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The Mullah of Dupont CircleIt isn't obscene to describe Ground Zero.

By Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Dec. 3, 2001, at 4:04 PM ET

Chatterbox was in New York last week for the first time since Sept. 11, but he didn't visit Ground Zero, in part because he might have wanted to write about Ground Zero, and this would have put Chatterbox in serious peril of provoking the wrath of Leon Wieseltier. Since the World Trade Center towers fell, Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, has been on a mission to excoriate any writer who dares aestheticize the moral horrors of 9/11. Like a Taliban mullah inveighing against the corrupting effects of photography and kite-flying, Wieseltier cries foul at any attempt "to meet atrocity with sensibility." Thus The New Yorker's delightful Adam Gopnik (enemy polymath!) gets cuffed by Wieseltier in an Oct. 8 “Washington Diarist” column for comparing the odor hanging over lower Manhattan to smoked mozzarella. "I was not in Manhattan when it was attacked," Mullah Wieseltier writes, "but I am certain that Gopnik's observation is a lie." Wieseltier then zeroes in on John Updike, who had the temerity to observe, from an apartment in Brooklyn, that "Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated surface." Such prose is "provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy." Needless to say, no such fancies corrupted our Dupont Circle cleric when he made his own pilgrimage to Ground Zero and wrote about it in a Nov. 26 “Diarist” column:

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I was not prepared for what I saw. I do not know how to express the quality of my shock, except to say that it banished culture completely from my mind. I fell dumb and stood there as if I had never read a book. My observations erased my memories. I was without allusions and without metaphors. Can a mind be naked? Then I was naked, without coverings. All I could do was look, and pray to see.

What's striking, of course, about Wieseltier's claim to have banished sensibility from his mind is its sly boastfulness about achieving, in so doing, an even finer sensibility. This clears the way for some sensory evocation of his own:

The metal was the color of an infernal tarnish. I learned that yellow smoke is released when iron is cut. The hole in the sky was more striking than the hole in the ground. I watched the cranes scoop up soil from the pit, and then I grasped that it was not soil. There was no soil in this place. What they were moving was the substance that was formed out of the dissolution of everything and everybody that had been crushed and incinerated: a deathloam.

Chatterbox has no objection to any of this. But he's a bit hazy about how we are to distinguish Wieseltier's musings from what Wieseltier had previously scorned, coming from Gopnik and Updike, as the "cheap balm" of "fine writing."

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

The Fray was evenly balanced between those who supported Wieseltier and those who supported Udike and Gopnik. Yukon called Timothy Noah "a genius" for catching out Wieseltier. Captain Ron Voyage said Wieseltier had a point, it was "a bad time for Rabbit with smoked mozzarella." Several readers took particular exception to the use of the word "loam" by Wieseltier.

Comments:

Wieseltier's argument is a familiar one to anybody who has followed the decades-long debate about whether it is possible to write "about" (as opposed to merely record as accurately as possible) the Nazi genocide. It is unthinkable that Wieseltier, given his background and interests, did not have this in mind when he wrote (as foreign as it may seem to a public that is snapping up tickets to The Producers). There is something deeply inappropriate about a writer using the death of thousands in a literal holocaust, or the death of millions in The Holocaust, as "material" in the ordinary sense. And I think Wieseltier was responding to that; I share his reaction that Updike's tone was one of preening, not mourning. I don't think, by the way, that Updike doesn't care about the dead (and I don't think that Adam Gopnik is a "liar"). I do think that their pieces were failures, though. Wieseltier, for all his pompousness, wrote a far better piece. I'm thinking out loud, here, but I guess what I'm saying is that writing about such subjects is permissible only if approached in a spirit of awe and deliberation. No, it's not. What I'm saying is is that this extraordinary historic event is a calling; like Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo, it looks through you. Extraordinary evil, like beauty, calls upon each human to feel something that transcends the ordinary--by extension, it calls upon the writer to transcend genre.

If Wieseltier is saying, Wittgenstein-like, that we must be silent in the face of such things, I don't agree. As humans, we think out loud and profit by the thoughts of others, however inadequate to the occasion. Wieseltier's piece itself is an example of what I mean; I'm glad I read it. The death-loam sentence put me in mind of the PBS series on Science in which Bronowski stood, in his dress clothes, up to his ankles in a muddy puddle at Auschwitz, where his family perished, talking about the skeptical and humane spirit of scientific inquiry, and the conviction of certainty that is its negation. It mattered to me as a young man; it gave me a way to think about the unthinkable. The Producers (the movie, at least) is also acceptable, because its sheer audacity and bad taste were redemptive--and it made me laugh. I'd put it on the Wieseltier side of the ledger. The sentimental Roberto Begnini film [Life is Beautiful], by contrast, perhaps belongs over there with Updike and Gopnik.

--Ex-Fed

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(12/6)

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