Between Loneliness and Alignment
Adam Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination
Verso, 368pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781804290590
reviewed by Gabriel Flynn
The title of Adam Shatz’s new essay collection, Writers and Missionaries, alludes to a remark by the novelist V. S. Naipaul during an interview with Shatz: ‘Ultimately you have to make a choice — are you a writer, or are you a missionary?’ Although Shatz finds Naipaul’s distinction too crude, he agrees there is a tension between the writer, ‘who describes things as he or she sees them,’ and the missionary, ‘who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the influence of a party, movement or cause.’ That tension, which was inaugurated into the canon of post-war literary debate with Sartre’s 1948 essay ‘What is Literature?’ and Adorno’s famous riposte of 1962, ‘Commitment’, is the underlying subject of this book.
Shatz does not systematically address the question but rather explores the lives and works of a number of intellectuals — novelists, philosophers, an anthropologist and two filmmakers — whose lives and works it variously shaped. Commitment here does not mean consigning oneself to producing pamphlets and agitprop but ‘dedication to a project — intellectual, moral, political, aesthetic or some combination.’ As Shatz writes, ‘When we write, we bind ourselves to the project that our work embodies; in the act of commitment, life and work fuse in pursuit of a common goal.’
Sartre is the figure who looms largest over these essays. He appears as an early advocate for the post-colonial struggles to which Shatz has dedicated much of his energy as a historian and reporter; as the father figure of the humanist existentialism that Claude Levy-Strauss and Roland Barthes had to overthrow, and finally, as the subject of a fascinating essay about an ill-fated visit to the Middle-East, during which Zionist and pro-Palestinian factions fought to win his endorsement for their causes.
Sartre is also a writer whom Shatz admires, though not, he says, for his long philosophical works so much as his writings on other writers. ‘I loved the way he burrowed his way into their voices,’ he writes, ‘exploring the political and ethical dilemmas they confronted in what he called “situations,” the settings of conflict and crisis in which they created their work.’ It is in this sense that Shatz most takes after him. He believes writing is inseparable from lived experience, which is not the same as saying it is reducible to it. (That is the assumption of contemporary identity politics, ‘which would have us believe writing is whipped out of collective trauma as butter is whipped out of cream.’) Shatz puts the works in the context of their authors’ lives and the authors’ lives in the contexts of the political struggles to which they dedicated their lives, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes ambivalently. Implicit in his approach is a belief that the most complex and contradictory aspects of his subjects’ characters are those most likely to show the fullness of their situation.
If these essays do form a subtle polemic, its argument might be that you can write in service of a commitment without abandoning complexity. He confesses to holding the currently unpopular view that ‘to explain is not to excuse.’ He wants to show that complexity is not the same as quietism. To probe deeper and wrestle with contradiction is not to throw one’s hands in the air and say they are all the same; there are good people on both sides. The target would be not only the quick-tempered absolutism of online political discourse (which hardly needs more detractors) but also the more entrenched liberal idea that a politically neutral position affords a clearer perspective. Writers do not face a simple choice between political commitment on the one hand — always tending toward generalisation and sermonising — and commitment to intellectual freedom on the other — always tending towards equivocation, hesitancy, and vacillation.
Although most of these essays have appeared individually, many in the London Review of Books, it is a coherent collection that shows a writer working through a set of related questions and concerns: the politics of the Middle East, especially Israel-Palestine; France, its literary and intellectual culture, and its relationship with its former colonies, especially Algeria; the ways philosophers, novelists, and film-makers work on a terrain shaped by political struggle and catastrophe. Shatz’s subjects are often overlaid, such that the protagonist of one might show up as a minor character in another while a country like France is explored in several guises: as the intellectual homeland of modern theory, as a country where African-American writers in the mid-century could enjoy freedoms they did not have at home, and as the former coloniser of Algeria (in a history that Shatz shows continues to shape the political and intellectual cultures of both countries).
The lives of the book’s subjects are often shaped by contradictions. The first of the book’s four sections features a profile of Kamel Daoud, the novelist and journalist whose theme is the ‘Algerian condition,’ the schizophrenia of being caught between religious piety and liberal individualism, as well as an investigation into the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a Palestinian-Israeli who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a refugee camp in the West Bank: ‘In Israel he was seldom allowed to forget that he was the son of an Arab, and in Jenin he was seen as an Israeli, a Jew, no matter how much he did for the camp.’ The book’s themes emerge most clearly in an essay on Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary critic, an early hero of Shatz’s, whose Orientalism shaped the field of contemporary literary studies to a far greater extent than Sartre. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Said aligned himself with the Palestinian struggle, but the risk of such an affiliation was that it could ‘degenerate into filiation, into a familial structure of obedience and conformity.’ While many of his colleagues in the American academy mistrusted his alignment with the Palestine Liberation Organization, whom they considered terrorists, its chairman Yasser Arafat saw Said as ‘A useful but somewhat suspect American professor.’ The intellectual, Said wrote, ‘always stands between loneliness and alignment.’
The second part of the book comprises essays on Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith, three African-American writers who, like their better-known compatriot James Baldwin, left the US for Paris, a city that ‘offered a sanctuary from segregation and discrimination, as well as an escape from American puritanism.’ In the words of Richard Wright, there was ‘more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!’ The focus of the third is a series of French writers, ranging chronologically from Claude Lévis-Strauss to Michel Houellebecq.
While Sartrean existential humanism and political commitment lived on in the literature of the Third World, the French intellectuals who succeeded Sartre were more suspicious. For Allain Robbe-Grillet, the child of Vichy collaborators, commitment was ‘a moral luxury.’ Literature, rather than a tool for political communication, was ‘the secret room of his imagination,’ where there was ‘freedom from truth and certainty.’ In Derrida’s case, ‘the call to choose sides in the class struggle or the Cold War struck him as a betrayal of deconstructionist first principles.’ And for Roland Barthes, ‘writing was revolutionary only insofar as it was revolutionary in form, and the qualities he admired in radical literature were opacity, complexity and elusiveness, a defiance of the communication that Sartre had seen as its goal.’
Most of Shatz’s subjects are at least committed to complexity, if not to a distinct and unified political cause. The notable exception is Claude Lanzmann, director of the 9-hour-long Holocaust film Shoah and a passionate Zionist who, as Shatz writes, ‘lived a long life while still seeing the world as a child does, divided between the forces of light and darkness.’ In one of many such overlaps, Lanzmann’s life and work are the subjects of one essay before he shows up as a secondary character in another: as Simon De Beauvoir’s lover and part of Sartre’s travelling party in a fascinating essay on Sartre’s trip to the Middle East, where Arab and Israeli delegates fought to win his endorsement. Sartre, a hero to many anticolonial dissidents, was usually decisive when it came to throwing his support behind a just cause and had been angered by Camus’ silence on the Algerian independence struggle.
Sartre’s Arab followers believed that a visit to the refugee camp in the Gaza Strip would bring him around to ‘the only authentic Sartrean position: solidarity with the Arabs in their struggle with the settler-colonial state.’ But Sartre’s sympathy for the Jewish plight during the Holocaust left him with lingering sympathy towards Israel and his travelling companion Lanzmann apparently ‘threatened to throw himself out of a window if Sartre sided with the Arabs.’ In the end, Sartre failed to commit to a cause, caught between friends and sympathies on both sides, His intransigence led Franz Fanon’s widow Josie to request that his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth be withdrawn and Edward Said to lament that Sartre remained ‘constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism.’ It’s appropriate to this book’s attitude that one of its protagonist’s final acts shows him at his weakest; Shatz does not mythologise or make heroes. As he writes, ‘In the struggle to overcome the weight of the past, father figures usually stand in the way of emancipation.’
He is interested in philosophers who might have been artists, like Claude Levi-Straus with his anthropological field notes comprising ‘childlike drawings of jaguars, armadillos, birds and fish’, Edward Said with his several unfinished autobiographical novels, and Barthes who might too have been a novelist, were it not for his inability to make up proper names. You sense that Shatz too might have been a novelist and that if anything stopped him, it was his total commitment to honouring the facticity of his material and his admirable reluctance to say ‘I’. His biographical writing is packed with incident and detail.
Of Claude Levis-Straus in New York, he writes he ‘befriended the anthropologist Franz Boas (who would die in his arms at a lunch held in his honour in 1942) and in his spare time joined Breton and Max Ernst on expeditions to the antique shops on Third Avenue, where cheap tribal artefacts were easy to come by.’ Of Barthes’ trip to China, he writes: he ‘passed his time reading Bouvard and Pécuchet while Sollers played ping-pong with professors of Marxist philosophy.’ Of Robbe-Grillet, he writes: ‘He spent more time tending his cacti and the chateau in Normandy, while Catherine whipped her guests in the chambre secrète.’ His prose is like a good holding midfielder or bass guitar track; the mark of its quality is that you notice it rarely, but he can turn on the style when he wants to. Here, for example, is a passage on Barthes:
He is at home in several modes of writing. Sometimes, he writes as a reporter on the ground in Oran or Jenin, building a story from interviews, historical records, and observations. Sensitive to the dialectical relationship between local and global, he describes a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers where ‘merchants’ stalls were awash with in Chinese electronic goods and clothing, CDs and DVDs and fresh produce’ and in the next paragraph, introduces us to Algerian historian who explains that ‘this normalcy was an optical illusion, the ephemeral effect of a consumption boom fuelled by high oil prices.’ As an intellectual historian, Shatz is lucid and transparent — his reading of Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference is the clearest I’ve read. As a critic-historian, he weaves together literary explication with biographical criticism, drawing subtle and suggestive connections between the personal and political lives of his subjects and their work, which, in the spirit of the book, illuminate the latter without attempting to explain away its complexity.
The penultimate essay, ‘Writers or Missionaries’ is adapted from a talk the author gave at Brown and Harvard in 2014. In it, he addresses some of the lessons he has learned in twenty-odd years of reporting on the Middle East. When he reflects on the teenager he once was, full of righteous indignation over Israel’s response to the First Intifada, it’s not his younger self’s positions he finds naïve but his blustering confidence. When he finally began to spend more time in the Middle East, he realised that ‘I could only be a good writer on the Middle East to the extent that I was a good listener. I realized how insufficient it was to have the right attitudes; they would provide me with little more than an I.’ That would be to misunderstand the role, he continues: ‘I’m here to report the story, not to be the story.’ One has to observe, listen, and describe, he says, ‘with a sense of history, and without false consolations.’ Otherwise, one risks turning a political struggle into a metaphor — whether for another political struggle or a struggle with oneself.
The book’s moving epilogue is a personal essay entitled ‘Kitchen Confidential’. He begins by describing the weekend visits his teenage daughter spends at his apartment, cooking elaborate meals, baking scones and croissants, and watching Chef’s Table, whose culinary idiom leads him to reflect on his early career as a prodigious child chef. He describes the thrill of placing a container of chocolate in the oven — ‘the fact that I’d melted it myself was exciting: I had transformed something’ — and of his graduation to fancy confections and complex emulsions. At age 11, he launched a catering company from his parents’ kitchen in Massachusetts and a few years later, he was training part-time with a Michelin-starred chef in New York City. He describes an article written by Ruth Reichl, then a food writer for the Los Angeles Times, later to become the editor of Gourmet, who mocked the 13-year-old Shatz as the ‘tyke with a toque.’
In the Hollywood version of this story, this would be the moment Shatz discovered the power of writing to change the world, but he steers clear of that, as he does of drawing a metaphoric relationship between writing and food (though one can’t help but see something in the latter, especially in the meticulous attention both require to the unique properties of their materials). He describes the education he received in upmarket kitchens in New York and Paris and a downmarket one in his Massachusetts hometown. He describes the class and racial dynamics of a typical kitchen and the education in post-colonial racism he received hanging out with teenagers in France. He also describes a lot of food.
The writing ethics laid out in the previous essay are also at work here: pace the current fashion, Shatz doesn’t tell you what he made for lunch when he’s writing about theory and when he finally tells you what he made for lunch, he does it without quoting theory. In the book’s final paragraph, he says that when his daughter comes over to cook, it’s his job to keep quiet and stay out of her way. You wonder if it’s a coded statement about the responsibility of a critic and historian or if it’s meant more literally than that — if it means only what it says. Either way, the result would be the same.
Shatz does not systematically address the question but rather explores the lives and works of a number of intellectuals — novelists, philosophers, an anthropologist and two filmmakers — whose lives and works it variously shaped. Commitment here does not mean consigning oneself to producing pamphlets and agitprop but ‘dedication to a project — intellectual, moral, political, aesthetic or some combination.’ As Shatz writes, ‘When we write, we bind ourselves to the project that our work embodies; in the act of commitment, life and work fuse in pursuit of a common goal.’
Sartre is the figure who looms largest over these essays. He appears as an early advocate for the post-colonial struggles to which Shatz has dedicated much of his energy as a historian and reporter; as the father figure of the humanist existentialism that Claude Levy-Strauss and Roland Barthes had to overthrow, and finally, as the subject of a fascinating essay about an ill-fated visit to the Middle-East, during which Zionist and pro-Palestinian factions fought to win his endorsement for their causes.
Sartre is also a writer whom Shatz admires, though not, he says, for his long philosophical works so much as his writings on other writers. ‘I loved the way he burrowed his way into their voices,’ he writes, ‘exploring the political and ethical dilemmas they confronted in what he called “situations,” the settings of conflict and crisis in which they created their work.’ It is in this sense that Shatz most takes after him. He believes writing is inseparable from lived experience, which is not the same as saying it is reducible to it. (That is the assumption of contemporary identity politics, ‘which would have us believe writing is whipped out of collective trauma as butter is whipped out of cream.’) Shatz puts the works in the context of their authors’ lives and the authors’ lives in the contexts of the political struggles to which they dedicated their lives, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes ambivalently. Implicit in his approach is a belief that the most complex and contradictory aspects of his subjects’ characters are those most likely to show the fullness of their situation.
If these essays do form a subtle polemic, its argument might be that you can write in service of a commitment without abandoning complexity. He confesses to holding the currently unpopular view that ‘to explain is not to excuse.’ He wants to show that complexity is not the same as quietism. To probe deeper and wrestle with contradiction is not to throw one’s hands in the air and say they are all the same; there are good people on both sides. The target would be not only the quick-tempered absolutism of online political discourse (which hardly needs more detractors) but also the more entrenched liberal idea that a politically neutral position affords a clearer perspective. Writers do not face a simple choice between political commitment on the one hand — always tending toward generalisation and sermonising — and commitment to intellectual freedom on the other — always tending towards equivocation, hesitancy, and vacillation.
Although most of these essays have appeared individually, many in the London Review of Books, it is a coherent collection that shows a writer working through a set of related questions and concerns: the politics of the Middle East, especially Israel-Palestine; France, its literary and intellectual culture, and its relationship with its former colonies, especially Algeria; the ways philosophers, novelists, and film-makers work on a terrain shaped by political struggle and catastrophe. Shatz’s subjects are often overlaid, such that the protagonist of one might show up as a minor character in another while a country like France is explored in several guises: as the intellectual homeland of modern theory, as a country where African-American writers in the mid-century could enjoy freedoms they did not have at home, and as the former coloniser of Algeria (in a history that Shatz shows continues to shape the political and intellectual cultures of both countries).
The lives of the book’s subjects are often shaped by contradictions. The first of the book’s four sections features a profile of Kamel Daoud, the novelist and journalist whose theme is the ‘Algerian condition,’ the schizophrenia of being caught between religious piety and liberal individualism, as well as an investigation into the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a Palestinian-Israeli who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a refugee camp in the West Bank: ‘In Israel he was seldom allowed to forget that he was the son of an Arab, and in Jenin he was seen as an Israeli, a Jew, no matter how much he did for the camp.’ The book’s themes emerge most clearly in an essay on Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary critic, an early hero of Shatz’s, whose Orientalism shaped the field of contemporary literary studies to a far greater extent than Sartre. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Said aligned himself with the Palestinian struggle, but the risk of such an affiliation was that it could ‘degenerate into filiation, into a familial structure of obedience and conformity.’ While many of his colleagues in the American academy mistrusted his alignment with the Palestine Liberation Organization, whom they considered terrorists, its chairman Yasser Arafat saw Said as ‘A useful but somewhat suspect American professor.’ The intellectual, Said wrote, ‘always stands between loneliness and alignment.’
The second part of the book comprises essays on Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith, three African-American writers who, like their better-known compatriot James Baldwin, left the US for Paris, a city that ‘offered a sanctuary from segregation and discrimination, as well as an escape from American puritanism.’ In the words of Richard Wright, there was ‘more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!’ The focus of the third is a series of French writers, ranging chronologically from Claude Lévis-Strauss to Michel Houellebecq.
While Sartrean existential humanism and political commitment lived on in the literature of the Third World, the French intellectuals who succeeded Sartre were more suspicious. For Allain Robbe-Grillet, the child of Vichy collaborators, commitment was ‘a moral luxury.’ Literature, rather than a tool for political communication, was ‘the secret room of his imagination,’ where there was ‘freedom from truth and certainty.’ In Derrida’s case, ‘the call to choose sides in the class struggle or the Cold War struck him as a betrayal of deconstructionist first principles.’ And for Roland Barthes, ‘writing was revolutionary only insofar as it was revolutionary in form, and the qualities he admired in radical literature were opacity, complexity and elusiveness, a defiance of the communication that Sartre had seen as its goal.’
Most of Shatz’s subjects are at least committed to complexity, if not to a distinct and unified political cause. The notable exception is Claude Lanzmann, director of the 9-hour-long Holocaust film Shoah and a passionate Zionist who, as Shatz writes, ‘lived a long life while still seeing the world as a child does, divided between the forces of light and darkness.’ In one of many such overlaps, Lanzmann’s life and work are the subjects of one essay before he shows up as a secondary character in another: as Simon De Beauvoir’s lover and part of Sartre’s travelling party in a fascinating essay on Sartre’s trip to the Middle East, where Arab and Israeli delegates fought to win his endorsement. Sartre, a hero to many anticolonial dissidents, was usually decisive when it came to throwing his support behind a just cause and had been angered by Camus’ silence on the Algerian independence struggle.
Sartre’s Arab followers believed that a visit to the refugee camp in the Gaza Strip would bring him around to ‘the only authentic Sartrean position: solidarity with the Arabs in their struggle with the settler-colonial state.’ But Sartre’s sympathy for the Jewish plight during the Holocaust left him with lingering sympathy towards Israel and his travelling companion Lanzmann apparently ‘threatened to throw himself out of a window if Sartre sided with the Arabs.’ In the end, Sartre failed to commit to a cause, caught between friends and sympathies on both sides, His intransigence led Franz Fanon’s widow Josie to request that his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth be withdrawn and Edward Said to lament that Sartre remained ‘constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism.’ It’s appropriate to this book’s attitude that one of its protagonist’s final acts shows him at his weakest; Shatz does not mythologise or make heroes. As he writes, ‘In the struggle to overcome the weight of the past, father figures usually stand in the way of emancipation.’
He is interested in philosophers who might have been artists, like Claude Levi-Straus with his anthropological field notes comprising ‘childlike drawings of jaguars, armadillos, birds and fish’, Edward Said with his several unfinished autobiographical novels, and Barthes who might too have been a novelist, were it not for his inability to make up proper names. You sense that Shatz too might have been a novelist and that if anything stopped him, it was his total commitment to honouring the facticity of his material and his admirable reluctance to say ‘I’. His biographical writing is packed with incident and detail.
Of Claude Levis-Straus in New York, he writes he ‘befriended the anthropologist Franz Boas (who would die in his arms at a lunch held in his honour in 1942) and in his spare time joined Breton and Max Ernst on expeditions to the antique shops on Third Avenue, where cheap tribal artefacts were easy to come by.’ Of Barthes’ trip to China, he writes: he ‘passed his time reading Bouvard and Pécuchet while Sollers played ping-pong with professors of Marxist philosophy.’ Of Robbe-Grillet, he writes: ‘He spent more time tending his cacti and the chateau in Normandy, while Catherine whipped her guests in the chambre secrète.’ His prose is like a good holding midfielder or bass guitar track; the mark of its quality is that you notice it rarely, but he can turn on the style when he wants to. Here, for example, is a passage on Barthes:
a plump sensualist who dislikes the conventions of bourgeois society but not so much that he wants to sacrifice its pleasures on the altar of a puritanical revolution; a gay man who lives with his mother, devoted simultaneously to the fleeting thrills of cruising and the dependable comforts of domesticity. He is a flirt, easily bored, invariably dissatisfied. If he is committed to anything, it is to the infinitely paradoxical nature of the self, and to the refusal of any attempt to deny it in the name of a singular meaning.
He is at home in several modes of writing. Sometimes, he writes as a reporter on the ground in Oran or Jenin, building a story from interviews, historical records, and observations. Sensitive to the dialectical relationship between local and global, he describes a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers where ‘merchants’ stalls were awash with in Chinese electronic goods and clothing, CDs and DVDs and fresh produce’ and in the next paragraph, introduces us to Algerian historian who explains that ‘this normalcy was an optical illusion, the ephemeral effect of a consumption boom fuelled by high oil prices.’ As an intellectual historian, Shatz is lucid and transparent — his reading of Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference is the clearest I’ve read. As a critic-historian, he weaves together literary explication with biographical criticism, drawing subtle and suggestive connections between the personal and political lives of his subjects and their work, which, in the spirit of the book, illuminate the latter without attempting to explain away its complexity.
The penultimate essay, ‘Writers or Missionaries’ is adapted from a talk the author gave at Brown and Harvard in 2014. In it, he addresses some of the lessons he has learned in twenty-odd years of reporting on the Middle East. When he reflects on the teenager he once was, full of righteous indignation over Israel’s response to the First Intifada, it’s not his younger self’s positions he finds naïve but his blustering confidence. When he finally began to spend more time in the Middle East, he realised that ‘I could only be a good writer on the Middle East to the extent that I was a good listener. I realized how insufficient it was to have the right attitudes; they would provide me with little more than an I.’ That would be to misunderstand the role, he continues: ‘I’m here to report the story, not to be the story.’ One has to observe, listen, and describe, he says, ‘with a sense of history, and without false consolations.’ Otherwise, one risks turning a political struggle into a metaphor — whether for another political struggle or a struggle with oneself.
The book’s moving epilogue is a personal essay entitled ‘Kitchen Confidential’. He begins by describing the weekend visits his teenage daughter spends at his apartment, cooking elaborate meals, baking scones and croissants, and watching Chef’s Table, whose culinary idiom leads him to reflect on his early career as a prodigious child chef. He describes the thrill of placing a container of chocolate in the oven — ‘the fact that I’d melted it myself was exciting: I had transformed something’ — and of his graduation to fancy confections and complex emulsions. At age 11, he launched a catering company from his parents’ kitchen in Massachusetts and a few years later, he was training part-time with a Michelin-starred chef in New York City. He describes an article written by Ruth Reichl, then a food writer for the Los Angeles Times, later to become the editor of Gourmet, who mocked the 13-year-old Shatz as the ‘tyke with a toque.’
In the Hollywood version of this story, this would be the moment Shatz discovered the power of writing to change the world, but he steers clear of that, as he does of drawing a metaphoric relationship between writing and food (though one can’t help but see something in the latter, especially in the meticulous attention both require to the unique properties of their materials). He describes the education he received in upmarket kitchens in New York and Paris and a downmarket one in his Massachusetts hometown. He describes the class and racial dynamics of a typical kitchen and the education in post-colonial racism he received hanging out with teenagers in France. He also describes a lot of food.
The writing ethics laid out in the previous essay are also at work here: pace the current fashion, Shatz doesn’t tell you what he made for lunch when he’s writing about theory and when he finally tells you what he made for lunch, he does it without quoting theory. In the book’s final paragraph, he says that when his daughter comes over to cook, it’s his job to keep quiet and stay out of her way. You wonder if it’s a coded statement about the responsibility of a critic and historian or if it’s meant more literally than that — if it means only what it says. Either way, the result would be the same.