Through a Glass Darkly

waffles
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

The waffled ceilings of Lourie-Love Hall will stand for another year, I have learned, as the university debates whether to allow students the freedom to customize the rooms there for its final school year. Of course I did my own customizations back in 1992-1994. Who can forget the Skinny Puppy poster that leered over campus? The relentless Ministry beats that came from my window (and that once attracted a crowd of like-minded outsiders)?

Of course I know that I am a different person today, and my vision of the world then was but a pale refracted shadow, the imperfect knowledge of an imperfect and not-fully grown man. But when I looked up as I fell asleep I would gaze at these waffled ceilings, even as, inches away, the chill breeze darted in and tickled my cheek (in my memories, Princeton is always a chilly late-September. I will miss Lourie-Love Hall).

Finished novel 398, now looking for 397.

Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, is the (semi-autobiographical) story of Jim, a British boy born of global capitalism, raised in Paris of the East, Shanghai. The narrative follows the "terrible city" as it stumbles forward in its old habits (costume balls, nights at the clubs, etc) even as war unfolds around its hapless British and Americans residents. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, they find themselves turned overnight into enemy citizens in occupied Shanghai, and are summarily rounded up.

I won't bother to re-narrate how the proud British, the wiley Americans, the vengeful Eurasians, all slowly starved to death covered in flies, ravaged by disease and mosquitoes, unmourned, in the civilian camps outside Shanghai. What is striking is how Jim, a child, becomes acclimatized to the conditions at the camp, to the state of war, to the disingenuous and hopeless optimism the adults were compelled to express to them. What horrified the adults most was that Jim was beginning to enjoy the war and the life in the camps; that he resented the American air raids that threatened to end the war, that he was afraid to ever leave the camp.

The work is therefore an exemplary bildungsroman, a coming of age tale refracted through a particular lens. Therein, its narrative illuminates a social order teetering on the precipice, and the way a young mind can naturalize death's constant companionship. I could certainly never write a work of such power from behind the windows of Lourie-Love Hall. What possible inspiration could I draw from waffled ceilings?

One final comment about war and subjectivity, two of my pet terms for 2006.
The novel chronicles 1941-1945, ostensibly the years of the "Pacific War." Yet, the conditions that brought the killing (and dying) to Shanghai (and China) began long before "the war," and continued uninterrupted beyond its much ballyhooed closure. Ballard prophetically responds to the announcement of the "end of the war," with an exclamation that he was thus witness to "the start of World War III."

And all through it, the Chinese, as coolies, amahs, chauffeurs, thugs, pickpockets, and most commonly of all, corpses, retain their impenetrable silence. Their subjectivity is silence; they are executed, they are abused, they watch, all without a shred of interior dialogue. It is as if the narrator is incapable of imagining, much less, writing their emotions. Save for one final quip, Chinese death is part of the natural landscape (Jim feels more affect for the bayonetted Japanese pilots). But here I will quote that one exceptional moment of empathy (at length):
Provoked by their curious but silent audience, the sailors began to jeer at the Chinese. At a signal from an older sailor, the men unbuttoned their bell-bottomed trousers and urinated down the steps. Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge.

Written in 1984, Ballard would not have been able to ignore China's rising role in world affairs. In our own context, his statement has two ominous dimensions, even as his prophecy's credibility becomes substantiated day by day by world events.
1. The crime that would be repaid upon the rest of the world is none other than the erasure of Chinese subjectivity. The fact that Chinese death meant little to either the Japanese or the foreign contingent implied that they failed to register as human deaths. They could not be imagined as humans, in much the way you might identify with a protagonist in a novel. (That is what I mean by subjectivity.)
2. That frightening debt can only be repaid with none other than an equivalent dehumanization of the rest of the world, this time by the Chinese.

In that sense, Jim's final moment of empathy, insufficient and futile perhaps, is not only a warning but an epiphany as well. We are made to realize the pain and anger in each of those silent Chinese deaths scarcely mentioned in Jim's narrative, hinting at an alternative/obverse narrative shadowing the entire novel. From a Chinese perspective, that is. Is Ballard not saying that if the rest of the world cannot overcome this subjective gulf, then it deserves the revenge that surely is coming?