Writing in the Dark by David Grossman Read Free Book Online Page B

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