Essays
by Wallace Shawn
Haymarket Books, 186 pp. ISBN 978-1608460021

When one hasn’t noticed that it’s one’s own boot that’s standing on the suffering person’s neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them. — Wallace Shawn

The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal. — T. W.  Adorno

Wallace Shawn’s Essays (also reviewed here, here, and here) is a collection of thirteen essays and two interviews. Though written over the course of 25 years on such diverse topics as personal morality, the politics of 9-11, the war in Iraq, theater, poetry and art, the book is unified in its concerns. Divided into two sections — “Reality” and “Dream-World” — Shawn’s Essays returns again and again to a question found in his plays, as well as in the film My Dinner With Andre (1981), written by Shawn in collaboration with Andre Gregory and directed by Louis Malle. The question, roughly stated, is a simple one and an old one: How can we live a good and moral life?

Updated somewhat for the readers of Generation Bubble the question becomes, how is it possible to live a good and moral life when that life is predicated on barbarity and death? The question has no satisfactory answer.  We want to be good and we want to be happy, but perhaps we cannot be both.

Essays stands as a sort of record of Shawn’s attempts to live such a life in spite of his own human failings. And to that extent, the book offers a sort of solution to the problem — though he does not present it as that. Rather, he represents his struggle to live through the conflict between reality and dreams that figures as the book’s structural conceit. We can enter reality through our dreams and enter dreams through reality. The disengagement with reality, the escape that is one of the pleasures of the dream life, can never be pursued for itself alone. Nor can we live completely in reality without complete despair. Reality and engagement must be tempered by dreams and disengagement. In this dialectical repetition, from reason to dreams and back, without ever staying with one for too long, Shawn finds a sort of accidental method to retain and maintain his own humanity.

Shawn’s book is not a self-help manual or a how-to guide, and he offers no precepts. Instead, he reveals his own struggle to make a life and the uneasy peace that he may or may not have found. The result is a demonstration that a life grounded in reality and guided by a continuous questioning of morality, reason and art can offer a true hope (a hope that is not reduced to a slogan beneath the smiling face of one of our “leaders”) that life and humanity are still possible. But Shawn is resolute that art, morality, or reason alone cannot offer this hope.

In “Morality” he demonstrates, as he did in his play Aunt Dan and Lemon, that reason can and often does lead us violently and horribly astray. We like freedom and prosperity, we see that it is offered by free markets and politicians espousing such ideals, and so we vote for Bush, and the result is not only economic disaster, but death and neverending war. Or, we dislike Bush. We think his economic policies are poorly conceived and his adventures in Mesopotamia and Central asia are unlikely to achieve succes. We hear a politician who also dislikes these adventures, so we vote for him, but the economy only worsens and the murder continues. We calmly and happily accept one seemingly sane and reasonable proposition, and then another, and another, and find that the result, as in Adorno’s epigram, is murder and enslavement.

Likewise, morality, by itself, is no help. In an interview with Noam Chomsky, Shawn suggests that perhaps adherence to moral codes provides a solution. Chomsky’s reply is a resounding “No.” For morality, grounded either in rationality or the chauvinism of religion, is, as we have seen, no less likely to end in genocide and historical disaster. And what, in the face of that, can art accomplish? If we flee into art and dreams because reality is unbearable and unlivable this does nothing to change reality. Even worse, the comforts and security provided by art are questionable because complete escape is never quite possible. The result is that we are left, like Andre Gregory’s character in the film, weeping openly in the street because, to paraphrase, we are able to live only in our art, and never in our lives.  Art, which seems to be our salvation, can just as easily lead to voluptuousness and escapism that leads in turn to more casual inhumanity that inflicts violence upon reality.

At times Shawn reproaches himself with “memories” of his early, privileged life. Immersed in art and music as he was, he still failed to see others as fully human:

Perhaps it was my father, who taught me to love art, who also in some way nourished these perverse “memories.” I remember once, when I was ten or so, I was riding with him in a taxi and I drew his attention to an overweight, bizarre, rather miserable-looking boy whom we were passing in the street. I found the boy funny and was merrily laughing away at him when I turned around and was shocked to discover that my poor father had burst into tears. The sight of the boy hadn’t struck him as funny, apparently, and my response to the boy had also, apparently, not made him happy.

From all this a sort of answer, as much as one is possible, emerges. The trick is to reject art, morality, and reason as solutions in themselves, in order to embrace them as mutually complimentary techniques of living that must exist in a constant and questioning tension if life is to go on.

What dreams may come: Shawn's oneiric–material dialectic.

I am impressed by Shawn’s simple and familiar morality evident throughout the “Reality” section, and considered explicitly in “The Quest for Superiority,” “Morality,” and “Patriotism.” It is not groundbreaking. It is not fashionable. It is not exciting. That is its charm. This morality is grounded in cutting away all that obscures reality to find the objective condition of one’s own humanity and the effects our humanity has on others who share it in common. The objective fact that Wallace Shawn is only one person, just as I or you are one person, among billions refutes any claim to superiority or privilege that he might make. The humility provided by this objective view requires Mr. Shawn to confront the fact that his life, like mine and perhaps yours, requires the subjection and exploitation of millions of impoverished and oppressed others. That is, for the status quo that constitutes his comfortable and humane life to continue, others must live horribly uncomfortable and inhumane lives.

The knowledge of this fundamental and inescapable immorality — an immorality that he did not choose any more than you or I chose it — requires a moral choice. He must either retain his morality and his fundamental humanity, or follow many of the privileged people he grew up with in “throwing away their moral chains and learning to enjoy their true situation”:

Yes, they are admitting loudly and bravely, We live in beautiful homes, we’re surrounded by beautiful gardens, our children are playing with wonderful toys, and our kitchen shelves are filled with wonderful food. And if there are people out there who are envious of us and who might even be tempted to break into our homes and take what we have, well then, part of our good fortune is that we can afford to pay guards to protect us. And if those who protect us need to hit people in the face with the butts of their rifles, or if they need perhaps even to turn around and shoot, they have our permission, and we only hope they’ll do what they do with diligence and skill.

On a larger scale, the comfort and security that we have come to expect as our due requires not guards of the manor, but guardians of the empire.  For each of us to continue to live as we do, soldiers will have to kill and die in far-flung outposts. This is the unavoidable truth hidden among the bumperstickers screaming, “Support the Troops”: Silently, and perhaps unwillingly, we all support the troops, and the death they sow. Our lives, as they are now lived, require it. To renounce the status quo means to embrace the humanity of others, and hopefully, discover our own, but it may come at the price of our happiness or our comfort. Those people who have made the choice to accept reality at the expense of morality are, according to Shawn, able to be comfortable and happy at the price, we who are only human think, of their own humanity. I do not know if this is true, and I do not know if happiness or comfort, offered at increasingly lower discounts by advertisers and politicians alike, is sufficient for a life.

In his writing, Shawn refuses to adopt the weighty tones of leaders or the shouting of entertainers and pundits. To do so would be an act of superiority and privilege, and Shawn’s voice is the negation of privilege and superiority. He writes with humility, calm and reflection. He cares and he wants to understand, just as he wants you to understand. Abstraction and reification, political or philosophical, can only be challenged in human and subjective terms. Likewise, inhumanity and barbarity can only be met with humanity and civility. So his voice must be soft and calm, his terms concrete. And perhaps that is the only route left. Amid the din of competing and ever more thoughtless shouts the alarm can only be raised by thinking and living carefully and speaking softly.

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