulated to him, redeemed by a particular character, brought to light.

From experience I know how wonderful it is when a character I have written surprises me this way, or even betrays me, by acting in contrast to my consciousness and personality and fears, acting beyond my horizons. The feeling at those times is one of extraordinary physical and emotional pleasure. In the simplest way, I can say that it is as though someone grabs me by the back of my neck with immense vigor and lifts me up, forcing me to take off outside my own skin.

On a closely related issue, I would like to say a few words about the meaning of literary writing — as I see it, as I believe in it — for people who have been living for over a century in an area that can be described, without exaggeration, as a disaster zone.

First, a clarification: I am not planning to talk “politics,” but rather to address the intimate, internal processes that occur among those who live in a disaster zone, and the role of literature and writing in a climate as lethal as the one we live in.

To live in a disaster zone means to be clenched, both physically and emotionally. The muscles of the body and the soul are alert and tensed, ready for fight or flight. Anyone who lives in this condition knows that not only the body clenches but also the soul, preparing itself for the next explosion or news bulletin. “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible tidings,” wrote Bertolt Brecht — another experienced citizen of disaster zones — in his poem “To Posterity.” Indeed, when one lives in a disaster zone, one is constantly on guard, and one’s entire being anticipates imminent pain, imminent humiliation.

It is difficult to determine the moment at which the cruel reversal occurs. When is the question of whether the pain and humiliation will in fact occur no longer significant because, either way, you are already deep inside them, even if they themselves remain only possibilities? For you have already created them inside you. You are already maintaining a routine that is saturated with humiliation because of the constant fear of humiliation. You no longer realize to what extent your life is largely conducted within the fear of fear, and how much the anxiety is slowly distorting your nature — as an individual and as a society — and how it is robbing you of your happiness, of your purpose in life.

In this intolerable climate, I and many other writers try to write.

In the first two years of the last intifada, for example, I went into my study every morning and wrote a story about a man and a woman who spend an entire night in a car, on an intense and turbulent journey. There were moments when it seemed utterly mad to shut myself up with these people in the car while the world around me turned upside down. On the other hand, writing has always been the best way for me to stay sane, and to find a grasping point in the world, which, as I grow older, seems more and more illusory and absurd, not truly graspable.

When the book I was writing—Her Body Knows—was eventually published, I was frequently asked, “Why didn’t you write about the intifada?” “How could it be that the man and the woman are not a Palestinian who falls in love with an Israeli?” And also, “Is the man’s broken leg a metaphor for the fracture occurring in the Zionist idea?” And of course, “Is the car really an allegory for the stifling Occupation?”

My reply was, No, these are a man and a woman who insist on turning inward, to each other — because they must. They even turn their backs on the “situation” outside, perhaps because they instinctively feel that this “situation” may cause them to miss out on the most important things in their lives. They feel that because of the “situation” and its terrors, they barely have the time or energy left over to inquire into the greater questions of human existence, and their own private little existence, which happens to have been tossed into the disaster zone of the Middle East.

When we live in a perpetual battle for our very existence, we often begin, out of despair and anxiety, and perhaps mainly out of exhaustion, to believe deep in our hearts that the war — in all its forms and guises — is the main thing in life, and often the only thing. We are so submerged in our warped perception that we barely grasp the true price we are paying for living alongside our own lives, for not daring even to dream about the whole spectrum of possibilities that a full, normal, peaceful life can offer a human being.

Again, I hope you understand that I am not talking “politics” in the narrow and restricted meaning of the term, in its insulting meaning, I would say. I will not discuss occupied territories or settlements or unilateral or bilateral withdrawals today. But I will talk of the principles of this disastrous condition, and of the roots it is striking in us, and the blows it is delivering us. Moreover, I will address the role of literature in this state, the healing and mending that literary writing and a literary way of thinking, observing, and regarding can bring to these distortions.

In the almost-eternal disaster zone in which our lives are lived, if we dare for a moment to truly look at what is happening to us and to those around us, we will be forced to admit that, essentially, we are always preparing ourselves for the next disaster. In this perpetual state of preparation, we unconsciously reduce within ourselves, one by one, our human elements and qualities, so that when they are taken from us, or debased by the situation or by the enemy, we will suffer less. Because if my gut feeling, and yours, is right, if it is true that in this terrible situation “he who feels more, suffers more,” then this aphorism is gradually translated in our minds into “he who feels, suffers.” We are so afraid of death that we condense the range of our emotional, psychic vitality.

In a disaster zone, of course, or in a prolonged war, the tendency of the hawkish sides is to minimize and deny the human aspect of the enemy, to flatten it into a stereotype or a collection of prejudices. Because only then can one truly fight to the death for decades, eventually hoping for the enemy’s disappearance or death, believing that he is less human than us, or completely nonhuman.

And please, do not tell me that life here is more or less normal or tolerable, that we have grown accustomed to the periodic, cyclical wars, and that we have learned to make the best of our existence in this cruel region. One cannot truly adapt to such warped conditions without paying a high price, the highest price of all — the price of living itself, the price of sensitivity, of humanity, of curiosity, and of liberty of thought. The fear of and aversion to facing others fully and soberly: not only the enemy, but any others.

After spending a century in all-out war and becoming accustomed to seeing anyone who threatens us as an enemy to the death, and having the concept of “enemy” ingrained in us so deeply, almost from birth, and living in an environment in which the concept is so highly available, because of the hostility and the constant acts of violence — after all this, eventually our compasses and healthy instincts go awry, and then, in almost any situation of conflict and disagreement, even one’s brother looks like the enemy. It is enough for his opinions and habits to be different from our own, for his desires to be distinct from our own, for his interpretation of a situation to be different from ours, for our brother to become, in our minds, in our fears, an enemy.

When I say this, I fear that after decades of spending most of our energies, our thoughts and attention and inventiveness, our blood and our life and our financial means, on protecting our external borders, fortifying and safeguarding them more and more — after all this, we may be very close to becoming like a suit of armor that no longer contains a knight, no longer contains a human. Moreover, I often think that even if this longed-for peace reaches our region tomorrow, in some sense it will already be too late. Because the qualities and the viewpoints and the behaviors that the violence has formulated in us, Israelis and Palestinians, will continue to work their ways on us for many more years. They will not be quick to disintegrate in our bloodstream, both private and national, and they will keep on poisoning our souls, sabotaging the possibility of maintaining a stable peace. Time after time, they will sweep us away and cause us to replay all the same old ills, which will, in turn, create more and more waves of violence.

Let us return to literature for one more moment.

The purpose of literature is the complete opposite of what I have described thus far: in literary writing, we do everything we can to redeem each character in our story from alienation and impersonality, from the grip of stereotypes and prejudices. When we write a story, we struggle — for years, sometimes — to comprehend all the facets of one human character: its internal contradictions, its motives and inhibitions, the boiling magma I talked of earlier.

There is something tender, almost maternal, in the way a writer attunes all his senses, his consciousness and subconscious, his dreams and waking states, to every emotional current and sensation that passes through the characters he has created. There is something naked and exposed, a self-abandonment, in the writer’s willingness to give himself over, unprotected, to the inner workings of the character he is writing about — and, I almost said, communing with.

To write a novel is, to a great extent, to be totally responsible for a few dozen characters. No one will volunteer to write them for us. No one will breathe life into them for us. Sometimes I liken this to a person who is hiding a huge family, several dozen strong, in the cellar beneath his house during a war. This person must go down to the cellar at least once a day to bring food and water to the people. Once in a while he must talk with them about their conditions, try to alleviate their stress, settle the quarrels that erupt among them, offer practical solutions for their immediate troubles. It would also be good of him to tell them about what is going on in the world, listen to their stories and recollections, remind them of all the things they can dream about, and the things they miss, so that they can briefly forget the stifling pit they are trapped in. And then, after doing all these kind things, he must remove their chamber pots and empty them out. Only this person can do all these things; no one can do them for him.

This is exactly the role an author plays for his characters: with all his might, with all his talent and empathy, he must exist in their space — the entire range of human activity that occurs between spiritual talk and the emptying of chamber pots. He must be completely attentive to all their needs, both the spiritual and the corporeal. He must devote himself to them. Body and soul.

If there is one thing I would hope that politics, and politicians and statesmen, might learn from literature, it is this mode of dedication to the situation and to the people trapped in it — after all, they bear significant responsibility for creating the traps, and for the conditions of those trapped. If they are not capable of true dedication, we can demand at the very least that they provide this form of attentiveness, of purposefulness, which is invaluable for reviving the person inside the suit of armor.

By doing so, we remind ourselves again and again of a banal fact that turns out to be so easily forgotten and denied: that behind the armor is a human being. Behind our armor, and behind our enemy’s. Behind the armor of fear, indifference, hatred, and the constriction of the soul; behind everything that languishes within each one of us as these difficult years go by; behind all the fortified walls — there is a human being.

The violence in which we have been living for so long acts naturally and incessantly to turn human beings into faceless, one-dimensional creatures lacking volition. Wars, armies, regimes, and fanatic religions try to blur the nuances that create personal, private uniqueness, the nonrecurrent wonder of each and every person, and attempt to turn people into a mass, into a horde, so that they may be better “suited” to their purposes and to the entire situation. Literature — and not necessarily any particular book, but the attentiveness engendered by direct, profound, complex literature — reminds us of our duty to demand for ourselves — from the “situation”—the right to individuality and uniqueness. It helps us to reclaim some of the things that this “situation” tries relentlessly to expropriate: the subtle, discerning application to the person trapped in the conflict, whether friend or foe; the complex nuances of relationships between people and between different communities; the precision of words and descriptions; the flexibility of thought; the ability and the courage to occasionally change the point of view in which we are frozen (sometimes fossilized); the deep and essential understanding that we can — we must — read every human situation from several different points of view.

Then we may be able to reach the place in which the totally contradictory stories of different people, different nations, even sworn enemies, may coexist and play out together. This is the place where we are finally able to grasp that in true negotiations, our wishes will be forced to encounter the Other’s, forced to recognize their justness, their legitimacy. This is the moment when we feel the sharp growing pains that always attend the arrival of sobriety, and in this case the realization that there is a limit to our ability to mold reality so that it perfectly suits only our own needs. This is the moment when we feel what I called earlier “the principle of Otherness,” whose deep-seated meaning, if you wish, is the rightful existence, the stories, pains, and hopes, of the Other. If we can only reach this Archimedean point, we can begin to dismantle the barriers and detonators that prevent us from solving the conflict.

Because when we know the Other from within him — even if that Other is our enemy — we can never again be completely indifferent to him. Something inside us becomes committed to him, or at least to his complexities. It becomes difficult for us to completely deny him or cancel him out as “not human.” We can no longer employ our usual ease and expertise to avoid his suffering, his justice, his story. Perhaps we can even be a little more tolerant of his mistakes. For we then see these mistakes as part of his tragedy. And if we have any strength and generosity remaining, we can even create a situation in which it is easier for our enemy to step out of his own traps; we too may benefit from this.

To write about the enemy means, primarily, to think about the enemy, and this is a requirement for anyone who has an enemy, even if he is absolutely convinced of his own justness and the enemy’s malice and cruelty. To think (or to write) about the enemy does not necessarily mean to justify him. I cannot, for example, contemplate writing about a Nazi character in such a way as to justify him, although I felt an urge — even an obligation — to write, in See Under: Love, about a Nazi officer, so that I could understand how a normal person becomes a Nazi, how he justifies his acts to himself, and what processes he goes through in doing so.

Sartre’s exploration of why we write, in his essay What Is Literature? is relevant here: “Nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism. For, the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of these men. Thus, whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only of individual passions or whether he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject — freedom.”

Sartre may have been naive in his assertion that “nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism”; such books have been written and will probably continue to be written. But he was certainly right about the topic that preoccupies authors, and which is also the soul of literature — freedom. The freedom to think differently, to see things differently. And this includes seeing the enemy differently.

To think about the enemy, then. To think about him gravely and with deep attentiveness. Not merely to hate or fear him, but to think of him as a person or a society or a nation that is separate from us and from our own fears and hopes, from our beliefs and modes of thought and interests and wounds. To allow the enemy to be an Other, with all this entails. Such an outlook may also be militarily advantageous from an intelligence point of view: “Know thy enemy — from within him.” It could also help us alter reality itself, so that the enemy gradually ceases to be our enemy.

I would like to clarify that I am not referring to the maxim “Love thy enemy.” I cannot claim to have been blessed with such noble magnanimity (and I always find it somewhat suspect when I encounter it in others). But I am certainly speaking of a sincere effort to try to understand the enemy, his motives, his internal logic, his worldview, and the story he tells himself.

Of course, it is not easy to read reality through the enemy’s eyes. It is difficult and frightening to give up our sophisticated defense mechanisms and be exposed to the feelings with which the enemy experiences the conflict and how, in fact, he experiences us. Taking such a step challenges our faith in ourselves and in our own justness. It poses a danger of undermining “the official story”—usually the only permissible, “legitimate” story — that a frightened nation, a nation at war, always tells itself. But perhaps we can upend the previous sentence and say that sometimes a nation remains in a prolonged state of struggle precisely because it is trapped, for generations sometimes, within a particular “official story”?

There is one other clear advantage to observing reality through the enemy’s eyes. The enemy sees in us, in the nation facing him, the things that each of us always shows an enemy: cruelty, aggression, brutality, self-righteousness, self-pity. We are often unaware of everything we “project” onto the enemy, and thereby onto others as well, even those who are not our enemy — and eventually onto ourselves too.

Not infrequently, we tell ourselves that we are taking a certain course of action, committing an act of violence or brutality, only because we are in a state of war, and that when the war is over we will go right back to being the moral, upstanding society we used to be. But we must consider the possibility that the enemy — toward whom we direct these hostile and violent acts, and who thereby becomes their permanent victim — senses long before we do how much these behaviors have become an integral part of our being as a nation and as a society, and how deeply they have seeped into our innermost systems. It is also possible that reversing our point of view, by looking at ourselves through the eyes of the nation we are occupying, for example, can sound the alarm bells within us, enabling us to understand, before it is too late, the depth of our denial, our destructiveness, and our blindness. We will know then what we have to save ourselves from, and how essential it is for ourselves to change the situation profoundly.

When we are able to read the text of reality through our enemy’s eyes, it becomes more complex, more realistic, allowing us to recover the elements we suspended from our world picture. From that moment, reality is more than just a projection of our fears and desires and illusions: when we are capable of seeing the story of the Other through his eyes, we are in healthier and more valid contact with the facts. We then have a far greater chance to avoid making critical mistakes and perceiving events in a self-centered, clenched, and restricted way. And then, sometimes, we can also grasp — in a way we never previously allowed ourselves to — that this mythological, menacing, and demonic enemy is no more than an amalgamation of people who are as frightened, tormented, and despondent as we are. This comprehension, to me, is the essential beginning of any process of sobriety and reconciliation.

These are some of the counsels that literature can offer to politics and to those engaged in politics, and in fact to anyone coping with an arbitrary and violent reality. The advice may sound weak and out of touch today, against the clamor of war that surrounds us, but the principles are valid for novel-writing, for interpersonal relationships, and for delineating policies — of peace or of war.

This approach to ourselves, to the enemy, to the entire conflict, and to our lives within it, an approach I have broadly termed “the literary approach,” is to me, more than anything, an act of redefining ourselves as human beings in a situation whose essence and methodology consist entirely of dehumanization. It can once again remind us of everything we hold dear that is now in danger, and it can restore something of the humanity that was swiftly and violently robbed from us, in a process whose severity we were not always aware of. Insisting on such an approach can also, slowly but surely, put us on the road to sincere dialogue with our enemies, a dialogue that will lead, one hopes, to reconciliation and peace.

January 2006