The rattle of skeletons
We need to examine the principles with which a writer is identified. And then ask, how do these principles bear upon the violations in their personal life?
I have to admit that I’ve extensively cited, taught and discussed the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, a man who murdered his wife – albeit in a mental condition that led him to clinics rather than prison.
Even more exciting and influential in my intellectual career has been the writing of the Kenyan novelist and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a man accused by his own son, the writer Mukoma wa Ngugi, of physically abusing the woman who was his wife and Mukoma’s mother.
How do I process my relationship with the ideas of these writers – and with the fact that they have invigorated my thinking for years now? The question creeps out of the closet and stares at my face as the literary world reels in chilling disgust at the revelation that the recently deceased Nobel Laureate in literature, the Canadian writer Alice Munro had ignored, indeed, had passively accepted the persistent abuse of her own daughter by her second husband, stepfather to the then-nine-year old girl. Munro had stood by her man in spite of his perversion, rather dismayed at his “adultery”, even going so far as to blame the little girl for being a “nymphette” and seducing the older man!
Throughout the history of civilisation, the morality of influential artists and thinkers, as reflected in their private lives, has not shown any elevation above common humanity. If anything, their behaviour has often violated ethical norms, no doubt enabled by the socio-economic privileges that gave them a prominent voice.
Be it musical composers, artists, or philosophers, the farther back into the past we move, the whiter, more male, more upper-class the figures appear – or in the subcontinental context, more Brahminical. People of these ranks may very well be brilliant — after all, they are the best supported and nurtured of all humanity — but their privilege and sense of entitlement have time and again led them to cause personal harm and violation to people around them, particularly to people less empowered than them, often the female members of their family.
Add to this power and privilege the legitimacy of artistic “decadence” — that perverse freedom of truth and beauty from the domain of ethical or political responsibility – and you get a kind of moral anarchy that only the decadent can celebrate.
And then we got Twitter and hashtags, and the sharpness of “Woke” morality. #cancelculture threatened to cancel them all. But the Munro revelation offers a sharp reckoning: Such violations go far beyond knee-jerk condemnation that burns like wildfire on social media and are then quickly forgotten.
What we need to examine carefully are the principles with which a writer and a thinker have come to be identified. And then ask the hard question — how do these principles bear upon the violations in their personal life? How does Ngũgĩ’s domestic partner abuse modify the narrative about sub-Saharan Africa as the battlefield of heroic and rebellious men? What bearing does Althusser's uxoricide have on his revealing reading of power and ideology in the capitalist state?
Here’s the damning irony of ethical violations: Anything that seems to have harmed a collective brings out a greater outrage, directly proportionate to the political capital attached to the bruised group. Personal violations are likelier to go unnoticed until they also touch a group identity, particularly a group that is able to muster a significant voice.
No wonder so many instances of child abuse go unnoticed and unremarked upon – often until the victim becomes an adult and is able to mobilise their outrage within a larger, vocal group — usually that of women. That is perhaps how Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner got her story out there, only after she became an adult.
No greater wounded power and cultural-financial prestige than the Jewish diaspora in the US, and in post-War America, no greater villain than the Nazis, possibly even beyond the Communists. Imagine the sharpness of the fall of the then Yale-based Belgian literary critic, Paul de Man before his liberal Jewish colleagues and students, when the anti-Semitic writing of his callow youth came to the surface!
Chilling lines stood out from De Man’s 1941 essay, ''Jews in Contemporary Literature': ''A leopard can never change its spots. The Jews are Asiatics; they're a menace to any country that will have them, and they must be excluded by the Constitution.''
A key term in De Man’s critical vocabulary was “prosopopeia”, the projection of the voice of a dead author. The pathologically anti-Semitic lines from the past of one of the most radical and innovative literary critics, a beloved of the liberal establishment, is an unexpected illustration of this unconscious voice lost to time.
De Man’s sharpest reader, Christopher Norris, called it, perhaps not without a sense of mischief, “ideological auto-critique.” Unthinkingly, De Man had worked for a Nazi newspaper and had gone along with the argument that Jews were dispensable as his employers were preparing the “final solution.” “He was innocent of history,” wrote James Atlas. “and his innocence assured his complicity.”
The personal life, particularly the personal ethical violations of writers and thinkers can trigger us to reject them on a personal level. But I repeat: What really matters is what they stood for. The hauntingly resurfaced stories of the deceased Alice Munro going so far as conniving at the abuse of her minor daughter, chilling as it is, need to be understood far beyond the immediacy of a gut response.
Across the long arc of cultural history — and the urgent domain of ethics — the importance of this kinship violation cannot be fully appreciated without measuring it against the unique feminism with which Munro has come to be identified. What is crucial for this history and this field of ethics is that Munro has been celebrated – and awarded the Nobel Prize for – the psychological complexity of the feminine “Gothic” as embodied in the tragic and eroticised female lives depicted in her short stories. Will the female Gothic in her work, with its erotic traumas and haunting mothers and daughters, ever be the same again?
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is the novel, The Remains of the Body. The views expressed are personal
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