Forum: poetry and torture.

Ball, David ; McClennen, Sophia A. ; Dorfman, Ariel 等

I AM AFRAID THIS LETFER WILL CUT ME OFF from a good part of the community of poets and alienate many well-intentioned readers, but here goes. ... Unlike Sophia McClennen in the September issue of WLT (see "Poetry and Torture," September-December 2004, 68-70), I don't think poetry can do anything at all about torture. On the contrary, poets who try to express their horror at the practice run the risk of writing bad poems. Of course like most poems full of laudable feelings, they're likely to be applauded, since everybody except the next attorney general of the United States and his buddies agrees that torture is a barbarous horror; we are moved by the subject of the poem--although perhaps not its words--and applaud the poet for sharing our feelings. Good poetry rarely comes out of this process. One must honor a man like Ariel Dorfman; whether we honor lines like "we heard from a companero / who just got out / that five months later / they were torturing him / in Villa Grimaldi" is a different matter. To me, they sound like a grim parody of political poetry. (Maybe they're better in Spanish, maybe not.) It's the incident that is moving, the experience "behind" the poem--not the poem itself.

In prose, J. M. Coetzee wrote about torture in Waiting for the Barbarians with tremendous force, without quite describing it; Pat Barker precisely describes electric torture disguised as therapy in a scene in The Eye in the Door that haunts me still. I'm sure there are poems that are just as strong, although nothing in McClennen's piece makes me think so. But that is beside the point. What does any of this do to combat torture? As Auden said, "Poetry makes nothing happen. It flows south.... "If we want to end torture, we'd do better to spend our time, energy, and money in the ongoing political struggle against it. When we read poems, it may be useful to keep Gide's skeptical maxim in mind: "Good sentiments make for bad literature." Not always, of course--far from it. But we need to be on our guard.

David Ball

Smith College

DAVID BALL RAISES A NUMBER OF ISSUES to which I would like to respond. It seems to me that Ball's letter constructs a number of divisions--between political activism and art, between good and bad poetry, between poetry that "is" and poetry that "does," between historical experience and its representation--that indicate fundamental differences in our aesthetic beliefs. At the center of what Ball sees as our divergent views of the purpose and potential of poetry is the question of whether poetry can "do" anything about torture. First, I would like to clarify that I never suggested that the poetry of torture should replace other forms of political activism. Rather, what I stress is that poetry plays a pivotal role in reclaiming language that has been appropriated by authoritarian discourse, that it is essential to historical memory, and that it helps those affected by torture to mediate their trauma.

A second yet related difference of opinion flows from Ball's suggestion that "good poetry" rarely comes from extreme experiences of violence, torture, or trauma. Ball seems to suggest that when poets are moved to write from a historical moment of urgency and anguish they are less likely to write something "good" than if they were detached, distant, and objective about their poetic subject. I would counter that "bad" poems can be written about anything and by anyone under any circumstances. Where we seem to disagree is on what it is that makes a poem "bad." Does it move you? Does it make you think? Does it change your view of the world? What do we value most about literary expression? For me, poems written from moments of extreme crisis often are the most moving, the most inspiring, and the most powerful. They are the poems that I believe play a vital role in helping communities strive for more egalitarian, democratic, and ethical societies.

We each, individually, have poems that speak to us, and rare is the poem that speaks to all in equal measure, which is why I ask readers to find their own poems at the end of the essay. And while I believe that at a general level poems have an ability to evoke in ways that differ from prose, I did not mean to privilege poetic mediation over other forms of art and literature. I was pleased to see that, in fact, Ball had been inspired by my piece to remember prose by Coetzee and Barker that had registered the trauma of torture in a way that was meaningful for him.

One way to summarize our contrasting views is through the way we read the same author. Ball's Auden writes, "Poetry makes nothing happen. It flows south. ..." Mine writes:

 Exiled Thucydides knew
 All that a speech can say
 About Democracy,
 And what dictators do,
 The elderly rubbish they talk
 To an apathetic grave;
 All I have is a voice
 To undo the folded lie,
 The romantic lie in the brain
 Of the sensual man-in-the-street
 And the lie of Authority
 Whose buildings grope the sky:
 There is no such thing as the State
 And no one exists alone;
 Hunger allows no choice
 To the citizen or the police;
 We must love one another or die.
 ("September 1, 1939")

Sophia A. McClennen

Pennsylvania State University

GOOD INTENTIONS, THE BEST INTENTIONS? On the contrary, I have the worst intentions, I have seen the worst intentions and it is from there that I write. From the fact that where the torturer tries to see the world in black and white (as do many victims), I see how easy it is to be contaminated.... That I explore what joins us to him. As if that were an easy task, as if I wanted to spend my life thinking of the pit and the pendulum instead of the rosebuds that I was born to gather.

Ariel Dorfman

Duke University

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN'S "Poetry and Torture" provokes wide-ranging reflection, not only on the ways in which language can "speak the unspeakable" or assert itself against atrocity, but also on the ways in which a moral vocabulary without reference to consequences will eventually produce the consequences it denies.

Over thirty years ago, as reported by Mary McCarthy in The Seventeenth Degree, the trials of Lt. Calley and Capt. Medina in the aftermath of the massacre at My Lai dramatized not only the distortion of language in relation to atrocity but also the inevitable translation of dehumanizing abstractions into actualities of human horror. "A figure of speech, overworked," according to McCarthy, "takes its revenge by coming to life." The word remorse, for example, came to stand in the Calley court-martial for a desire for revenge rather than a need for absolution: "Calley ... spoke of a pre-My Lai 'remorse for losing my men in the minefield, remorse that those men had ever had to go to Vietnam, remorse for being in that sort of situation....' In short, he felt regret for things that were not his fault, and the sad sensation ... was presented as an excuse for mass murder, about which his conscience, so he said, was at ease."

Now comes Alberto Gonzales, counsel to the president and the new attorney general, who in recent Senate confirmation hearings spoke in defensively involuted abstractions about torture, denying its use as a matter of government policy in nonresponsive replies to senators' questions regarding the relation of policy memos he had written to subsequent acts at Abu Ghraib. The language of Gonzales's testimony--and of the memos, one presumes--stands vis-a-vis the language of the Geneva Conventions mocked therein as Calley's "remorse" stands vis-a-vis the same word in its true meaning, from which (in McCarthy's phrase) it had "'accidentally' broken loose," just as the term "intelligence"--in Iraq as in Vietnam--has shattered into (un)intended double meanings.

The "anti-language" of violence and torture, reducing through abstraction the human particulars of consciousness and experience, is always somewhere in proximity to the physical facts of cruelty and oppression, just as the rehumanizing counter-language of which McClennen speaks must radiate from within, rather than simulating from without, a capacity to comprehend and identify with the individual humanity of human beings.

McClennen and the writers whom she discusses--not least among them the late Susan Sontag--show that while a failure of correspondence between professed values and their performance can lie in corruptions of the word--willful or due to a vacancy of moral will--so too can language speak the unspeakable, as seemingly simply as by speaking the truth.

Gordon O. Taylor

University of Tulsa