Myth-making as denial of reality

About thirty years ago I read an essay that was so good I pinched the book it was in from my sister. In truth, the book, an anthology of expository writing called the Norton Reader, had been assigned in one of her college courses and when the class was over she abandoned it at home. So I was really only rescuing it from neglect.

The essay was “‘The Bridge over the River Kwai’ as Myth” by Ian Watt and was reprinted from a 1971 issue of the Berkshire Review. I knew nothing about the author except what the endnotes stated—that he was a professor of English at Stanford University and author of The Rise of the Novel. But his unique perspective and analysis impressed me, for as a young British lieutenant he was one of the prisoners of war who worked on the two-hundred-mile stretch of railroad across Thailand and the real bridges over the Kwai (yes, there were actually two).

Watt’s experience enabled him to explain the origins and evolution of the River Kwai “myth.” He begins with a synopsis of the surrender to Japan of more than a hundred thousand British soldiers in Malaya and Singapore in 1942. He describes the Japanese Army’s organizational structure and attitudes toward prisoners, life in the prison camp and on work details, and how the senior British officer, Colonel Philip Toosey, saved lives by organizing the prisoners and by “handling” their Japanese captors, at least as well as a captive officer could in such harsh and demoralizing conditions.

Watt then traces how a Free French officer named Pierre Boulle, who served in Indochina during the war, heard of the British colonel and the building of the bridges. Boulle subsequently wrote The Bridge over the River Kwai, which was published in 1954. 

Boulle’s fictional Colonel Nicholson is an infantile egomaniac obsessed with the means of the work and, as a result, he becomes an unwitting collaborator. According to Watt, he is much more a representation of French officers who called Boulle a traitor when they switched their allegiance to Vichy France than he is of the real Colonel Toosey.

As Watt states, the novel thematically explores “how the vast scale and complication of operations which are rendered possible, and are even in one sense required, by modern technology tend finally to destroy human meanings and purposes. The West is the master of its means, but not its ends.”

In David Lean’s 1957 Oscar-winning movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, which achieved great popular success and critical acclaim, the myth expands further and moves still farther from reality. The bridge becomes an engineering marvel, a cantilevered wooden fantasy instead of the real iron-truss bridge built beside a temporary wooden bridge. And, most significantly, it is blown up at the end.

The movie, in contrast to the novel and in contradiction to the real lessons of survival learned by the prisoners, is about the institutional insanity of war and the irony of its senseless outcomes. (For Watt, the movie’s theme is made even more ironic by the facts of its making: the bridge for the movie was built not in Thailand, which didn’t look the part, but in Ceylon, at the cost of a quarter-million dollars, only to be destroyed along with a real train in that final audience-pleasing scene.)

For Watt, the further preposterousness of the myth-making is the fact that tourists in Thailand go to see the real steel bridge and nearby cemeteries of the prisoners who died building it to feed a fantasy perpetrated by the movie.

Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson in the 1957 movie.

Pierre Boulle borrowed a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Victory for the epigraph to his novel: “No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he was so representative of all the past victims of the great Joke. But it is by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing upon the whole. And, besides, he was what one would call a good man.”

Watt provides a plausible reason why Boulle may have made that choice—to emphasize the absurdity of the human condition in this, the dead-end of history. At the end of the essay, however, Watt returns to Conrad to defend the real Colonel Toosey: “a hero of the only kind we could afford then, and there. For he was led not by what he wanted to believe, but by what he knew: he knew that the world would not do his bidding; that he could not beat the Japanese; that on the Kwai—even more obviously than at home—we were for the most part prisoners of coercive circumstance.”

For Watt, the myth of the Kwai denies the reality Colonel Toosey represented, those two Conradian moral imperatives: work and restraint in the face of coercive circumstance.

Note to the reader: The good news is that Ian Watt’s thought-provoking essay is still available, and you don’t have to find a forty-year-old edition of the Norton Reader to read it. It turns out that, until his death in 1999, Watt was one of the leading scholars on the English novel and, in particular, Joseph Conrad. In 2000, Cambridge University Press published his Essays on Conrad (which I will review another time); thankfully the publisher included this remarkable essay as the coda of that collection.

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Is historical fiction intrinsically cheap?

Henry James wrote in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, “the ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness…” (I am indebted to Samir Chopra’s excellent blog for this thought-provoking quote.) A modern writer, James continues, can include historical details but cannot invent or represent “the old consciousness, the soul, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent.” Jewett wanted to write about the New England Puritans, but to James’ point, how could she without being one?

Laurent Binet, the French author of HHhH, apparently agrees. Winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, HHhH is a gripping, self-conscious historical novel about the daring attempt by the Czechoslovakian Resistance to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man and mastermind of the Final Solution, in Prague in 1942. Through a careful orchestration of the story’s  facts, presented with the ironies that only a historical perspective can provide, he avoids the “old consciousness” entirely, except in supposition, and yet he creates a suspenseful and nuanced tale.

I was drawn to Binet’s book not only by its subject but also by his treatment of the “historic” problem. For, although I enjoy the history in historical fiction, I share James’ concern: the fictional aspect, meaning the experiential truth of it, is usually disappointing. The lack of the “old consciousness” was the problem I had with The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, as I struggled to articulate here, and it is frequently the problem I have with books about Elizabethans or Victorians written by modern authors: they fail to capture the consciousness of the time, making the story and, consequentially, the history false.

Laurent Binet (Photo credit: Booktrust.org.uk)

Binet gets the problem. Born in 1972, he knows he would be faking any dialogue between Heydrich and Himmler or between the two brave resistance fighters who parachuted into Czechoslovakia to kill Heydrich. So, to get around the “consciousness” problem, he inserts himself as a first-person narrator into the novel, critiquing his own story-telling and advising the reader not to believe what he wrote: it is made up and a disservice to the important truth of the real story. This metafictional device is clever and coy at the same time, and toward the climax of the novel it delays without adding value, becoming somewhat annoying. Yet it highlights the dilemma fiction writers face with any historical drama; it also adds another, more postmodern dimension to the story (as John Fowles’ techniques did in The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

Binet forces the reader to ask not only how much of what he writes is true, but how much of the past is truly capturable. Is all history fiction? Is all fiction false? What is the point of history if our imagination and empathy are not involved? And what better way to tap our imagination and empathy than with fiction? Binet doesn’t really resolve James’ issue, but he does a fine job raising these ancillary questions.

J.G. Ballard’s vision of modern war

After Anthony Burgess praised it, I picked up J. G. Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company and gave it a go but never finished it. I simply didn’t connect with what appeared to be a book-length dream sequence. I could tell Ballard possessed enormous talent, a fascination with technology (airplanes in particular) and a sharp understanding of human psychology, but there wasn’t enough character development for this realist.

Empire of the Sun was Ballard’s genre-breaking novel, making him known beyond the aficionados of speculative and science fiction. Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation only brought Ballard wider fame—and well deserved it was. This “autobiographical” novel did what the earlier book failed to do: ground the author’s vivid imagination with personal experience to render a unique perspective on an historical moment.

The book is about a boy’s experiences in a Japanese detention camp outside Shanghai during World War II. Yes, Ballard lived that experience, but this book is more than thinly veiled autobiography. First, Ballard was not separated from his parents for the duration of the war. Second, it’s unlikely he saw many of the things his main character, eleven-year-old Jim, sees. But isn’t this where a novelist’s imagination comes into play?

With an unflinching eye, Ballard confronts human brutality at its worst while reminding us of the impressionable innocence of the young. In Jim we have a child who feels a strong attraction to the means of destruction—airplanes and atomic bombs—because they are all he knows. Surrounded by starvation and death, the meaning of death troubles and confuses Jim. He wonders when the soul leaves the body and worries if he is dead or alive.

“‘Mrs. Phillips, I’ve thought about the war.’ Jim rolled over in the grass. He was about to explain to Mrs. Phillips that she was dead, but the old missionary was asleep… ‘Mrs. Phillips, we mustn’t worry any more…’”

“He was bare-chested, and his emaciated ribs were like a bird cage in which Jim could almost see his heart fluttering.”

“To Jim it seemed that the two missionary women on the floor were now barely alive, with blanched lips and eyes like those of poisoned mice.”

Such finely wrought images about death and dying occur throughout the book, and none is more powerful than the ending one, which also becomes a metaphor for the loss of youth and the life of memory. Through Jim’s experienced yet innocent eyes, the terror of death becomes more graphic, more believable while remaining unbelievable.

Reading Empire of the Sun, I was reminded of Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird. Told from a child’s perspective with a child’s eye for the magical, the two books might be bookends. Both describe with precise, almost morbid, fascination the cruelties of war, and each dramatizes the depravity that war engenders. These two authors, children of the same war, ask the same question: Does war cause the depravity or does an innate depravity cause war? Based on their fine novels, they seem to have arrived at the same dark answer.

At the twist in the tunnel

Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags is a biting send-up of Britain’s upper class coming to terms with the reality of yet another world war. Waugh skewers the vanity and delusions of a certain caste of high society during the Phony War of late 1939 and early 1940. In the lull, while waiting for the attack that was sure to come, fear preyed on people’s minds and terrorized their dreams, and some took wholesale advantage of the situation, including Waugh to comedic effect.

Though a light book, and in my estimation not his best, there is plenty of vintage Waugh here to enjoy: cruel and selfish characters who use charm to slip blithely through the world, whether at war or not. Then there is Waugh’s sharp wit. In Scoop he wrote three of the funniest paragraphs in modern English literature about a newspaper column called “Lush Places.” Here, he’s worth reading if only for such wonderful bits as the following, where a pompous booby reflects on his wife: “Maternity and the tranquil splendour of Malfrey had wrought changes in her; it was rarely, now, that the wild little animal in her came above ground; but it was there, in its earth, and from time to time he was aware of it peeping out, after long absences; a pair of glowing eyes at the twist in the tunnel watching him as an enemy.”