As the
social contract frays, what does it mean to be polite?
By RACHEL
CUSK FEB. 15, 2017
In a
world as unmannerly as this one, how is it best to speak?
There’s
no need to be rude, I say to the man in the packed hall at passport control.
There are people everywhere, and his job is to send them into the right queues.
I have been watching him shout at them. I have watched the obsessive way he
notices them, to pick on them. There’s no need to be rude, I say.
His head
jerks around.
You’re
rude, he counters. You’re the one who’s rude.
This is
an airport, a place of transit. There are all sorts of people here, people of
different ages, races and nationalities, people in myriad sets of
circumstances. In this customs hall, there are so many different versions of
living that it seems possible that no one version could ever be agreed on. Does
it follow, then, that nothing that happens here really matters?
No, I’m
not, I say.
You are,
he says. You’re being rude.
The man
is wearing a uniform, though not a very impressive one: a white short-sleeved
synthetic shirt, black synthetic trousers, a cheap tie with the airport’s
insignia on it. It is no different from the uniform a bus driver might wear, or
someone at a car-rental desk, someone who lacks any meaningful authority while
also being forced into constant interaction with members of the public, someone
for whom the operation of character is both nothing and everything. He is
angry. His face is red, and his expression is unpleasant. He looks at me — a
woman of 48 traveling alone, a woman who doubtless exhibits some signs of the
privileged life she has led — with loathing. Apparently it is I, not he, who
has broken the social code. Apparently it was rude of me to accuse him of
rudeness.
The
social code remains unwritten, and it has always interested me how many
problems this poses in the matter of ascertaining the truth. The truth often
appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with
rudeness. When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release
from pretense that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might
follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth. It
may only be by examining the aftermath of each that it becomes possible to
prove which was which.
The queue
moves forward. I reach passport control, and I pass through it, and the man is
left behind.
In
recounting this incident afterward, I find myself running into difficulties. For instance, I
find myself relying on the details of the man’s physical ugliness to prove the
badness of his character. Searching for a specific example of someone else’s
being upset or offended by him, the only person I can prove he offended was me.
On another day, a perfectly polite man is probably to be found directing the
crowds in the customs hall, assisting the elderly, apologizing for the crush,
helpfully explaining things to people whose English is uncertain: He would make
a good story about individuality as the basis for all hope.
By
telling this story, I am trying to substantiate my fear that discrimination and
bullying are used against people trying to enter Britain, my country. There are
many people who don’t have this fear. To them, my story proves only one thing,
which is that I once met a rude man in an airport. I might even have
inadvertently made them pity him. I, the teller of this tale, would have to
demonstrate that under the same circumstances, I would have behaved better. In
the event, all I did was criticize him. I made him angrier; perhaps he took it
out on the next person in the queue. To top it all off, I admit that he accuses
me of precisely the same failing: rudeness. Anyone hearing the story will at
this point stop thinking about the moral problem of rudeness and start thinking
about me. I have damaged my own narrative authority: Might I be to blame after
all? By including that detail — true though it is — I am giving the man a
platform for his point of view. In most of my stories, I allow the truth to
look after itself. In this one, I’m not sure that it can.
For all
these reasons, the story doesn’t work as it should. Why, then, if it proves
nothing, is this a story I persist in telling? The answer: because I don’t
understand it. I don’t understand it, and I feel that the thing I don’t
understand about it — indeed the mere fact of not understanding — is
significant.
Another
day, another airport. This time the situation is clearer: My country has recently voted to
leave the European Union, and rudeness is rampant. People treat one another
with a contempt that they do not trouble to conceal. The people in uniforms —
the airport officials — exercise their faux power with uncommon ugliness, while
the rest of us look suspiciously at one another, not sure what to expect of
this new, unscripted reality, wondering which side the other person is on. It
is already being said that this situation has arisen out of hatred, but it
seems to me that if that is true, then the hatred is of self.
The uniformed
woman at security bangs the gray plastic trays one after another onto the
conveyor belt with a violence that seems to be a request for attention. At
every opportunity, she makes it clear that she has relinquished self-control:
Her nature has been let loose, like an animal from its cage. She abuses,
without exception, every person who passes along her queue, while seeming not
to address any single one of them: We are no longer individuals; we are a herd
enduring the drover’s lash, heads down and silent. She looks unhealthy, her
face covered with sore-looking red spots, her shapeless white body almost
writhing with its own anger, as though it wishes only to transgress its
boundaries, to escape itself in an act of brutality.
The
person in front of me in the queue is a well-groomed black woman. She is
traveling with a child, a pretty girl with neatly plaited hair. She has put two
large clear bags of cosmetics and creams in her tray, but this, apparently, is
not allowed; she is permitted only a single bag. The uniformed woman halts the
queue and slowly and deliberately holds up the two bags, looking fixedly at
their owner.
What’s
this then? she says. What’s this about?
The woman
explains that because two of them are traveling, she has assumed that they are
entitled to two bags. Her voice is quiet and polite. The little girl gazes
ahead with wide, unblinking eyes.
You
assumed wrong, the uniformed woman says. Her horrible relish for the situation
is apparent. She has been waiting, it is clear, to fasten on someone and has
found her victim.
You don’t
get away with that, she says, grimacing and shaking her head. Where do people
like you get your ideas from?
The rest
of us watch while she makes the woman unpack the bags and then decide which of
her possessions are to be thrown away. They are mostly new and
expensive-looking. In another situation, their scented femininity might have
seemed to mock the ugliness of the woman superintending their destruction with
folded arms and a jeering expression on her face. The other woman’s slender,
varnished fingers are shaking as she scrabbles with the various pots and jars.
She keeps dropping things, her head bowed, her lower lip caught in her teeth.
The uniformed woman’s unremitting commentary on these events is so unpleasant
that I realize she is half-demented with what would seem to be the combination
of power and powerlessness. No one intervenes. I do not inform her that there
is no need to be rude. Instead, as I increasingly seem to in such situations
these days, I wonder what Jesus would have done.
My
traveling companion — a painter — is the politest person I know, but I have
noticed that he does not often take up arms on another person’s behalf. He
dislikes conflict. When it is our turn in the queue, the uniformed woman stares
at the bag he has placed in the tray. It contains his tubes of paint. They are
crumpled and bespattered with use, and there are so many of them that the bag
can’t close at the top. She folds her arms.
What are
those, she says.
They’re
paints, he replies.
You can’t
take those through, she says.
Why not,
he asks pleasantly.
The bag
has to close at the top, she says. That’s why not.
But I
need them to paint with, he says.
You can’t
take them through, she says.
He looks
at her in silence. He is looking directly into her eyes. He stands completely
quiet and still. The look goes on for a very long time. Her eyes are small and
pale blue and impotent: I did not notice them until now. My friend neither
blinks nor looks away, and the woman is forced to hold herself there as the
seconds tick by, her small eyes open and straining. During those seconds, it
seems as if layers of her are being removed: She is being simplified, put in
order, by being looked at. He is giving her his full attention, and I watch the
strange transformation occur. Finally he speaks.
What do
you suggest I do, he says, very calmly.
Well,
sir, she says, if you’re traveling with this lady, she might have room in her
bag.
Neither
of them looks at me — they are still looking at each other.
Would
that be acceptable? she says.
Credit
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro
Yes, he
says, I don’t see why not.
I proffer
my bag, and the woman herself transfers the paints from one bag to the other.
Her hands labor to do it with care and exactitude: It takes her a long time.
Finally she seals the bag and lays it gently back in the tray.
Is that
all right, sir? she says.
Now that
he has won this victory, I want him to use it to reprimand her, not just for
her behavior toward the black woman in the queue but for all the wrongs her
behavior represents; for the fact that it’s safer to be him, and always has
been. He does not reprimand her. He smiles at her politely.
Thank you
very much, he says.
It would
have been a shame to throw them away, wouldn’t it? she says.
Yes, it
would, he says. I appreciate your help.
I hope
you enjoy your holiday, sir, she says.
Society
organizes itself very
efficiently to punish, silence or disown truth-tellers. Rudeness, on the other
hand, is often welcomed in the manner of a false god. Later still, regret at
the punishment of the truth-teller can build into powerful feelings of worship,
whereas rudeness will be disowned.
Are
people rude because they are unhappy? Is rudeness like nakedness, a state
deserving the tact and mercy of the clothed? If we are polite to rude people,
perhaps we give them back their dignity; yet the obsessiveness of the rude
presents certain challenges to the proponents of civilized behavior. It is an
act of disinhibition: Like a narcotic, it offers a sensation of glorious
release from jailers no one else can see.
In the
recollection of events, rudeness often has a role to play in the moral
construction of a drama: It is the outward sign of an inward or unseen
calamity. Rudeness itself is not the calamity. It is the harbinger, not the
manifestation, of evil. In the Bible, Satan is not rude — he is usually rather
charming — but the people who act in his service are. Jesus, on the other hand,
often comes across as somewhat terse. Indeed, many of the people he encounters
find him direct to the point of rudeness. The test, it is clear, is to tell
rudeness from truth, and in the Bible that test is often failed. An unambiguous
event — violence — is therefore required. The episode of the crucifixion is an
orgy of rudeness whose villains are impossible to miss. The uncouth conduct of
the Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross, for instance, can be seen in no
other light: Anyone thinking that Jesus could have done a bit more to avoid his
fate is offered this lasting example of humanity’s incurable awfulness. They
know not what they do, was Jesus’ comment on his tormentors. Forgive them.
In the
United Kingdom, the
arguments rage over the rights and wrongs of the Brexit referendum result. I
begin to think this is what it must be like to be the child of divorcing
parents. Before, there was one truth, one story, one reality; now there are
two. Each side accuses the other, and amid the raised voices, the unappeasable
points of view, the vitriol and distress, the obfuscation and exaggeration and
blame, the only thing that is demonstrably clear is that one side is ruder than
the other. It seems to me that even if you didn’t know what they were arguing
about, you would have to come to that conclusion.
In the
aftermath of their victory, the winners are markedly unmagnanimous. They brand
those who voted the other way as a liberal elite, patronizing, self-interested,
out of touch with real life. The liberal elite are characterized as bad losers,
as though the vote were a football match. When they protest against or complain
about the result and its consequences, they are immediately belittled and
shouted down. In the weeks before the vote, the eventual victors’ own handling
of language resembled a small child’s handling of an explosive device: They
appeared to have no idea of its dangers or power. They used phrases like “We
want our country back” and “Take back control” that were open to any and every
interpretation. Now they complain that they have been misrepresented as racist,
xenophobic, ignorant. They are keen to end the argument, to quit the field of
language where only the headachy prospect of detailed analysis remains, to take
their dubious verbal victory and run for the hills. They have a blunt phrase
they use in the hope of its being the last word, and it is characteristically
rude: “You lost. Get over it.”
The
liberal elite, meanwhile, have evolved a theory: It is their belief that many
of the people who voted to leave the European Union now regret their decision.
There is no more tenuous comfort than that which rests on the possibility of
another’s remorse. In psychoanalysis, events are reconstructed in the knowledge
of their outcome: The therapeutic properties of narrative lie in its capacity
to ascribe meaning to sufferings that at the time seemed to have no purpose.
The liberal elite are in shock; they fall upon the notion of the victors’
regret as a palliative for their mental distress, but because the referendum
result is irreversible, this narrative must adopt the form of tragedy.
Unlike
the victors, the losers are loquacious. They render the logic of their
suffering with exactitude and skill, waxing to new expressive heights. The
deluge of fine writing that follows the referendum contrasts strangely with the
reticence that preceded it. The liberal elite are defending their reality, but
too late. Some urge a show of tolerance and understanding; others talk about
the various stages of grief; others still call for courage in standing up for
the values of liberalism. These are fine performances, but it is unclear whom
they are for. I have often noticed how people begin to narrate out loud when in
the presence of mute creatures, a dog, say, or a baby: Who is the silent
witness to this verbal outpouring?
Meanwhile,
in the Essex town of Harlow, a Polish man is murdered in the street by a gang
of white youths who apparently heard him speaking his native language.
How can
we ascertain the
moral status of rudeness? Children are the members of our society most often
accused of being rude; they are also the most innocent. We teach children that
it is rude to be honest, to say, “This tastes disgusting” or “That lady is
fat.” We also teach them that it is rude to disrespect our authority. We give them
orders: We say, “Sit still” or “Go to your room.” At a certain point, I got
into the habit, when addressing my children, of asking myself whether I would
speak in the same way to an adult and discovered that in nearly every case the
answer was no. At that time, I understood rudeness to be essentially a matter
of verbal transgression: It could be defined within the morality of language,
without needing to prove itself in a concrete act. A concrete act makes
language irrelevant. Once words have been superseded by actions, the time for
talking has passed. Rudeness, then, needs to serve as a barrier to action. It
is what separates thought from deed; it is the moment when wrongdoing can be
identified, in time to stop the wrong from having to occur. Does it follow,
then, that a bigoted remark — however ugly to hear — is an important public
interface between idea and action? Is rudeness a fundamental aspect of
civilization’s immunity, a kind of antibody that is mobilized by the contagious
presence of evil?
In the
United States, Hillary Clinton calls half the supporters of Donald Trump “a
basket of deplorables.” At first the remark impressed me. I approved of Clinton
for her courage and honesty, while reflecting on her curious choice of words.
“Basket of deplorables” almost sounded like a phrase from Dr. Seuss: It would
be typical of him to put deplorables in a basket, for the moral amusement of
his young readers. A sack or a box of deplorables wouldn’t be the same thing at
all, and a swamp of deplorables is too Dante-esque; but a basket is just the
kind of zany, cheerful container that makes light of the deplorables while
still putting them in their place. It quickly became clear, however, that as a
public utterance, the phrase was malfunctioning. The basket began to speak, to
distinguish itself: Inside it were a number of offended individuals. Clinton
had made the mistake of being rude. The “basket of deplorables” wasn’t Dr.
Seuss after all. It was the snobbish language of the liberal elite, caught
committing the elemental moral crime of negating individual human value. Yet
Clinton’s adversary regularly committed this crime with impunity. Were
Clinton’s and Trump’s two different kinds of rudeness?
In
Britain, a man tweets that someone should “Jo Cox” Anna Soubry. The amorality
of the English tongue: In the run-up to the referendum, Jo Cox, a member of
Parliament, was shot and stabbed to death by a far-right nationalist; to “Jo
Cox” someone is to murder a female member of Parliament who advocates remaining
in the European Union. The man who posts the tweet is arrested. The police, it
seems, are trying to get on top of our verbal problems. It has now become
commonplace for proponents of liberal values to receive death threats. The
death threat, I suppose, is the extreme of rudeness: It is the place where word
finally has to be taken as deed, where civilization’s immunity reaches the
point of breakdown. “I could kill you,” my mother often used to say to me, and
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. It is true that I frequently fell
foul of her and others through my habit of outspokenness. The sharpness of my
phrases maddened her. I was quite capable of the basket-of-deplorables mistake,
the confusion of cleverness with insult, the belief in language as an ultimate
good, the serving of which was its own reward. No one could mind what you said
if you said it with sufficient skill, could they? Later I came to believe that
the good of language lay entirely in its relationship to truth. Language was a
system through which right and wrong — truth and untruth — could be infallibly
identified. Honesty, so long as it was absolute, was a means for individuals to
understand all good and evil.
Like a narcotic, rudeness offers a sensation of
glorious release from jailers no one else can see.
The
liberal elite, as far as I am aware, do not make death threats. Is this because
they have better manners? Do they in fact wish that their enemies were dead but
would just never say so? And if they do wish it — albeit politely, in the manner
of a white lie — is the sin somehow less cardinal for being courteous? The
anti-liberals do not seem to find their own penchant for death threats
problematic. In America, Trump even makes a veiled one against Clinton. We are
told by the newspapers that Trump invited the Clintons to his wedding, that
their daughters are good friends. Is this verbal violence, then, simply
incompetence? Is it the verbal equivalent of someone who has not learned the
piano sitting down and trying to play Rachmaninoff’s Third?
The
rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to
their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual
violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint
of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually
outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill — rudeness — they
find that they are the masters. My mother’s death threats undoubtedly arose
from her frustration with my own use of language. What I did not take into
account when I spoke to her was the difference in our social positions. She was
a housewife with little education and a rapidly retreating beauty, for whom
life was a process of discovering that no greatness had been held in store for
her. She did such things for me as cook and clean, while I was on my way to
university and liberty. Yet to my mind, she had an extraordinary power, the
power to blacken my mental outlook and ruin my prospect of life. When I spoke
to her, I thought I was addressing a tyrant in whose overthrow my only weapons
were words. But words were the very things that roused her to violence, because
at her life’s core, she had been separated from them. Her labor, her maternal
identity, her status were all outside the language economy. Instead, she
formulated a story of herself whose simplifications and lies infuriated me. I
aimed to correct her with truth — perhaps I thought that if only I could insult
her with sufficient accuracy, we would be reconciled — but she refused to be
corrected, to be chastened. In the end, she won by being prepared to sacrifice
the moral basis of language. She didn’t care what she said, or rather, she
exacted from words the licentious pleasures of misuse; in so doing, she took my
weapon and broke it before my eyes. She made fun of me for the words I used,
and I couldn’t respond by threatening her with death. I couldn’t say “I could
kill you” because it wasn’t true, and in language I had staked everything on
telling the truth.
If
inequality is the basis on which language breaks down, how is it best to speak?
In a
clothes shop in London, I sift through the rails, looking for something to
wear. The instant I came in, the assistant bounded up to me and recited what
was obviously a set of phrases scripted by the management. I dislike being
spoken to in this way, though I realize the assistant doesn’t do so out of
choice. I told her I was fine. I told her I would find her if I needed
anything. But a few minutes later, she’s back.
How’s
your day been so far? she says.
The
truth? It’s been a day of anxiety and self-criticism, of worry about children
and money, and now to top it all off, I’ve made the mistake of coming here in
the unfounded belief that it will make me look nicer, and that making myself
look nicer will help.
It’s been
fine, I say.
There’s a
pause in which perhaps she is waiting for me to ask her about her own day in
return, which I don’t.
Are you
looking for something special? she says.
Not
really, I say.
So you’re
just browsing, she says.
There is
a pause.
Did I
tell you, she says, that we have other sizes downstairs?
You did,
I say.
If you
want something in another size, she says, you just have to ask me.
I will, I
say.
I turn
back to the rails and find that if anything, my delusion has been strengthened
by this exchange, which has made me feel ugly and unlikable and in more need
than ever of transformation. I take out a dress. It is blue. I look at it on
its hanger.
Good
choice, the assistant says. I love that dress. The color’s amazing.
Immediately
I put it back on the rail. I move away a little. After a while, I begin to
forget about the assistant. I think about clothes, their strange promise, the
way their problems so resemble the problems of love. I take out another dress,
this one wine-colored and dramatic.
God, that
would look amazing, the assistant says. Is it the right size?
According
to the label, it is.
Yes, I
say.
Shall I
put it in the fitting room for you? she says. It’s just easier, isn’t it? Then
you’ve got your hands free while you keep browsing.
For the
first time, I look at her. She has a broad face and a wide mouth with which she
smiles continually, desperately. I wonder whether the width of her smile was a
factor in her being given this job. She is older than I expected. Her face is
lined, and despite her efforts, the mouth betrays some knowledge of sorrow.
Thank you
very much, I say.
I give
her the dress, and she goes away. I find that I no longer want to be in the
shop. I don’t want to try on the dress. I don’t want to take my clothes off or
look at myself in a mirror. I consider quietly leaving while the assistant is
gone, but the fact that I have caused the dress to be put in the fitting room
is too significant. Perhaps it will be transformative after all. On my way
there, I meet the assistant, who is on her way out. She widens her eyes and
raises her hands in mock dismay.
I wasn’t
expecting you to be so quick! she exclaims. Didn’t you find anything else you
liked?
I’m in a
bit of a hurry, I say.
If inequality is the basis on which language breaks
down, how is it best to speak?
God, I
know exactly what you mean, she says. We’re all in such a hurry. There just
isn’t time to stop, is there?
The
fitting rooms are empty: There aren’t any other customers. The assistant hovers
behind me while I go into the cubicle where she has hung the dress. I wonder
whether she will actually follow me in. I pull the curtain behind me and feel a
sense of relief. My reflection in the mirror is glaring and strange. I have stood
in such boxlike spaces before, alone with myself, and these moments seem
connected to one another in a way I can’t quite specify. It is as though life
is a board game, and here is the starting point to which I keep finding myself
unexpectedly returned. I take off my clothes. This suddenly seems like an
extraordinary thing to do in an unfamiliar room in a street in central London.
Through the gap in the curtain I can see into a dingy back room whose door has
been left open. There are pipes running up the walls, a small fridge, a kettle,
a box of tea bags. Someone has hung a coat on a hook. I realize that the
theater of this shop is about to break down, and that the assistant’s manner —
her bad acting, her inability to disguise herself in her role — is partly to
blame.
How is
everything? she says.
I am
standing there in my underwear, and her voice is so loud and close that I
nearly jump out of my skin.
How’s it
going in there? How are you getting on?
I realize
that she must be speaking to me.
I’m fine,
I say.
How’s the
fit? she says. Do you need any other sizes?
I can
hear the rustle of her clothes and the scraping sound of her nylon tights. She
is standing right outside the curtain.
No, I
say. Really, I’m fine.
Why don’t
you come out? she says. I can give you a second opinion.
Suddenly
I am angry. I forget to feel sorry for her; I forget that she did not choose to
say these things; I forget that she is perhaps in the wrong job. I feel
trapped, humiliated, misunderstood. I feel that people always have a choice
where language is concerned, that the moral and relational basis of our
existence depends on that principle. I wish to tell her that there are those
who have sacrificed themselves to defend it. If we stop speaking to one another
as individuals, I want to say to her, if we allow language to become a tool of
coercion, then we are lost.
No, I
say. Actually, I don’t want to come out.
There is
a silence outside the curtain. Then I hear the rustling of her clothes as she
starts to move away.
All right
then, she says, in a voice that for the first time I can identify as hers. It
is a flat voice, disaffected, a voice that expresses no surprise when things
turn out badly.
I put my
clothes back on and take the dress on its hanger and leave the cubicle. The
assistant is standing with her back to me on the empty shop floor, her arms
folded across her chest, looking out the window. She does not ask me how I got
on or whether I liked the dress and intend to buy it. She does not offer to
take the dress from me and hang it back on its rail. She is offended, and she
is very deliberately showing it. We are, then, equal at least in our lack of
self-control. I hang up the dress myself.
Credit
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro
It wasn’t
my day, I say to her, by way of an apology.
She gives
a small start and utters a sound. She is trying to say something: She is
searching, I see, for one of her scripted phrases in the effort to reassume her
persona. Falteringly, she half-smiles, but her mouth is turned down at the corners
like a clown’s. I imagine her going home this evening, unhappy.
When I
tell the story afterward, making myself both its villain and its butt, it goes
like this: I, currently dismayed by the sudden ascent of rudeness in our world
and wondering what it means, am betrayed into rudeness myself by a personal
sensitivity to language that causes me to do the very thing I despise, which is
fail to recognize another human’s individuality. But the person I tell it to
doesn’t hear it that way at all. He hears it as a story about how annoying shop
assistants are.
I hate it
when they do that, he says. It was good you made an issue of it. Maybe she’ll
give feedback to the management, and they’ll stop making people say all that
stuff.
What
Jesus did was
sacrifice himself, use his body to translate word to deed, to make evil
visible. While being crucified, he remained for the most part polite. He gave
others much to regret. Their regret sustained 2,000 years of Christianity. Is
regret, then, the most powerful emotion after all?
My mother
and I don’t speak to each other anymore, but I’ve been thinking about her
lately. I’ve been thinking about facts, about how they get stronger and
clearer, while points of view fade or change. The loss of the parent-child
relationship is a fact. It is also a failure. It is regrettable. The last time
my parents spoke to me, my father said something very rude. He said I was full
of shit. He put the phone down straight away after he said it, and I have not
heard from him again. For a long time afterward, I was profoundly disturbed by
his words: For my father to speak to me of shit, and claim that I was full of
it, seemed to remove my basis for existing. Yet he was half of me: It was, I
realized, for that reason that he felt he could speak to me the way he did. I
was his child; he forgot that I was as real as he. It could be said that
one-half of our country has told the other it is full of shit, deliberately
choosing those words because it knows that their object finds rudeness — the
desecration of language — especially upsetting.
In
Sophocles’ play “Philoctetes,” the man who suffers most is also the man with
the most powerful weapon, an infallible bow that could be said to represent the
concept of accuracy. The hardhearted Odysseus abandoned the wounded Philoctetes
on an island, only to discover 10 years later that the Trojan War could not be
won without Philoctetes’ bow. He returns to the island determined to get the
bow by any means. For his part, Philoctetes has spent 10 years in almost unendurable
pain: It is decreed that he cannot be healed other than by the physician
Asclepius at Troy, yet he would rather die than help Odysseus by returning with
him. Time has done nothing to break down the impasse: Philoctetes still can’t
forgive Odysseus; Odysseus still can’t grasp the moral sensitivity of
Philoctetes. It is for the third actor, Neoptolemus, a boy of pure heart, to
resolve the standoff and bring an end to war and pain. Odysseus urges
Neoptolemus to befriend Philoctetes in order to steal the bow, claiming it is
for the greater good. Philoctetes, meanwhile, tells Neoptolemus the story of
his dreadful sufferings and elicits his empathy and pity. In his dilemma,
Neoptolemus realizes two things: that wrong is never justified by being carried
out under orders, and that the bow is meaningless without Philoctetes himself.
The moral power of individuality and the poetic power of suffering are the two
indispensable components of truth. For his part, Neoptolemus might be said to
represent the concept of good manners. In this drama, the expressive man and
the rude man need each other, but without the man of manners, they will never
be reconciled.
“Make her
stop!” my
daughters used to beg me when they were younger and one was doing something the
other didn’t like. In other words: Restore to me the primacy of my version; rid
me of this challenge to the experience of being me. One might say that what
they wanted was justice, impartiality — but impartiality, I usually discovered,
was not easy to attain. There were always two sides to their stories, and I
lacked the ability to turn them into one. I have prided myself on my
willingness to object to injustices, to speak my mind when I thought I saw
wrong being done. But perhaps all I was ever doing was trying to make it stop,
trying to return the world to something I could bear to live in, without
necessarily understanding it first.
It
strikes me that good manners would be the thing to aim for in the current
situation. I have made a resolution, which is to be more polite. I don’t know
what good it will do: This might be a dangerous time for politeness. It might
involve sacrifices. It might involve turning the other cheek. A friend of mine
says this is the beginning of the end of the global order: He says that in a
couple of decades’ time, we’ll be eating rats and tulip bulbs, as people have
done before in times of social collapse. I consider the role that good manners
might play in the sphere of rat-eating, and it seems to me an important one. As
one who has never been tested, who has never endured famine or war or extremism
or even discrimination, and who therefore perhaps does not know whether she is
true or false, brave or a coward, selfless or self-serving, righteous or
misled, it would be good to have something to navigate by.
Rachel
Cusk is the author of several novels, including “Outline,” which was one of the
The Times’s 10 Best Books of 2015, and most recently “Transit.” She last wrote
for the magazine about making house.
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Source: nytimes
