Then we may be able to reach the place in which the totally contradictory stories of different people, different nations, even sworn enemies, may coexist and play out together. This is the place where we are finally able to grasp that in true negotiations, our wishes will be forced to encounter the Other’s, forced to recognize their justness, their legitimacy. This is the moment when we feel the sharp growing pains that always attend the arrival of sobriety, and in this case the realization that there is a limit to our ability to mold reality so that it perfectly suits only our own needs. This is the moment when we feel what I called earlier “the principle of Otherness,” whose deep-seated meaning, if you wish, is the rightful existence, the stories, pains, and hopes, of the Other. If we can only reach this Archimedean point, we can begin to dismantle the barriers and detonators that prevent us from solving the conflict.
Because when we know the Other from within him — even if that Other is our enemy — we can never again be completely indifferent to him. Something inside us becomes committed to him, or at least to his complexities. It becomes difficult for us to completely deny him or cancel him out as “not human.” We can no longer employ our usual ease and expertise to avoid his suffering, his justice, his story. Perhaps we can even be a little more tolerant of his mistakes. For we then see these mistakes as part of his tragedy. And if we have any strength and generosity remaining, we can even create a situation in which it is easier for our enemy to step out of his own traps; we too may benefit from this.
To write about the enemy means, primarily, to think about the enemy, and this is a requirement for anyone who has an enemy, even if he is absolutely convinced of his own justness and the enemy’s malice and cruelty. To think (or to write) about the enemy does not necessarily mean to justify him. I cannot, for example, contemplate writing about a Nazi character in such a way as to justify him, although I felt an urge — even an obligation — to write, in See Under: Love, about a Nazi officer, so that I could understand how a normal person becomes a Nazi, how he justifies his acts to himself, and what processes he goes through in doing so.
Sartre’s exploration of why we write, in his essay What Is Literature? is relevant here: “Nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism. For, the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of these men. Thus, whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only of individual passions or whether he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject — freedom.”
Sartre may have been naive in his assertion that “nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism”; such books have been written and will probably continue to be written. But he was certainly right about the topic that preoccupies authors, and which is also the soul of literature — freedom. The freedom to think differently, to see things differently. And this includes seeing the enemy differently.
To think about the enemy, then. To think about him gravely and with deep attentiveness. Not merely to hate or fear him, but to think of him as a person or a society or a nation that is separate from us and from our own fears and hopes, from our beliefs and modes of thought and interests and wounds. To allow the enemy to be an Other, with all this entails. Such an outlook may also be militarily advantageous from an intelligence point of view: “Know thy enemy — from within him.” It could also help us alter reality itself, so that the enemy gradually ceases to be our enemy.
I would like to clarify that I am not referring to the maxim “Love thy enemy.” I cannot claim to have been blessed with such noble magnanimity (and I always find it somewhat suspect when I encounter it in others). But I am certainly speaking of a sincere effort to try to understand the enemy, his motives, his internal logic, his worldview, and the story he tells himself.
Of course, it is not easy to read reality through the enemy’s eyes. It is difficult and frightening to give up our sophisticated defense mechanisms and be exposed to the feelings with which the enemy experiences the conflict and how, in fact, he experiences us. Taking such a step challenges our faith in ourselves and in our own justness. It poses a danger of undermining “the official story”—usually the only permissible, “legitimate” story — that a frightened nation, a nation at war, always tells itself. But perhaps we can upend the previous sentence and say that sometimes a nation remains in a prolonged state of struggle precisely because it is trapped, for generations sometimes, within a particular “official story”?
There is one other clear advantage to observing reality through the enemy’s eyes. The enemy sees in us, in the nation facing him, the things that each of us always shows an enemy: cruelty, aggression, brutality, self-righteousness, self-pity. We are often unaware of everything we “project” onto the enemy, and thereby onto others as well, even those who are not our enemy — and eventually onto ourselves too.
Not infrequently, we tell ourselves that we are taking a certain course of action, committing an act of violence or brutality, only because we are in a state of war, and that when the war is over we will go right back to being the moral, upstanding society we used to be. But we must consider the possibility that the enemy — toward whom we direct these hostile and violent acts, and who thereby becomes their permanent victim — senses long before we do how much these behaviors have become an integral part of our being as a nation and as a society, and how deeply they have seeped into our innermost systems. It is also possible that reversing our point of view, by looking at ourselves through the eyes of the nation we are occupying, for example, can sound the alarm bells within us, enabling us to understand, before it is too late, the depth of our denial, our destructiveness, and our blindness. We will know then what we have to save ourselves from, and how essential it is for ourselves to change the situation profoundly.
When we are able to read the text of reality through our enemy’s eyes, it becomes more complex, more realistic, allowing us to recover the elements we suspended from our world picture. From that moment, reality is more than just a projection of our fears and desires and illusions: when we are capable of seeing the story of the Other through his eyes, we are in healthier and more valid contact with the facts. We then have a far greater chance to avoid making critical mistakes and perceiving events in a self-centered, clenched, and restricted way. And then, sometimes, we can also grasp — in a way we never previously allowed ourselves to — that this mythological, menacing, and demonic enemy is no more than an amalgamation of people who are as frightened, tormented, and despondent as we are. This comprehension, to me, is the essential beginning of any process of sobriety and reconciliation.
These are some of the counsels that literature can offer to politics and to those engaged in politics, and in fact to anyone coping with an arbitrary and violent reality. The advice may sound weak and out of touch today, against the clamor of war that surrounds us, but the principles are valid for novel-writing, for interpersonal relationships, and for delineating policies — of peace or of war.