Humanities Underground

The Geometric Elasticity of Force

   Prasanta Chakravarty    An Honest Letter An exceptional testament about the nature of violence in times of civil war appears in the form of a letter: the one sent by Simone Weil to the novelist Georges Bernanos around 1938, being moved by his novel A Diary of My Times. In his work Bernanos, a devoted monarchist and a visionary, candidly describes the ferocity and casualness of violence on the part of the nationalists and church dignitaries as it unfolds at Majorca during the Spanish Civil War.  Weil had participated in the war on the Republican side. In her first encounter of the Civil War in 1936, nearsighted as she was, Weil stepped in a pot of boiling oil and completely burnt her lower left leg and instep. She found enough courage to return to combat. Should there be any confusion about the sides the two chose, she tells Bernanos early on in the letter that her native inclination has always been to side with the ‘despised strata of social hierarchy.’ This was the left radical Simone Weil who in her many teaching assignments and the grueling factory work among unskilled female labourers in the early 1930s realized and conveyed to everyone that ‘the organization of labour is the deepest root of oppression’—something that produced humiliation, which in turn, produced fatigue. But that confession of being with the oppressed strata is qualified immediately in the letter by a simple yet momentous addition: that the same associations were of a nature that proved instrumental in ‘discouraging all sympathies’ for her. What had happened that had led to such a fundamental perceptual hardening in a person who is exceptionally dedicated and driven in her acts, politics and thoughts? What did dehumanization look like at the front? The letter is actually a dialogue and an inner battle with her selfhood and its alterations as it passes through such extraordinary violent times. Writing the letter to her ideological antagonist who is equally alive to little acts of fiendish bestiality and its effects during extraordinary violent times seemed an obligation to Weil.  It was a leveling with what actually happens behind the lines during violent outbursts that takes humans to the brink of the purgatorial state of nature. In such circumstances, what does it mean to participate emotionally in a war, and at what price such first-hand knowledge? In the letter we come to witness Weil addressing a fundamental truth about nodes of intensity among the combatants: that grandeur and vice sometimes find a simultaneous natural outlet, so that all idealistic, righteous ventures are always sieved and purified at a point through the realist-determinist lens. But when the volunteer who joins the battle of resisting and fighting fascistic forces comes to square up with the realities of actual warfare, she often begins to weigh in the returns of her idealist immersion in the first place. On the one hand, the realist lens refracts back to sacrificial ideals as she ruminates upon the large catholicity of the anarchists. They did allow everyone to join their ranks. But what happens when idealists begin to waste themselves in a rut that begins to take a life of its own? Were the genuine radicals outnumbered by those who were impelled to political action by baser forms of violence? On the other hand, it is evident to those who live such a bloody war that love, an ambiance of brotherhood and, the demand for dignity among the humiliated are more than recompensed by a mix of immorality, cynicism and cruelty among those who profess equity and human dignity.  In Bernanos, Weil found a kindred soul who breathed the same odour of blood and terror as her, albeit the two nurtured diametrically opposite views about the political temperament of their times. In the rambling, confessional middle of the letter, Weil recounts several tales which depict the unleashing of actual anarchist terror, which is always offhand and banal: her almost witnessing the execution of a priest, a boy killed and his father instantly going mad, and a young prisoner given twenty-four hours to join the anarchist camp and having refused that option, shot dead in cold blood when he refuses.  In a different instance, the radicals, having discovered some haggard souls in the caves, shoot them to death lest they join the fascists. The reasoning for the mass murder is the key point: since the poor souls had not joined them and awaited the fascists, they were considered to be fascists themselves. It is not possible to hold on to any middle ground to those caught in the crossfire of civil war. And there are always justifications for such brutality: as some others were spared the anarchists considered their acts as humane and just. The final story concerns the manner in which an anarchist leader narrated the following incident to Weil: two priests were apprehended by the anarchists. Having shot one, the other was asked to leave. At twenty paces he was shot down too. Weil concludes the tale by pointing out the surprise on the face of the leader when he noticed that she was not laughing at his retelling of the incident.  Such punitive and murderous expeditions were rife in Barcelona at that time.  But the vital point is not about the number of people murdered. It has more to do with the attitude of those who committed those crimes in the name of transformation and equity. Weil emphasizes that she never saw among the intellectuals any remorse or disgust for the pointless killings. Rather the obverse was more forthcoming: ‘a brotherly smile’ whenever the killing of the priests/fascists was recounted to others.  Civil war converts human beings to automatons.  Fear is offset by a strange kind of courage among the partisan which inures them to all human loss and tragedy. After a point, you go with the tides and perform the motions. Shall we call this courage? Perhaps every act of courage has an underside. Perhaps there is no