SALON

Books

Wednesday, May 16, 2001 8:50 PM UTC

Loudmouths and legends

The wild manifestos of modernism reveal the splendors and stupidities of the last moment when art mattered enough to hate.

By

Between the years 1909 and 1924, the following demands and assertions were made:

– That machinery and motors in cities be tuned like musical instruments, transforming every factory into “an intoxicating orchestra of noises”

– That the art of “tactilism,” which is particularly suited to “young poets, pianists, and stenographers,” will enable anyone to recover the sensations of their past life “with freshness and complete surprise”

– That the nude be totally suppressed in painting for 10 years

– That flexible rubber tubes be connected to the udders of cows and connected to underground conduits leading to cities because “it is contrary to general human morale for different people to drink milk from the same pail”

– That a “new race of men,” inspired by the revolutionary language of the cinema, will rise up and crush palaces and prisons

– That women must “become sublimely unjust once more, like all the forces of nature”

– That “a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes … is more beautiful than the ‘Victory of Samothrace’”

– That the authors, by the act of painting their faces, “will bear man’s multiple soul to the upper reaches of reality”

– That the right angle alone expresses the “primordial relation” of the universe, the “opposition of two extremes”

– That the right angle, “which we consider passionless,” be rejected

– That all “cosmic faculties” should be opposed to “this gonorrhea of a putrid sun coming out of the faculties of philosophic thought”

– That “men or women who are intelligent” can become masters of their “facial destiny” through “Auto-Facial-Construction”

– That “Francis Picabia is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!”

– That “the Past and Future are the prostitutes Nature has provided”

– That “if we were sheep to the point of forming a collective school, this would surely be ‘Showoffism’”

– That “a great poet or painter must take over the directorship of all the great women’s fashion houses” to create “illusionistic, sarcastic, sonorous, loud, deadly and explosive attire”

These utterances (click here for sources) are not the ravings of lunatics, or jokes dreamed up by overeducated buffoons. They are founding statements by the legendary figures who helped create modernism. It’s hard to imagine just how shocking they must have been: The volcano-like eruption of modernism seems almost as distant, now that the Revolution has become a TV show, as the Renaissance. Its doctrines are exhausted, its once nerve-wracking fragments ensconced in museums, and the whole thing made sleepily irrelevant by the rise of mass media. But it was the Biggest Bang in the last 500 years of our cultural history, and if you lean over its crater you can still hear and feel it, the molten craziness and hurtling euphoria of that uncanny moment when for the last time High Art still mattered enough to hate.

“Manifesto: A Century of Isms,” edited by Mary Ann Caws, gathers together the glorious, the histrionic and the just plain nutty pronouncements made by various artists and loudmouths at the outbreak of modernism. It is at once a fascinating thread running into that visionary labyrinth, an inspiring reminder of one of the great, weird moments in human history, and a sobering monument to a future that never arrived.

Caws, who teaches at the graduate school of the City University of New York and who is an expert on surrealism, has gathered every aesthetic “ism” in the 20th century, from the familiar to the delightfully obscure. The collection opens with James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s “The Ten O’Clock” (1885), a celebrated art-for-art’s-sake lecture that started at its unorthodox hour to give his fashionable London audience a chance to dine first, and concludes with a 1984 meditation by the poet Edmond Jabes on the idea of The Book. In between, it covers such well-known movements and ideas as cubism, futurism, expressionism, the scuola metafisica, dada, vorticism, suprematism and surrealism, as well as lesser-known ones like ultraism, rayonism, nowism, thingism, hallucinism and verticalism, along with a number of catch-all categories like “Thresholds,” “Individualism and Personism,” “Miscellaneous Manifestos” and “Writing and the Book.” The heart of the book, what Caws calls the Manifesto Moment, covers that “ten-year period of glorious madness” stretching from 1909 (when F.T. Marinetti issued his first Futurist Manifesto) to 1919, with much attention also paid to the Surrealist movement in its heyday, the 1920s and ’30s.

In her lively introduction, Caws nails the dead-serious goofiness of the Manifesto Moment:

At its most endearing, a manifesto has a madness about it. It is peculiar and angry, quirky, or downright crazed. Always opposed to something, particular or general, it has not only to be striking but to stand up straight … The manifest proclamation itself marks a moment, whose trace it leaves as a post-event commemoration. Often the event is exactly its own announcement and nothing more, in this Modernist/Postmodernist genre. What it announces is itself. At its height, it is the deictic genre par excellence. LOOK! It says. NOW! HERE! The manifesto is by nature a loud genre, unlike the essay … The manifesto makes an art of excess. This is how it differs from the standard and sometimes self-congratulatory ars poetica, rational and measured. The manifesto is an act of démesure, going past what is thought of as proper, sane, and literary. Its outreach demands an extravagant self-assurance. At its peak of performance, its form creates its meaning.

What’s unique about these manifestos, as the admittedly extreme list of assertions above makes clear, is their inextricable blend of wisdom and silliness. Like a loudmouth in love, they’re foolish — but enviably foolish. Much of their silliness, as Caws indicates, derives from their overblown tone, which even ironic self-awareness somehow cannot curb; but their more profound and intriguing ridiculousness results from the imbalance between their grandiose mission and the actual artistic means intended to achieve it.

Again and again, the authors of these manifestos open with a mighty trumpet blast, issuing the most lofty and passionate denunciations of the imbecilic, stale, decadent, safe, bourgeois, vile, outmoded, mechanical, academic, etc. tradition they are rejecting. But when it comes time for them to reveal their epochal new vision, the mighty doctrine that will overthrow the past, turn art on its head and lead mankind into a dazzling new era of truth and beauty, it turns out to be, well, “spatial forms arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects” (Rayonists Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharov). Or a theater in which the actors read aloud from their parts (the Russian symbolist Fyodor Sologub). Or a placard proclaiming “No Girdle!” (The nunist Pierre Albert-Birot, who also incorrectly asserted that nunism is “an ‘ism’ to outlast the others.”) Without discounting the originality of these ideas — rayonist paintings are among the first abstract works ever executed, Sologub’s theater anticipates Brecht, and Birot would have burned Andy Warhol in a game of one-on-one — after the mighty windup, there’s something banana peel-like about these aesthetic punchlines.

And yet, these manifestos inspire more than laughter. “The attraction of those initial or founding manifestos of violence was and is their energy and their potential for energizing,” Caws notes, and their energy, their intensity, their passionate belief that art matters, that nothing is as important as finding a new, deeper, more modern way to paint or write or compose, is in the end what you take away from them.

You also take away a few pints of the finest avant-garde bile. The authors of these manifestos, like all self-consciously “advanced” thinkers — and the Manifesto Moment was highly self-conscious — engage in more backbiting than a Bakuninist cell. The first “ism” of them all, futurism, seems to wear the biggest “Kick Me” sign — no doubt because its founder, F.T. Marinetti, had more than a touch of the P.T. Barnum about him, and also because his chest-beating program, with its worship of fast cars and tough guys, was so tempting a target. So here are the Russian constructivist brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner whispering nasty nothings into futurism’s chrome ear: “One had to examine Futurism beneath its appearance to realize that one faced a very ordinary chatterer, a very agile and prevaricating guy, clad in the tatters of worn-out words like ‘patriotism,’ ‘militarism,’ contempt for the female,’ and all the rest of such provincial tags.” Or the English vorticist R. Aldington — whose own movement’s doctrines were uncomfortably close to futurism, as is so often the case in these unpleasant affairs — putting in his 2 cents’ worth: “The artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an ‘advanced,’ perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination).” Or, returning again to Russia (Italo-Russo relations being apparently just as strained in 1913 as they are on “The Sopranos”), here are the Futurists Victor Khlebnikov and Alexey Kruchenykh piling on: “The Italians caught a whiff of these Russian ideas and began to copy them from us like schoolboys, making imitation art. They had absolutely no sense of verbal matters before 1912 (when their big collection came out), and none after … These Italians have turned out to be noisy self-promoters, but inarticulate pipsqueaks as artists.”

There’s also a bit of unseemly scrambling to lay claim to the title of first dadaist, first cubo-futurist, etc. This isn’t surprising: Just as the Old West was already a myth when Buffalo Bill took his Wild West show on the road, so the age of “isms” was legendary when it was still going on, and being first in line gave one the status of a minor art-deity. In light of this I-was-here-first-ism, one of the more charming manifestos is by the Brazilian Mario de Andrade, who in his “Very Interesting Preface” writes “If we are geniuses: we will point the road to follow; if we are jackasses: shipwrecks to avoid” and concludes, “So the poetic school of ‘Hallucinism’ is finished. In the next book I will found another school.”

Such modest self-awareness is rare in these pages, and it’s probably just as well: Like quarterbacks and divas, avant-garde artists pretty much have to be cocky. Of all the manifestos here, practically the only one that doesn’t assert its utter originality is Jorge Luis Borges’ Ultraist Manifesto of 1921, which states “The ultraists have always existed: they are those who, prescient for their times, have brought to the world new aspects of vision and expression.” In this fire-breathing collection, this measured statement feels like Walter Mitty mumbling to himself at a party of gangsta rappers. (It may not be a coincidence, however, that Borges’ artistic achievement is considerably greater than that of many of his noisier co-manifestoists.)

“Manifesto” includes pieces by writers as disparate as Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dali, John Cage, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee (who demonstrates a higher artistic IQ than just about anybody else here), Willem de Kooning, Mina Loy (a fascinating American modernist whose aphorisms are hard-edged and memorable), Frank O’Hara and Blaise Cendrars (whose essay on film is stunning). The greatest pleasure in reading “Manifesto” is finding the unexpected prize — and there are many, some of them Cracker Jack toys, some diamonds. Take Francis Picabia’s “Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto” (1920), a masterpiece of free-associative invective:

[You are] Finally standing before DADA, which represents life and accuses you of loving everything out of snobbism from the moment that it becomes expensive.
Are you completely settled? So much the better, that way you are going to listen to me with greater attention.
What are you doing here, parked like serious oysters — for you are serious, right?
Serious, serious, serious to death.
Death is a serious thing, huh?
One dies as a hero, or as an idiot, which is the same thing. The only word which is not ephemeral is the word death. You love death for others.
To death, death, death.
Only money which doesn’t die, it just leaves on trips.

Other pieces dazzle with their mad showmanship. “The Trumpet of the Martians,” by the Russian futurist Victor Khlebnikov and others, resembles something Heidegger might have written if he had dropped acid while watching “The War of the Worlds” after reading Ayn Rand:

“People of Earth, hear this! The human brain has been hopping around on three legs (the three axes of location!) We intend to refurrow the human brain and to give this puppy dog a fourth leg — namely, the axis of TIME.
Poor lame puppy! Your obscene barking will no longer grate on our ears! [...]
Are we not gods? And are we not unprecedented in this: our steadfast betrayal of our own past, just as it barely reaches the age of victory, and our steadfast rage, raised above the planet like a hammer whose time has come? Planet Earth begins to shake already at the heavy tread of our feet!
Boom, you black sails of time!

And then there are statements that are simply, utterly weird. Here is the futurist Carlo Carra (before he met de Chirico and went metaphysical) waxing synaesthetic with psychotic precision on the colors that belong to various sounds and smells: “In railway stations and garages, and throughout the mechanical or sporting world, noises and smells are predominantly red; in restaurants and cafes they are silver, yellow and violet. While the sounds of animals are yellow and blue, those of a woman are green, blue and violet.” Paging Oliver Sacks!

As Caws notes, the categories and labels attached to modernism are notoriously imprecise, and there’s inevitably a fair amount of overlap and blurriness: “Expressionism” and “futurism,” for example, include so many national variations as to be virtually meaningless terms. But Caws also introduces some confusion by including some “isms,” like Primitivism and Individualism, that are not movements at all, but simply artistic tendencies or intellectual themes. She even makes up a category she calls “Thingism.”

This editorial approach muddies the waters, but it does allow her to include essays that otherwise wouldn’t have made the cut. A dubious, overly broad category titled “Nativism” gives Caws the opportunity to include superb essays by Marsden Hartley and Eudora Welty (although Caws also exhumes D.H. Lawrence’s over-anthologized “The Spirit of Place.”) The made-up “Thingism” makes room for a piece wonderfully titled “The Philosophy of Furniture” by that noted avant-garde theorist, Edgar Allan Poe. (Alas, the title is more interesting than Poe’s essay.) In another place, Caws shoehorns Yeats into her chapter on symbolism. This is a stretch at best — Yeats was beyond category — but since it allows Caws to include a stunning excerpt from “Anima Hominis,” who cares?

The fact that Caws essentially opens the field to all comers by including loose and baggy categories like “Individualism” and “Nativism,” and essays that have little to do with art or aesthetics, invites the reader to second-guess her choices. Caws says that on principle she ruled out secondary, merely critical selections: the manifestos and statements included had to be “written by a practitioner of the particular art movement.” But this artists-only rule is not absolutely enforced. And since the French feminists Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement are allowed in, why not a critic of much greater stature, Walter Benjamin, whose “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was a far more influential 20th century text than their “Sorties”? Or T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”? Or Roland Barthes’ “Writing Degree Zero”? Or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “For a New Novel”? Or even Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”? (Presumably, Cixous and Clement got in because the moralistic, feminist strain in their essay makes it more “manifesto-like” than the alternatives cited, which are mere lit-crit.) Other possible candidates include Evgeni Zamyatin’s 1924 manifesto “On literature, revolution and entropy,” Tom Wolfe’s recent call for realism, one of Henry Miller’s wild solos on literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s post-structuralist rantings, the cut-up theories of William S. Burroughs, a doctored Situationist comic strip, and one of the Fluxus or Happenings manifestos.

One could also question the high-cultural bias of Caws’ selections. If, as Robert Hughes and many others have argued, mass media has replaced the fine arts as our culture’s dominant force, one could make a case, as Greil Marcus implicitly did in “Lipstick Traces,” that the true manifestos of our time are not documents by highbrow poets with academic sinecures but three-minute songs by angry, drug-addled punks. The Sex Pistols undoubtably changed the world more than the Language poets — why isn’t “God Save the Queen” in here?

A deeper problem — though one that is to a large degree beyond Caws’ control — is the fact that, like modernism itself, “Manifestos” gets less interesting as it goes along. The last quarter or so of the book, after the chapter on surrealism, is far weaker than the earlier part. With a few minor exceptions like lettrism, after surrealism modernism simply didn’t offer any more significant formal innovations (or, more to the point, chest-pounding bombast), and so the book simply runs slowly out of steam. The categories become ever more watery and eclectic: Does Whitman’s “Song of Myself” really need to be in here? Does a category called “Individualism” mean anything? One chapter, “Thresholds,” seems a perfunctory sop to bien-pensant academic trends.

The last cohesive modernist movement featured in the book is language poetry, a heavily theorized, frequently unreadable postmodern school celebrated in academia. In her introduction, Caws notes that “If the Postmodernist manifesto shrugs off [Modernist] nostalgia, it has often a kind of dryness that undoes its energy”: her words certainly apply, not just to the language poets but to many of book’s more contemporary manifestos.

Why is this? What’s at issue is not just the status of postmodernism, but that of modernism itself. Is postmodernism a vital part of the great modernist tradition of rebellion and formal innovation, and thus worthy of inclusion in a book that confers upon it, by association, the heroic mantle of its predecessors? Is it merely a cul-de-sac, the playing-out of a dead end within modernism? Or was modernism a glorious but one-time-only explosion that has now exhausted itself, rendering futile all attempts to continue working in the same radically exploratory vein?

To answer these questions, we need to look more closely at the crisis that modernism responded to and the answers it gave. Modernism came into being at the precise moment when the relationship of art to life became problematic: It was an attempt to answer questions that had never before been posed with such force: What is art? Does it matter? How can it express a reality that is itself no longer known? The early modernists struggled mightily (and often, as we’ve seen, kookily) with these questions — and were sometimes tortured by both the questions themselves and the answers they came up with.

Caws acutely notes that “some Modernist manifestos give off an odd aura of looking back, to some moment they missed.” This sense of loss is, at bottom, spiritual — it is the sense that God is dead and something that used to be called “art” has to take his place, and no one knows how that’s supposed to happen. Much of the energy and tension of modernism derives from its attempt to replace God — but that attempt is tortured by the artists’ consciousness of its impossibility. (Much modernist bravado is a mask.) This impulse lies behind the disquieting need of so many of these movements to force various artistic forms to do what they by definition cannot do — to make painting talk, music see, words sing. What can these doomed leaps into a formal void be if not attempts to force the world to become transfigured, holy, other?

Now that modernist works are safely enshrined in museums, they seem to exude the repose and calm of Olympian masterpieces. What many of them really are, in fact, is magnificent records of a struggle, not a victory — attempts to shore up fragments against ruin, traces of prayers that didn’t work, scaffolding built for an assault on heaven that collapsed. Yet even a spiritual journey that has not reached its goal can be an artistic success. By engaging with ultimate questions, the modernists kept the faith — even if it was the faith of nonbelievers.

The founding struggle between “art” and “life” divides modernists into two camps. One group denigrates life — or nature, or the “self” — and exalts art. The vorticist R. Aldington writes, “The Vorticist does not suck up to life. He lets Life know its place in a Vorticist Universe!” Mondrian, with his metaphysical fetish of the right angle (Caws notes that while lunching with Jean Arp, the nature-hating Dutchman “requested a seat at the window so as not to have to look at the landscape”!) writes disparagingly that “In the natural, however, unity is manifested only in a veiled way.” And Malevich writes, “the only obligation to nature which mankind has taken upon itself [is] to create art.” The other group rejects art, or at least all previous art, in favor of the higher truth of life or nature. Thus Marsden Hartley: “We are most original when we are most like life. Life is the natural thing.” Or the constructivists Gabo and Pevsner, who denounce beauty and write, “All is a fiction … Only life and its laws are authentic.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter what side of this debate an artist is on; what matters is simply that he or she engages with it. Many answers emerged from that struggle: the mysticism of the Russian symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov and Malevich’s ascetic formal purity; the dreamlike rebuses of Magritte and the scientistic gravity of the constructivists Gabo and Pevsner; the audacious innovations of Picasso and Braque and the frightening masks of Artaud. Yet all these manifestations share a common element: an overarching belief that art matters, that it has something vital to say. That belief, carved out of a struggle with silence and expressed in a strenuous engagement with form, was the driving force behind the great artistic achievement of modernism.

We gaze upon that belief with disbelief, that enchantment with disenchantment. Inevitably, reading these fiery documents, which were written not so long ago, leads to nostalgia, to an acute sense of cultural loss — the same sense, ironically, the moderns themselves felt when looking at primitive art. Where did that belief in art come from? What happened to it? And how can we get it back?

The short answer to the last question is: We can’t, at least not in the same form. Modernism was the product of a uniquely cataclysmic change in society. In his study of modern art, “The Shock of the New,” Robert Hughes quotes the French writer Charles Peguy, who said in 1913 “the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last 30 years.” This accelerated change in all areas of society — Einstein’s rewriting of the laws of nature (which a recent book argues played a significant role in Picasso’s development of cubism), the invention of the car, the plane, the phonograph, the triumph of industrialization, the city, bureaucracies and rationalized capitalism — was unprecedented, and it will never happen again.

Modernism, which arose in reaction to those inconceivably rapid changes, was also unprecedented — Hughes calls it “one of the supreme cultural experiments in the history of the world” — and it, too, will never happen again. Perhaps the healthiest attitude we can have regarding modernism is to appreciate it as something rare, beautiful and very, very strange that came and passed — a comet that streaked across our sky for an uncanny moment, then disappeared forever.

But to do that would not, I think, mean giving up our connection with what is enduring about modernism — its drive to find forms that mirror our new sense of the old chaos, what Frank Kermode has called our “rage for order.” In this regard, Paul de Man is right: every age is modernist. Or, as Borges said, “The Ultraists have always existed.” But it does mean pruning out the dead part of modernism, the part we can’t use — and which is precisely the part that still holds us in a rigor mortis-like grip.

“Has Modernism Failed?” the critic Suzi Gablik asked. Yes and no. There is a strain within modernism — its most absolute, nihilistic and Manichaean strain, its quintessential one — that denies the value of art itself. It is found playfully in dada, elegantly in Duchamp, scarily in those pure varieties of futurism that exalted war because it made life into a work of art. And this part of modernism — which was really postmodernism avant la lettre — did fail. It had to, because it had nowhere to go. It led to the extreme, self-canceling gestures with which we are all too familiar: dice-toss art, silent art, readymade art — all those cute, nihilistic table-trimmings for what Kermode called a “farcical apocalypse.”

Recognizing this is a start in breaking modernism’s dead grip on us. And it should open our eyes to its corollary: the heart-quickening idea that there is no progress in art.

So reading these manifestos inspires gloom, but it also instills hope. The passion of the documents gathered here is an unpleasant reminder that our own passion about art — at least in our public pronouncements — does not match theirs. But these credos also remind us that great art can be created in any historical situation, even one as glibly ironic and commodified as ours. All that is required is the belief in form, the inner tension required to investigate and mirror the world.

But can we still generate that belief, that tension, today? It’s all well and good to say that there is no progress in art, but there does seem to be decline — and history seems to work against the possibility of rejuvenation. Modernism drew its tension from its questioning of art itself, but at a time when that questioning still could be folded back into art’s great, unbroken tradition: modernist masterpieces, whether Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or de Chirico’s “The Disquieting Muses,” derive their power from the collision of innovation and tradition, a collision in which destructiveness and creation are inextricably tangled. Once questioning becomes the tradition, which is the situation we now find ourselves in, all that is solid melts into air; the walls artists need to push against vanish. Artists still go through the motions of manipulating form, but their heart isn’t in their subversions anymore — nor can they return to the good old unconscious days when just imposing their own individual style on the style of the day was enough. Art always must move forward, find a new way to steal the old fire — but after modernism, there is no forward. Nietzsche’s fear that nihilism, “uncanniest of all visitors,” would win has come true.

But to accept this is to give the accidents of history too much power over us. The true spirit of modernism — not its dream of an end to art, but its search for forms that, in John Lennon’s words, howl and move — will endure. Yes, it was that intoxicating fork in history’s road that unleashed the demons and angels of modernism, and that fork will never come again. But the road goes on.

If we listen to modernism itself, there is hope. Modernism teaches us that humans have an archetypal need to express, which primitive art reveals and which modern man shares. It teaches us that the struggle with form, with the materials given by the world which can be used to discover the world, always has the capacity to be heroic. It teaches us that, in the end, art matters. If these lessons are true, modernism’s own towering achievement will not stand as an epitaph — and a human activity that goes back to those magical bison painted on the walls of the caves of Altamira will not die.

It’s true that things have changed. The old enemies are gone. This time, we will have to do without a God or a tradition to battle with: We will have to construct and create using only the tension of our own souls. But every generation faces the same unknown and radiant world. And if the triumph of the modernists is our triumph, there will be art.

Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya.

Sunday, May 20, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

“People Who Eat Darkness”: The disappearing blonde

A true crime story set in Tokyo illuminates the complicated truths behind media cliches

By Joji Obara and Lucie Blackman (Credit: Estate of Lucie Jane Blackman)

Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she’d become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn’t match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.

Continue Reading Close
Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Friday, May 18, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

Corporate criminals gone wild

The maker of the documentary film "Inside Job" has a new book excoriating Wall Street -- and President Obama

By A detail from the cover of "Predator Nation"

“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary film on how government, Wall Street and academia colluded to deliver us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, made a powerful case that something was very very rotten at the heart of the American political/economic nexus. His follow-up book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” can be considered the legal brief that dots every “i” and crosses every “t” in his argument. A tightly argued, profusely footnoted and deeply enraged castigation of everyone involved, “Predator Nation” isn’t just a factually unchallengeable account of how Wall Street blew up the global economy. It’s a denunciation, a call for justice and a warning: After getting away with the crime of the century, Wall Street still isn’t satisfied.

“If you have already got 96 percent of what you want,” Ferguson told Salon, “why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.”

For at least 30 years the United States has been headed on the wrong track, handing over more power and wealth to a tiny percent of the American population at the expense of everyone else. But Ferguson’s story isn’t just focused on the greed and recklessness of the elite. It’s also about their criminality. The bankers who wrecked the financial system broke the law. And yet, amazingly, not only have the vast majority of responsible parties not been convicted of any crime — they haven’t even been charged. There have been a few settlements of fraud allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory bodies and a smattering of slap-on-the-wrist fines, but nothing that comes close to a proper reckoning for the massive hardship and economic destruction that they caused.

Ferguson’s glowering rage spares neither political party. Clinton gets the blame for completing the process of financial sector deregulation, and George W. Bush is lacerated for his general incompetence. But Barack Obama is showered with a particularly aggrieved contempt. Obama, writes Ferguson, came into office with more hope invested in him than in any recent leader, and then proceeded to “betray” and “screw” his supporters by declining to bring Wall Street to account for its misdeeds.

“Predator Nation” hits bookstores on Monday, just in time to cash in on the headlines generated by the latest banking atrocity — JPMorgan Chase’s massively failed derivatives bet.

“Predator Nation” is an angry book. Were you this angry before you started making the film “Inside Job”?

No, I absolutely was not. I remember the first time I got any kind of inkling of what was to come was in August or September 2007, when Charley Morris sent me a copy of a galley proof of his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” It was scary and powerful, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I remember calling Charley and saying, “You lay out a very convincing case but really, these people aren’t that crazy, they aren’t that stupid. They are regulated. Can it really be this bad?”

And he said: “You just wait.” And boy, he was right.

It’s not that I thought that investment bankers were like Mother Teresa. I knew that they weren’t. But the degree of nakedness and extremity of the dishonesty and its pervasiveness was a huge shock to me. It turned out that many banks, on a very large scale, and without any disclosure, had created and sold securities with the intent of betting on their failure. And this was done with the knowledge and approval of senior management of all these banks, including the oldest and most traditional.

How do you explain this behavior? How did we get to a point where it was routine for Wall Street bankers to behave in ways that most Americans would consider frankly immoral?

I think this has its roots all the way back in the 1970s and the beginning of the era of deregulation. But there was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.

You say that everything is now legal, but in your book you dismiss Obama’s argument that he could not prosecute Wall Street bankers for criminal behavior because what they did was technically not illegal as “complete horseshit.”

I should be more precise. I should have said, “where everything was perceived as being legal.” There was no perception that, even when you were in fact violating the law, that there would be any legal jeopardy or legal consequence to what you were doing. And that was part of my surprise when I was making “Inside Job.” I really was surprised that people would so overtly and explicitly do things that 20 years previously probably would have gotten them landed in prison.

One can certainly argue that the penalties and prosecutions following the S&L [Savings and Loan] and insider scandals of the 1980s were vastly insufficient. No doubt about that. But there still were consequences. I don’t know whether [junk bond king] Michael Milken would have still done everything he did, if he knew that he was going to spend two years in prison and have about half of his wealth confiscated. Maybe he still would have made that bet, but still, clearly he had a few unpleasant days. And now, nothing, just nothing.

In your book, you have a laundry list of things you believe the bankers could be prosecuted for, everything from securities fraud to perjury to RICO Act violations. And then you point out, more than once, that during the Obama administration there have been no arrests or indictments of any firms or senior executives “related to causing the bubble or the crisis.” What’s your explanation for this? Is it as simple as the Obama administration being captured by the financial sector?

I’m not President Obama’s psychoanalyst, so I can’t speak to what goes on inside his head. But that is what I would say of the Obama administration generally. In the book I go through the list of his personnel appointments and it’s pretty clear.

But how do we square that with the negative Wall Street reaction to bank reform? You devote only one sentence in your entire book to Dodd-Frank, calling it “weak and ridiculously complicated.” But even so, House Republicans have introduced nine bills trying to repeal parts or all of it, Romney is campaigning on repealing the whole thing, and Wall Street hates it and has tried to kill every last part of it. There is clearly antipathy against Obama from the financial sector now, from Jamie Dimon on down, that wasn’t there when he got elected. If he was truly captured, why the antipathy?

Well, there is some antipathy. But he just held a very successful fundraiser at the home of the president of private equity group Blackstone. So the antipathy is not universal.

But you know, when I was in academia and also when I was running a software company I had a fair amount of contact with portions of the financial sector, investment banking industry, and the venture capital sector. And certainly they were already pretty rapacious and pretty politically conservative. But they would never then have said and done the things that they say and do now. I recently was at a dinner in New York City and one of the people there was a very, very successful man who is on the borderline between venture capital and private equity. And this guy went into an extended rant about how he was at a disadvantage because he had to pay 15 percent capital gains taxes. When I was first dealing with venture capitalists in a significant way, the capital gains tax rate was 28 percent, and nobody was complaining. Then they got them reduced to 20 under Clinton, and then later 15 under Bush. Plus, they got a rollover provision so if they took the proceeds of a venture capital investment and rolled it over into a new venture capital investment it was tax-free. At that point, we’ve reached nirvana, what more could there be?

But now we’re in this environment where this guy was loudly and aggressively complaining that he has to pay 15 percent to the government. And if that’s where you’re at, then of course you are going to complain about Dodd-Frank. You are going to complain about everything. If you have already got 96 percent of what you want, why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.

Do you find it alarming that even after this huge crisis and even with a lot of populist anger on both the right and the left focused on Wall Street, Mitt Romney is running for president while promising to further deregulate Wall Street and repeal Dodd-Frank, and the polls show him neck and neck with Obama?

That is true, but I don’t think that Romney is going to get votes primarily or even secondarily for that. Most of the votes he is going to get will be because he’s religious, he’s against gay marriage, et cetera, all of these allegedly “values” issues — things like that and wanting to reduce taxes. That’s why he is going to get a substantial fraction of the popular vote. The reason he says he wants to roll back Dodd-Frank is not to get votes, it is to get money.

Ninety-nine percent of your book tells a story of how we’ve gotten ourselves into a bigger and bigger mess, and then you’ve got about a page and a half discussing what could be done to fix it. But your solutions — a legitimate third-party alternative, controlling the influence of money in politics, real tax reform, fixing education — it’s just really hard to see how we get from our current problems to those bullet points.

Yes. And we’re not. Not right now. I think it’s going to take things getting worse, either slowly or fast. Either we continue to melt away for another 25 years and then finally people wake up, or there might be another crisis. And maybe that will be sufficient. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’d be interested in your own view of this. I’ve had debates with several of my friends on this question. If Obama had really had the balls to try to do the various kind of things that he’d promised to do, or kinda sorta almost promised to do during his campaign, if he really made an effort, how far do you think he could have gotten in 2009?

At this point, I’m in the camp that believes that American government is completely broken. And we didn’t really find out how broken it was until Obama came in. In your book, you talk about Obama coming in withoverwhelming majorities, but he really only had 60 votes in the Senate from July 2009, when Al Franken was finally sworn in, to January 2010, when Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy’s seat. And even the things that Obama did get through had to pass muster with a handful of very conservative Democrats. Nebraska’s Ben Nelson had control over the entire government. It’s a completely dysfunctional system. I think Obama severely underestimated what he was facing when he came in, and picked the wrong strategy of trying to go bipartisan, but it’s not as if he had the freedom to do what he wanted that Roosevelt enjoyed when he became president in 1932.

But there are an awful lot of things that the president can do even without the Congress. He didn’t have to choose the people he chose. He didn’t have to choose the attorney general he chose or the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department that he chose. I think that if he had said, I’m going to allocate $500 million to a special prosecutor’s office, and we’re going to find out what the fuck happened here, he could have done that.

There’s some talk now that JPMorgan’s disastrous bet on credit default swaps might lead to tighter regulation. I have to say, it was bizarre to be speed-reading your book while the Morgan news was causing post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the worst days of the financial crisis. Does what happened there fit into the narrative of “Predator Nation”?

I rather think so, yes. Mr. Dimon has long been largely correctly regarded as the best, most judicious, most careful steward of a major global bank. That he and his bank could make a mistake like this does not bode well. One thing that has actually not been widely discussed, somewhat to my surprise, in the commentary about all of this, is that this mistake — which it appears will cost them between $2 billion and $5 billion — this occurred in a very forgiving economic environment. If they made a mistake like this in September 2008, then things could look really quite different.

Does it qualify as criminal behavior?

There is some suggestion of criminality in the lack of honesty on disclosure of the positions and their potential implications. I can’t say; we don’t know enough yet. It certainly is the case that JPMorgan, although more prudent than many other banks over the last decade, has frequently been just as dishonest. It has done a number of extremely unethical things, some of which I mention in the book. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if they had not been forthcoming about this.

Do you think it will make any difference in how banks are regulated?

I fear not. Honestly. I’m sure that Mr. Dimon is momentarily chastised, and that JPMorgan will not be making any similar bets in the next couple of years. But is it going to change the overall posture of bankers and banking and is it going to change the regulatory environment in any significant way? I tend to doubt that. Unfortunately.

So where does this leave us? Your book is filled with a strong sense of personal outrage. How do you personally feel about the prospect that the only thing that could get us out of the mess we’re in is yet another crisis, perhaps even worse than the one we just lived through?

Personally, I am very fortunate. I have a very blessed life. I made some money earlier, I’m basically pretty financially secure. I can’t have private jets and private islands but I don’t have to worry about having a roof over my head or being able to eat well, unlike many people in this country going forward. And I do work that I love. I love making movies, I love writing books. Personally I’m fine.

But the country is not. But this happens to countries. This is not the first country it’s happened to. It’s not even the first time it happened to the United States. We’ll see whether we come out of it. Last time it happened we came out of it, eventually. It took a long time and it was very painful but eventually we came out of it. Will that happen again or not, I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

Continue Reading Close
Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Can you identify?

Science shows that the only way around some readers' prejudices is to trick them

By (Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)

The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.

The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.

Continue Reading Close
Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Sunday, May 13, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

“The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

A reporter traces the shadowy fate of the definitive version of the Hebrew Bible

By Matti Friedman

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.

The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”

The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.

All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.

It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.

The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”

While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.

This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?

The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.

If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.

This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.

Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”

Continue Reading Close
Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Saturday, May 12, 2012 7:00 PM UTC

Augusten Burroughs: Conquer trauma by letting it go

Salon exclusive: The best-selling memoirist says past horrors haunt us because we think about them too much. Stop

By Augusten Burroughs
Excerpted from "This Is How" by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.

Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.

For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.

Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.

The therapeutic process takes time, commitment, and funding. Then, insight leads to understanding, which leads to choice. At last, they are free to move on.

It’s such a clean, well-defined structure for the process of healing. Almost like a paint-by-numbers portrait where all those black outlines are confusing at first, but in time, as you apply the correct colors in the right areas, the tangle of lines resolves into a perfectly clear image.

Unfortunately, our brains tend to color outside the line. First, there is the matter of understanding our past and the events that transpired.

Understanding what happened in the past is rarely truly possible. Because true understanding must incorporate context. Not merely what we experienced, but why. And the why requires knowing the motivations of the other people involved. Without the perspective of this context, our understanding will always be biased; it will be from a single perspective: Ours. And therefore, not necessarily accurate or true.

If you are on a highway and you drive past a car accident so severe that the hood of the car has been crushed up against the windshield, you may very well assume the occupants are dead. And perhaps this will haunt you because as you passed by the car, you glimpsed a little girl’s doll on the shelf behind the backseat. One look at that accident was all anybody would need to know what “unsurvivable” looked like. And you have never been able to forget that doll or the little girl who must have loved it and who died in such a terrible crumple of steel and glass. Let’s imagine that you are haunted by dreams where you come upon the accident and you see the doll and you do nothing.

Let’s say that what was unknown to you was that the car was a high-end Mercedes that featured crumple zones designed to absorb the impact of a crash while protecting the occupants within a safety cage. And let’s say that the two occupants inside the car were sitting there as you drove by and the man in the driver’s seat was on his cell phone.

“No, I mean totally like, trashed, totaled. We’re waiting; they’re supposed to send a tow truck. She’s good except she has to pee so she’s—”

“Oh my God, did you just tell Jason that I have to pee? Now he’s going to imagine me peeing. Don’t forget to tell him we found the doll at a tag sale but we need to buy wrapping paper. At least we think it’s the doll.”

“You hear that? Yeah, don’t think about her peeing. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right doll; we had to spend like three hours on Craigslist to find one.”

Imagine that after the tow truck arrives and our couple has been safely installed into a rental vehicle, they don’t really ever think about that crash again except both are pleased with the new car’s color. Neither liked the wrecked Mercedes’ particular shade of red.

In this example, you can see how your entire perception of what happened — and you were a witness — is completely distorted by your point of view.

So, if you were to enter therapy over being disturbed by this wreck, you could spend years discussing why the sight of the doll was so upsetting, and how impotent you felt being unable to stop and help but even if you could stop, what could you have done?

Possibly, the therapist would have you write letters to the dead little girl.

What this really accomplishes is the creation of a sort of personal myth. A series of well-remembered events with finely honed details. As accurate as they may be, they are accurate from only one perspective.

For many years, I believed that one’s past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one’s past and trying to gain understanding and “make peace” with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.

As with any addiction, the first step to overcoming it is to see it.

And once you see it, you have to stop it.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Once the current moment moves into the past, it is entirely gone. It ceases to exist except in documents, photographs, and an impression left in a sofa cushion. The past — and all the moments it contained — are no longer sharing this world with us.

They are no more real than Cinderella.

To spend time — year after year — in therapy or on your own thinking about your past and forming conclusions and stitching the elements into a narrative that you can name, “the truth,” in order to be “free” of it, is not how you become free from your past.

The past does not need to be reconsidered in the present and given a structure. The events of the past cannot be understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.

When somebody says, “Therapy has been really helpful to me in terms of resolving some of my issues from the past,” what does this actually, in practical terms, mean?

Or somebody is “haunted” or controlled by their past. How is this possible?

When I first moved to New York, I became friends with a guy who seemed to be exactly the guy I wanted to be. He was very outgoing and had lots of friends and they probably all felt as I did: Like his best and closest friend.

After we’d been friends for almost a year, one night we were out drinking and he told me he had a confession to make, something he wanted me to know about himself.

I nodded and tried to look very sincere and open, while inside my mind it was the Kentucky Derby, with most of the money being placed on female-to-male transsexual. That wasn’t it.

He proceeded to tell me in great detail about the utterly atrocious physical abuse he’d experienced at the hands of his father and mother during his childhood. It was well beyond anything I myself had ever come close to experiencing.

After this evening, my friend spoke of his past abuse frequently. And I realized that all the time we’d been friends, all those moments prior to his revelation had probably been, in his mind, moments leading up to The Telling.

Only after The Telling could he be fully himself with me. His story of his past abuse was a large part of his identity. It was a protected secret that was kept out of view for acquaintances and coworkers. Only after a measure of trust and intimacy had been formed would there be almost a ceremony in which he detailed his abuse. Rather like unwrapping, slowly, an extravagant gift one knows is going to blow the mind of the recipient.

When we first became friends it had amazed me that he was single. I now understood that he was single because of
how guys reacted when my friend finally revealed his history. It was like encountering a new person. And my friend’s abuse was now like a third person with us wherever we went.

Who could blame him? It was a wonder he was still alive.

Today, I see it differently.

My friend is a dramatic example of somebody who is haunted by their past. But because the past is gone, how does it haunt? Of course, it does not. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We re-experience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has taken place do we stop worrying that particular tooth with our tongue.

For years, I believed this was how to live.

I was wrong. It’s how to stagnate.

I know now how to get over the past. It has worked for me in a deeper, more enduring way than any therapy I have ever had.

Writing six autobiographical books is what freed me from my past.

If the books had been cookbooks I expect I would feel just exactly as free. That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains.

Perhaps the process of writing — being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter — has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.

For the same reason, being out of a job and just hanging around is depressing in a thousand different ways. All you have is time. Sooner or later, you end up wandering around bad neighborhoods inside your head. Neighborhoods like, “They never should have fired me, those assholes.” Which may be true or it may be untrue but it’s irrelevant to everything. It is through work that challenged me and required continuous freshness that I began to occupy not the past but this, right now. My advertising career had not been challenging. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.

And this, here, this line, that comma.

That’s what freed me from the past. The present kidnapped me. I climbed into its car when it held up its hand and showed me the candy. I hopped right in.

When something from my past upsets me here in my present, it’s because I let my mind think back to the past and grab hold of something.

This is how the past haunts us. We think about it.

Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess.

Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. Sometimes, a particular trauma may be the largest thing we have ever experienced. So we kind of move into it, make it our home. Because there’s nothing in our lives on the scale of that loss or that trauma.

So, you need a larger life. Something that can successfully compete with your past.

To live with your mind in the past — in the name of healing or understanding or overcoming — is to live in a fantasy world where nothing new or original is created. To “understand” one’s past is to handle clay that no longer exists and shape it into a bowl nobody can ever see or touch.

Denial of the painful events in one’s past is the same as obsessing over one’s past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power. Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song — these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry around, show people occasionally, put back in its black velvet pouch, and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

Then, when asked to join the pole vaulting club, pull the coach aside and whisper, “I can’t. See” — and remove your gem from your pocket — “this is my terrible thing and as I expected, showing it to you has taken your breath away and made you sympathetic. So I will be excused, I assume?”

Other people will allow you — they will never blame you or challenge you — to use your past as an excuse to not face the normal fears everybody has when facing their future. Even if you were brutally physically assaulted, you must not withdraw because you are afraid it will happen again. This is not a valid exit.

Your fears that it might happen again are perfectly reasonable and justified: It might happen again.

Many people believe that if something really bad happens to them, they have paid their dues and nothing else really bad can happen again. But on the day you attend your mother’s funeral or declare personal bankruptcy, there is no law in the universe that prevents you from also getting a speeding ticket and your first grey hair.

When multiple bad things happen, it can feel like “life is out to get you.” It’s not. And it’s not a sign, either. What you do is, you keep going. You stop waiting for fairness.

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be.

Unless.

Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others.

Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.

I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.

He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.

I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”

He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”

I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.

Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.

From “This Is How” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Continue Reading Close

Augusten Burroughs' many books include "Runnning With Scissors," "Dry," "Sellevision," "Magical Thinking" and "Possible Side Effects." His latest book is "This Is How." More Augusten Burroughs.

Page 1 of 984 in Books

Recommendations