Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I do remember it, I said. Zafar was describing one of a series of commercials that all ran to the same theme: Things are not as they first appear, and you need to get the bigger picture in order to understand what’s going on — you need, presumably, to read The Guardian.

It was a neat little commercial, he continued, rather good for its time, but quite aside from its political statement, it illustrates something about human motivation and action. In fact, it actually relies on the observation that the same action can be produced by different motivations, even opposite ones. You’re rather fond of Graham Greene?

I am, as a matter of fact, I replied.

Years ago, at Oxford, when I asked you who your favorite authors were, you said Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. An interesting group. Do you remember?

Indeed they are — my favorite authors, I replied. I didn’t tell Zafar that I had no recollection of his having asked me. Nor did I share with him the fact that I’d actually read only one or two of each of their books; nor, to make my confession here complete, did I share the fact that I’d read so little fiction since my youth that my favorites, such as they were, had remained the same.

In The End of the Affair , continued Zafar, Graham Greene writes: Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ? *

I think now, at the end, that Emily was not manipulative, not in a Shakespearean way, not like Iago, even if her actions were the same actions as those of a manipulative person. A different kind of motivation or disposition can produce the same actions, just as different situations can produce the same action. I think she told me about the protest because it would elicit sympathy and deepen the bond.

What’s wrong with that? I asked him, although I was unsure whether he was exonerating her or accusing her.

Zafar fell silent. He seemed distracted. What motivation did he have in mind? If I am truthful, I must admit that I wasn’t quite following him. And then the description of those authors was irksome. What did he mean when he said they were an interesting group? I had always suspected a condescension toward me in literary matters.

Why are they an interesting group? I asked.

Zafar smiled at me.

If those writers put themselves in their stories, they do so invisibly. That character, a narrator who’s in the story but not really of it, that’s an interesting character for you, no? I wonder if you like them because you know what it’s like to stand on the sidelines.

I had not read all of their works, but as far as what I’d read went, Zafar was right about the presence of a narrator— in the story but not of it, as he put it.

I might like those writers for other reasons, I responded; they might just all happen to have that feature.

Perhaps you like them because those stories bring you close to your own experience of experiencing the world. They don’t really get involved, people like Carraway, not just in the sense that the plot doesn’t turn on them but because they resist forming profound attachments to anyone and only stand silently and watch. They are not the authors of their own lives, so to speak. Carraway takes his detachment a step further by giving it a name. He calls it reserving judgment, but he fails completely. To reserve judgment is to maintain an infinite distance. But nothing is visible at that remove. Is it an act of kindness, which is an act of engagement, that calls forth tenderness, when there is presented before us a human being with all his flaws?

I did not follow what Zafar was getting at then and, to be honest, I cannot be absolutely sure that I’ve grasped it now. But I’ve had a chance to think. Writing this has helped, this effort of looking in while looking out. That is what it is to consider the life of another, someone who made an impression, and in the course of writing discover — no, not discover , not quite, not even learn or understand , but simply sit and listen and fully embrace the risk of disrupting one’s precious outlook on the world that such listening entails. Zafar was right. Every story belongs to the teller, and the teller’s lesson to himself lies in the very way he tells the story. Writing has helped in many ways, helped me to think about a lot of things, to do with work, to do with Meena and family, and to do with Zafar also. I don’t know now, for instance, if Zafar was quite as lost as I have thought him to be, quite as lost as at times he seemed even before he met Emily; perhaps I was the one who’d never really had much sense of bearings. It could all be just a midlife crisis: People who do the studies and run the statistics, they say that the so-called midlife crisis actually happens to men when they’re in their late thirties, earlier than convention has it, which would make mine right on time or even a touch overdue. But it’s more than that, or just different. It’s true that I’ve lived as someone who stands aside, choices determined by the sweep of ease and opportunity — and the corollary of standing by is not participating. At the very beginning of The Great Gatsby , the narrator, Nick Carraway, tells the reader about his father’s advice to keep in mind that others never had the advantages he had. Reserving judgment, be it heroically difficult, is what he should do. It becomes an ironic point, as one reads on, for the people Carraway meets who are most deserving of adverse judgment are, I think, people who had every advantage Carraway had — and then some. But as I again consider that opening statement, having just retrieved the book from my shelves and reread the passage, but with Zafar’s remarks in my mind, I see something else in it, which is that Carraway’s attitude keeps him one step removed. It keeps him one step removed from the play, in the mind of the reader — in mine, in any event — but it also keeps the man himself separated from the mess of life. In this light, his father’s advice actually reads like a statement of disqualification. I never studied literature, so there’s likely little store to be set in what I say about these things. But that is what the opening now says to me. And though I surprise myself not to have thought so before, for now it seems obvious, I wonder if our experience of a novel is enriched by our experience of life.

One thing I do question is whether Zafar was correct to include The End of the Affair. In fact, that book seems rather obviously — bizarrely so — out of step with his thesis. True enough, Bendrix, the narrator, is a writer like Greene, but he is not some sterile bystander, for who could be more caught in the plot than the man who consorts with an adulteress?

* * *

You were saying you moved into Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’s house when you came out of hospital. How long did you stay with her?

You and I had lost contact by then, two years or so before I went into hospital.

That long?

What did Emily tell you? Zafar asked me.

When?

She told me she spoke to you when I was in hospital.

When did she tell you that?

Six months and seven days after I came out of hospital. Which is when — and why — I began to wonder.

That’s very precise.

My notebooks.

Is it important, then?

It turns out everything hangs on precise mathematics. Not complex but simple and precise. Funny really that it came down to simple arithmetic.

Go on.

When she told me — six months after I’d come out, as I say — that she’d spoken to you while I was in hospital, it struck me that you never called me when I was there, never left a message or sent word. Something had happened when you met Emily that discouraged you from calling then or later, not once in six months, seven including my stay in hospital, seven and counting. What could that have been?