Avoidance Systems

 Back in 2018—the same year Donald Trump was carrying out his family separation policy at the border—I was doing all in my power not to think about politics. Part of it was that I had to spend every moment at work thinking and writing about Trump already (I worked at a human rights advocacy organization, after all). The rare chance when I had free time at home felt like an opportunity to detox from "the news." So on the weekends of that year, I spent an uncharacteristic amount of time reading about things like art history, which I took to be politically neutral. 

It's partly that I knew that, if I read about politics directly, it would carry me away. The first word on the subject would then exhaustingly force me to log onto this website, and write even more about it, and then I'd have to write about what I'd written, and there would be no escape. So I calculatedly confined my reading only to those things that I thought would inspire no further ideas or blogs on my part. And, to an extent, I appear to have succeeded. Looking back at this blog's timeline, I see that 2018 was the year with the fewest completed posts. 

Yet, even through these defenses, the occasional political idea would erupt. Even reading art history, one couldn't escape a reference to Siqueiros, say—or Goya's Disasters of War. One couldn't help but see Trump and his lies somehow reflected in the allegories of calumny that litter the pages of the subject. Even with the walls of my defensive barriers up, these subjects would somehow find a way to creep over them. Then I would have to write about it. But after finishing each post, I hoped these thoughts would depart from me forever. 

My inner monologue was like that of Siegfried Sassoon, in one of his poems about shell-shock: "[I]t's been proved that soldiers don't go mad/ Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts /That drive them out to jabber among the trees." 

Is that what I feared would happen, if I let in the political thoughts? That I would go mad? And if I felt that way back in 2018—what will happen to me now, if Trump wins the election on November 5? 

There are things we find we just can't face. At least not in the moment. Not until some years have passed. We erect barriers of civilization around us. The cool, calm contemplation of architectural monuments. No violence can penetrate there! None of the endless jargon and rhetoric and posturing of social media and the depravity of our current politics. So we think... but somehow, it finds a way through...

I have just finished reading W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, after having made my way through his earlier trilogy (Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn) this past summer. What gives these books their almost incommunicable power is that they are an exercise in self-aware avoidance of the unspeakable—yet, the unspeakable breaks through at last, in the final volume. And this overcoming of every emotional barrier, so that we are left at last, in the final volume, with a direct confrontation with everything we never wanted to face, lends these books a devastating emotional force that few other volumes have ever possessed. 

Sebald, after all, is a twentieth century German writer who doesn't write about the Holocaust—except that he does. The first volumes of the loose tetralogy I have mentioned—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn—deal with the subject more obliquely. 

In The Rings of Saturn (the last of the three to be published, but the first that I read), the ghost of genocide is hovering constantly just outside the field of vision. It begins to obtrude first in reference to the Croatian Ustasa's mass murders during World War II—an indirect way of backing into the subject; and it appears again, with the book's closing discussion of a Nazi manual on silk production, with its eerie references to the necessity of "extermination" in the animal kingdom... 

But the full confrontation is somehow held back. The book is strangely inhibited (self-consciously so), and we share its inhibitions—we do not want to see more. 

But in Austerlitz, the last of the four volumes to be published, the mental barriers finally crack. The enemy forces of the "ugly thoughts" flood in. A guiding metaphor in the book is the erection of defensive fortifications in European towns across the continent, after all—and how ineffective they always ultimately proved to be.

The book's central character, Austerlitz himself, is a man who has surrounded himself with the mental defenses of civilization. He is a student of architecture and its history. He observes at one point, that for nearly his entire adult life, he avoided learning anything at all about the period of the second World War. He avoids ever looking at a newspaper or listening to the radio. He dodges at every turn "so-called current events." "As far as I was concerned," he says at one point, "the world ended in the late nineteenth century. I dared go no further than that[.]" (Bell trans.)

The book describes what happens when the past finally overcomes all these defenses. It recounts the swarming of the "ugly thoughts" and facts of history over the ramparts of one's civilized emotional fortifications. It tells what happens when Austerlitz's whole "avoidance system," as he calls it—which he has spent his adult life perfecting—breaks down. 

And what is so eerily potent about this novel is that it feels as if the book were also a chronicle of Sebald's own "avoidance system" breaking down. The topic that was ever-present in his other books, but had to be kept somehow slightly off-stage; the topic that only shows itself at an angle, entering obliquely—here finally shows its full face in all its horror. It is the long delay that precedes this confrontation that makes it so devastating and unforgettable when it occurs. Austerlitz is a book that makes one want to sink to one's knees, as Willy Brandt did when he entered the Warsaw ghetto...

Reading this book leaves one shaken with the same feelings D.H. Lawrence once described, in the presence of sudden remembrance: I weep like a child for the past.