LOOK FORWARD WITH ANGER
By Kalu Singh
The first two thoughts prompted in me by Mr Ward's honest and complex piece on Moral Outrage were utterly dissimilar: one from high fictional comedy and the other from high real-life tragedy.
Miss Gwendoline Fairfax, Wilde's earnest heroine, feeling herself betrayed and outwitted by her newly-met, best-almost-sister friend Cecily Cardew announces "On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure." No doubt she too, like Mr Ward, puffed out her chest: with, for her, its attendant pleasurable friction of flesh against whalebone and silk. Outside sexual stimulation, there is nothing more physically energising than the rush of manageable anger, with its promise of delightful explosion and ejaculation.
Even the prepubescent ten-year-old Jane Eyre feels it when her abusive guardian aunt chides her. "That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had. Shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued [my reply]."
Of course, if the anger comes to feel completely ungovernable, then there is anxiety and fear of implosion and fragmentation. It is hard to ride the tide or tiger of anger: but it seems like a test of virility to try. Interestingly there is no male equivalent for the common saying wonderfully parodied as "Hell hath no fury like any woman you care to mention".
The tragic association began from Mr Ward's conjecture: Surely every son of a holocaust survivor must have said angrily to his father "How did you let it happen?"
I was reminded of a passage from Trude Levi's holocaust memoir.
"The morning after we arrived in the camp, there was an order for 50 persons to go to a neighbouring town for work. I had decided that we had to go but, since Mother refused to move, I quite brutally forced her to come with me. Something possessed me to behave this way. When we arrived at the place of departure there were already 49 people in the group. I pushed an elderly woman aside to enable my mother and me to make up the numbers. Throughout the war this was the one deed of which I was greatly ashamed and which I regretted. But at the time I just had to get into that group.
From the camp we were taken by train some 12.5 miles to another disused factory. All warehouses or workshops were separated by wire fences. We were taken into one - and there was my father. It was wonderful and yet quite traumatic to feel his presence. The man who had always been so incredibly self-assured kept on pleading for forgiveness as he held my hand. As I recall we were a couple of days in this camp and were then herded into railway cattle-trucks where we spent the next five days until we arrived at Auschwitz. Meanwhile, my mother became increasingly senile, and finally went completely out of her mind. My father kept holding my hand, begging me to forgive him..
On our arrival at Auschwitz, my parents and I were separated from each other. My mother was immediately taken to the gas-chamber: I could never find out what had happened to my father. "
His apology is so poignant: her puzzlement is differently poignant. At the time I read this, I was trying to analyse the conditions of ascription and definition for contrition and apology. Here was a bizarre example. The fault, the mea culpa, is not named. What is he apologising for? What can't she see, or won't see? At the time, and perhaps this is an ordinary counsellors reflex, I wondered if it was some earlier sexual transgression : lechery besmirches Elektra. But Mr Ward's piece persuaded me that perhaps the guilt and apology were for his failure to save her from the Holocaust: a failure he didnt know how, rather than didn't dare, to name. He cannot say it for it would immediately sound absurd. And the very oddness of an apology for an unnamed fault seems to have paralysed her ability to think.
I am not a parent, so I don't know how consciously the parental couple agrees to some kind of primal division of labour. The woman will risk her life to give life : the only thing a man can do that is remotely commensurate with this is to offer his life for their child. Thus Mr Ward's second conjecture: Surely Mohhamed al-Durrah's mother must have said to her husband 'Why didn't you lie on top of the child?'.
Perhaps one of the famous stories about Lytton Strachey is not irrelevant here. At his examination/trial for his refusal to enlist, the Chairman, perhaps with a homophobic sneer as well as moral outrage, taunted him, "And what if a beastly Hun tried to rape your sister?". He replied, in a dignified tone, "I would endeavour to interpose myself between them".
How does a father carry that burden to interpose between his child and the Grim Reaper? It is said that both Freud and Darwin were irreparably broken by the deaths of their daughters.
Finally, I am thinking about moral outrage at one of the few times in my life when I feel utterly justified in feeling it: a justification affirmed by others. I will not trouble you with the full story. And yet, I find myself moving between two strange poles: a sense of shame at being only powerlessly right - is this perhaps a sense of my (big-me) Self having failed to protect my innocent Self from institutional brutes? - and a determination not to be less brave than the ten-year-old Jane. Or is the latter only my pathetic masculine protest not to be too weedy even for her big girl's blouse?
Education page | Freud today