Books are not for Burning

Books are not for Burning March 20, 2008

The dilemmas parents place on their children may be unintentional, but they gnaw away the child’s conscience and torment him even in ripe old age. Dmitri Nabokov is the septuagenarian son of Vladimir, the lepidopterist and writer, who left him with note cards which form the basis of a novel called The Original of Laura. If we go by Dmitri’s word, it is the finest distillation of his father’s creativity.

There is a catch. The father told his son to burn the cards. Should he follow his father’s last wishes, or should he get it published? Burning what could be a great novel seems like a victimless crime, since nobody has read it, but it is not the same as burning Nabokov’s telephone bills. This is art. Should it be burnt?

History recommends publication. Franz Kafka had told his friend Max Brod to burn his unfinished manuscripts; Brod ignored the plea, and as a result we have the full oeuvre—of the rich world of the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa, the trial of Josef K. and other works, all ranking among the finest expositions of totalitarianism and its impact on modernity. More than two millennia ago, Virgil wanted Aeneid burnt, but he was ignored. However, Emily Dickinson chose to have her correspondence burnt, but did not say anything about other notebooks and manuscripts; after an intra-familial dispute, we got a clearer glimpse of her art. Hope was that thing with feathers, and we were no longer without feathers.

Burning a book is different from burning minutiae of our quotidian lives. Books are often burnt in anger, and when they are, they presage evil. On my first visit to Berlin, I walked away from the Brandenburg Gate, along the avenue of imperial grandeur, Unter den Linden. To my right, I came across an open quadrangle. There, a part of the floor was made of glass. Inside, you could see stacks of bookshelves, all white, glowing in a yellow light. The bookshelves were empty. There was a palpable stillness around that quaint monument which was eerie. It was meant to be: It was the monument to the ritual book-burning the Nazis performed once they seized power in Germany in the 1930s. They targeted troublesome authors: Jews, homosexuals, anti-fascists, or those otherwise sympathetic to communism or leftist ideas.

The German playwright Heinrich Heine wrote in his 1821 play, Almansor: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.) In less than a decade, in towns such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the Nazis burnt people by the millions.

The link of creativity between the written word on a printed page, the thought that goes behind it, the imagination of a mind that gives it shape, is what makes us human, and it is what expression and humanity are all about. Destroy the work, and you destroy the thought behind it—and the thinker.

In early 1989, British Muslims (many of Pakistani origin) in Bradford had not given much thought to such philosophical impulses, but they were driven by the same angry passion which was to ultimately turn the Nazis into beasts, when they held aloft copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, burning them to ashes. Rushdie was stunned. Books were holy in his childhood home; in an early essay, he writes about his grandfather kissing a book that accidentally falls on the ground.

This does not mean every written word is sacrosanct. Telephone directories get pulped; junk mail gets thrown away; why, if unread, I hope this column will at least hold the bhelpuri someone might eat some day. But the responsibility of destroying the original rests with the creator. If you forget to destroy it, too bad. Do it yourself; don’t pass the burden onto others. Sometimes destroying things yourself might even be good: Ernest Hemingway’s Dangerous Summer, The Garden of Eden and True at First Light did not enhance his reputation. But the posthumously published A Moveable Feast ranks as one of the finest evocations of Paris of the 1920s, even if some dispute the events and characterization, particularly of the Fitzgeralds, and whether James Joyce drank Swiss white wine.

The novel I had always wanted to read was the one the adult Apu casts away in a valley, the pages disappearing, flying away randomly, carried by the wind, towards the end of Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar. He loses the novel but regains his son. The sight of Apu carrying his estranged son on his shoulders at the end of the film is one of the most beautiful endings of all time. But we know that end because of the way Ray interpreted Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya’s narrative, reinforcing hope in the face of Apu’s unbearable loss—his wife. Even if Apu released his story to the elements, Ray captured it for us. In his absence, we must turn to the original—of Virgil, of Kafka, of Nabokov. And, of Laura.

An American in Pyongyang

An American in Pyongyang - Feb 27, 2008 

As the largest group of Americans since the end of the Korean War reached Pyongyang, performing under Lorin Maazel’s baton, the idea of cultural engagement got a new meaning. That the New York Philharmonic’s tour happened within a week of ­Steven Spielberg’s decision to step aside as an artistic adviser to the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics makes the contrast all the more glaring.

When it comes to informal diplomacy, there is one rule for Pyongyang, another for Beijing. When it comes to actual diplomacy, another set of rules prevails. Almost nobody trades with North Korea; almost everybody trades with China. No country is about to open a commercial attache’s office in Pyongyang; despite Darfur and Tiananmen Square, no one has stopped doing business with China.

The case for the Philharmonic’s tour to the hermit kingdom is sound. This is about music. There are few works more uplifting than George Gershwin’s An American In Paris. It embodies the sunny-side-up optimism of the American abroad, exploring the world with innocent charm. The Bush administration likes this cultural diplomacy—by some reckoning, the tour is as important as the American table tennis players’ tour of Mao-era China.

But China today is different. And because the world cannot do without $10 T-shirts and $39 DVD players, the battle to reform China must be fought by other means. This means Spielberg, and if activists are lucky, some athletes who might boycott the Games, jettisoning their dreams, will make political points. But it is disingenuous to target the Games now: The time to do so was in July 2001, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted for Beijing. In 1993, even when Tiananmen Square was red with the blood of students killed by the Chinese military four years earlier, China came close to the prize: Sydney barely scraped through with a 45-43 win over Beijing. In 2001, there was hardly any debate.

True, when IOC voted for Beijing, the Darfur crisis was not as acute then, and we lived in the innocent, pre-9/11 world. But you didn’t need Darfur or Burma to punish China, for there is no shortage of abuses there: The way tens of thousands of prisoners are treated in China’s lao gai (labour camp) is far worse than the treatment meted out to inmates at Guantanamo Bay. And yet, while the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was sufficient for many Western countries to boycott the ­Moscow Olympics in 1980 (resulting in the tit-for-tat Soviet bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games in 1984), all concerns were set aside while voting for Beijing.

Curiously, that may not be a bad thing. This is not out of any naive, sentimental feeling that sports builds bridges, but because it exposes the hypocrisy of international politics—of empty gestures. Sometimes sports builds bridges, sometimes it destroys them, bringing out the worst of jingoism. Think of India-Pakistan matches which, as the American writer Mike Marqusee describes it, are war minus the shooting. Or, an actual war: in 1969, a football match between ­Honduras and El Salvador was the last straw that broke the barrier, plunging the two nations into a war, which the late Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski immortalized in his book, The Soccer War.

There’s enough tension in sports; adding politics makes it worse. And seeking political change through sports (or culture) is guilt-free activism. It is peculiarly odd to think that by preventing Spielberg from going to Beijing, China’s—or Sudan’s—human rights situation will improve. Sports and arts boycotts are feel-good boycotts. They require no sacrifice on the part of politicians; the burden is for the performer or the athlete, and the fans.

The world has been through this before: India was among the first to impose economic sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa. And yet, on my first visit there when apartheid ruled nominally, in Durban’s Grey Street, I could find Lijjat papad, Stardust magazine, Vandevi hing and Dabur’s products. Oh yes, in 1974 India did forfeit its chance to win the Davis Cup, when the Amritraj brothers were prevented from playing South Africa in the finals.

To stop the massacre in Darfur, impose oil sanctions on Sudan and stop selling arms to Khartoum. But that’s more complicated. Taking on China is also hard. So Sudan and Burma have become the proxy to attack China, and Spielberg a weapon in that battle. That’s a recipe for drama, not change.

Real change is glacial: In 2004, the creators of South Park made a wildly funny film, Team America: World Police, where superheroes tool on Kim Jong-II (who has half of Hollywood singing for him). This week, Maazel played An American In Paris in Pyongyang. Strange though it may sound, it is progress.