Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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from the Intifada to the security fence and the withdrawal from Gaza. (Its equivalent in Cuba would be the “special period,” a code-word for the economic catastrophe that followed the disintegration of the Soviet bloc.) “The Situation” is not a specific event but rather every event; it bleeds into every part of life. In stark contrast, his fiction withdraws into the claustrophobic space of private passions and obsessions. However, even when he writes of marriage and desire, jealousy and motherhood, loyalty and betrayal, he is mapping an entire country’s anxieties and longings. Rather than explicitly reporting the facts on the ground, Grossman constructs his own alternate reality that evokes “The Situation” as their absent Real-Cause.
The central character of “Frenzy,” the first novella of Grossman’s Her Body Knows, is Shaul, an official in the Ministry of Education, who has convinced himself that his wife, Elisheva, is having an affair. Consumed with jealousy, he conjures up every detail of the lovers’ time together. When Elisheva goes off for a few days alone, Shaul insists on following her. Because his leg has been fractured in a mysterious accident, he enlists the help of his brother’s wife, Esti, who agrees to drive him to where Elisheva is staying. On this hallucinatory journey, the normally reticent Shaul finds himself telling Esti the elaborate story of Elisheva’s affair. Is the affair real or just a fantasy? Is it rooted in Elisheva’s actual emotions or in Shaul’s obsessive jealousy? Somewhere along the way, that distinction stops mattering: Shaul blurs into the figure of his wife’s lover and the Elisheva of his imagination blurs into the Elisheva of real life. Esti is transformed as well: as their journey stretches deeper into the night, Shaul’s story stirs Esti’s own longing for a past love.
The second novella, “Her Body Knows,” is also about jealousy and betrayal; at its center are two women: a yoga teacher named Nili who is dying of cancer, and her estranged daughter Rotem, a writer living in London who has returned to Israel to read her mother a story she’s been working on, about a yoga teacher named Nili. In the story, which takes place during her own childhood, Nili is asked by the father of a shy teenage boy to initiate the latter into the secrets of sexuality and thus “make him a man.” It is easy to recognize here the logic of fantasy at its purest: inventing a scenario which touches on the mystery of the parents’ sexual lives.
What both novellas are really about is the transformative power of storytelling, the need to construct alternate fictional realities: what actually happened is beside the point, both Shaul and Rotem refashion reality to create a story they need to tell. Rewriting the past is an act of generosity which enables the subject to change her future. Even if the fictional realities they construct are not pretty (there are no happy marriages in these fantasies, no idyllic childhoods), even if it appears that one pain is merely “replaced with another in a widening, an opening up, of the past,” there is a secret “pathological” profit in this shift, a “surplus-enjoyment” is generated.
And it is here that ideology enters: such retreats into intimate reality take place against the background of hamatzav, “The Situation.” No wonder that, in recent years, this same desire for an alternate reality has become part of Israel’s national psyche: dealing with “The Situation” generates an atmosphere of anxiety, a deep sense of claustrophobia, a retreat into the relative safety of the indoors. Though an Israeli writer need not directly address the political atmosphere that surrounds him, these concerns seep in, quietly and evocatively. The properly ideological function of this retreat is thus clear—its underlying message is: “we are just ordinary people who want only peace and normal life.” A similar attitude forms part of the mythology of the IDF: the Israeli media love to dwell on the imperfections and psychic traumas of Israeli soldiers, presenting them not as perfect military machines, but as ordinary people who, caught into the vicissitudes of history and warfare, are just as likely as anyone else to make mistakes or lose their way.
This ideological operation accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war: Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon. Lebanon draws on Maoz’s own memories as a young soldier, rendering the war’s fear and claustrophobia by shooting most of the action from inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched in the tank to “mop up” enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli Air Force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, the actor who plays the director as a soldier a quarter of a century ago, said: “This is not a movie that makes you think ‘I’ve just been to a movie’. This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.” In a similar way, Waltz with Bashir renders the horrors of the 1982 conflict from the point of view of Israeli soldiers. Maoz said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through: “The mistake I made is to call the film ‘Lebanon’ because the Lebanon war is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.”3 This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict, involving questions such as what was the Israeli army doing deep in Lebanon? (In Lebanon, the spatial limitation to the inside of a tank quite literally enacts such an erasure.) Such a “humanization” thus serves to obfuscate the key question: the need for the ruthless political analysis of what is being done in terms of political-military activity. Our politico-military struggles are precisely not an opaque History which brutally disrupts our intimate lives—they are a field in which we are always already engaged, even if it is in a mode of ignorance.
Should we be surprised to find the same ideological mechanism in Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde police procedurals set in today’s Havana? On a first approach, these novels provide such a critical view of the Cuban situation (poverty, corruption, cynical disbelief.) that one cannot but be shocked to learn not only that Padura lives in Havana, but that he is an establishment figure who has received major state prizes. His heroes—although disappointed, depressed, seeking refuge in alcohol and dreams of alternate historical realities, mourning their missed chances, and, of course, depoliticized, completely ignoring the official socialist ideology—nonetheless fundamentally accept their situation. The novels’ underlying message is thus that one should heroically accept the situation the way it is, rather than attempt to escape to the false paradise of Miami. This acceptance forms the backdrop to all the critical remarks and dark descriptions: although totally disillusioned, the characters are from here and are here to stay, this misery is their world, and they struggle to find a meaningful life within its framework rather than resisting it in any radical way. Back in the Cold War era, Leftist critics often pointed out the ambiguity of John le Carré’s stance towards his own society: his critical portrayal of opportunist cynicism, ruthless maneuvering and moral betrayal nonetheless presupposes a basically positive stance—the very moral complexity of secret service life is proof that one lives in an “open” society which allows the expression of such complexities. Mutatis mutandis, does not exactly the same hold also for Padura? The very fact that he is able to write the way he does within Cuban society only contributes to its legitimization.
There is a very thin line separating this “humanization” from a resigned coming to terms with lying as a social principle: what matters in such a “humanized” universe is authentic intimate experience, not the truth. At the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a film which also “humanizes” its superhero, presenting him as full of doubts and weaknesses, the new DA Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante against mob rule who became corrupted and committed a number of murders, dies. Batman and his police friend Gordon recognize the loss of morale the city would suffer if Dent’s crimes became known. So Batman persuades Gordon to preserve Dent’s image by holding Batman responsible for the murders; Gordon destroys the Bat-Signal and a manhunt for Batman ensues. This need to perpetuate a lie in order to sustain public morale is the film’s final message: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder that, paradoxically, the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain.4 The aim of his terrorist attacks on Gotham City is made clear: the attacks will stop only when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and thus protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman—another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon stages his own (fake)