Lessing On 9/11 - A Great Writer Loses The Plot
Posted by Robert Stagg on November 6th, 2007
“September 11th was terrible, but if one re-examines the history of the IRA, what happened in the United States was not so bad. Some Americans believe I’m crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was. People forget. The Americans are a very naïve people, or they pretend to beâ€
So there we have it. Lessing, the latest in a short line to both deserve and win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has begun honing her Harold Pinter impersonation. Not as hackneyed and not as demagogic as the over-esteemed playwright, perhaps, but just as wrong. It’s always difficult to know where to start with such clusters of semantic and intellectual confusion. Note the uneasy and teetering start of that extended quotation, and the breathless launch into trashy historical relativism. Note the tidy and potentially disarming self-deprecation sitting right in the middle of it all. Note the detached and distanced tone (“two buildings fellâ€, as if of their own accord). And finally, note the constant shifts in emphasis – at the beginning of one sentence, September 11th is “terrible†but by the end it’s all been placed within a neat historical timeline, consigned to mediocrity behind an amateur explosion on the south coast of England. Now there’s historical relativism for you.
Depressing as it is to see such an ambitiously progressive author – The Grass Is Singing remains one of the best exposes of the racist psyche – descend into hackneyed nonsense, it’s not altogether surprising. Her remarks are just another circumambulation of militant Islam. This euphemism is especially prevalent in academic circles.
It’s here in Cambridge. Bryan Turner, the now-departed professor of sociology, gave a lecture at CRASSH two weeks ago in which he neatly glossed just about every problem militant Islam poses to his vision of a ‘bottom-up cosmopolitanism’. When a rather more critical member of the audience inquired quite how somebody who believes that adulterous women should be stoned and homosexuals burned slots into this grand scheme of voluntary integration, he replied (astonishingly) that it is not what people think that matters; it’s what they do. Well, there was me labouring under the frivolous illusion that there’s some correlation between the two.
Grafted on to this kind of idiocy is the usual pretended confusion about the importance of this conflict, erroneously labelled ‘the war on terror’. Desperate for a niche (and the occasional book sale), bogus scholars from all disciplines have queued to ‘contextualise’ (read: ‘diminish’) the 11th of September 2001. Unfortunately, this ‘contextualising’ consists almost entirely of a lengthy list of American misdemeanours and scarcely a word cataloguing the indulgences of Islamic fascism. You are expected to believe, in fact, that the cornucopia of hatred directed at Salman Rushdie was really some Freudian projection of ‘grievance’ about Palestine. One doesn’t need to note that Osama Bin Laden and his followers barely mention this in their broadcasts (although the entirely sensible annexation of East Timor does preoccupy them) to see what’s missing in this doughnut-style logic. The rational mind cannot fathom the sheer volume of religious mania on display – and so wishes it out of existence. How Freudian that is.
Lessing has previously seemed sharp on this point. She’s been reasonably outspoken on Iran, albeit whilst indulging in the kind of tawdry Sufi mysticism Gore Vidal dismissed as being “a good deal harder to read than it is to writeâ€. She has also been tough on the many, and constant, violations of female dignity that are undergone in the Islamic world.
It’s why these comments are a distinct shame. It would have been reasonable to assume that a lifelong opponent of the tribalism and backwardness of apartheid might consider the tribalism and backwardness of the forces of jihad to be her enemy. But instead Lessing appears to have allowed herself to devolve into an angry and parochial brand of apathy. Too bad. Listen up, Doris: This isn’t, as Samuel P. Huntington put it, ‘a clash of civilisations’. It is a clash for civilisation. And wouldn’t it be nice if our Nobel Laureates, Lessing at the vanguard, led the charge?
Filed under: 9/11, dorislessing, nobelprize, robertstagg on November 6th, 2007
There is something, though, isn’t there, in the idea that we shouldn’t exaggerate the 9/11?
Not for the reasons Lessing would give, but because it allows people to underestimate the threat. The truth is that, horrific as 9/11 was, for most people in most of the West its impact was negligible. Yes, there were big political and economic consequences, but I would say that its effect on my day to day life is close to zero.
And I think that allows a lot of people, especially intelligent liberals, to be complacent about the threat of terror. If 9/11 is the worst “they” can do, then it’s easy to believe we don’t have much to worry about - and so any reduction of civil liberty is an outrage.
Few people are genuinely terrified about terrorism. Perhaps we should be though - the possibility of a terrorist attack on a much bigger scale than 9/11within our lifetimes - perhaps a dirty bomb - is very real. But because we’ve conceptualised 9/11 as “as bad as it gets”, the benefits of greater security seem fairly small. I know, that’s probably not what Lessing means, but she (unintentionally) has a point.
Some really interesting points here. I think most people who have been brought up in a Western culture would agree with you and find things such as stoning and the burning of homosexuals morally repugnant, though such practices are not as common as you perhaps inadvertently appear to make out.
We can’t be entirely absolutist here, nor can Westerners claim a perfect record themselves (the death penalty, Western complicity in torture in the Middle East, and Guantanamo Bay spring to mind). Just as we may find the prohibition of alcohol or the wearing of the veil counterintuitive, many Muslims might use the word ‘uncivilised’ when describing Western attitudes towards pornography. To say that there is a ‘clash of civilisations’ is too black and white; to call it a ‘clash for civilisation’ is condescending and plainly inaccurate. In fact, these sorts of terms encourage conflict and radicalisation. They are unnecessary. Islamic fundamentalism is surely about as representative of mainstream Islam as the BNP is of mainstream British society.
Just some thoughts. You’ve made a really good case here, though I think it’s taken a little too far in places.
Great authors often cast themselves as strong critics of their own culture - because that’s what they spend their time writing about. Orhan Pamuk criticises Turkey because he has authority on that topic - if he moaned about Iran, would anyone care? Likewise JM Coetzee with South Africa, Gunter Grass with Germany, Garcia Marquez with Colombia, and so on. Novelists rarely dive into global politics.
My feeling is that when Lessing, Pinter and others target the West as a whole, they’re overstretching, and people won’t listen. But I think they’re part of this trend among authors for analysing one’s own culture. You could argue it’s an author’s job to put cultural-introspection-goggles on. Let the politicians talk about how bad other cultures are.