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Wednesday
I had an unsettling experience recently while reading Edna O’Brien’s Little Red Chairs, her 2015 novel about survivors of the Bosnian war and immigrants in general: I realized that I was one degree of separation from one of her genocidal characters. Or rather, from the character he is modeled on.
And this in turn means that I am two degrees of separation from the book’s villain.
I share this anecdote even though it isn’t the main thrust of today’s post, which is to explore why love of Shakespeare failed to prevent someone from becoming a homicidal psychopath. But more on that in a moment. First, the story.
In 1987, I received to Fulbright to teach in Yugoslavia, during which time I traveled around the country. At one point I spent several days teaching American literature in Skopje, Macedonia, and I remember overhearing a conversation about Nikolai Koljevič, a Bosnia Serb who taught at the University of Sarajevo and who was respected for his Shakespeare scholarship. (Shakespeare the Tragedian had come out a few years before.) My colleagues at the University of Ljubljana also mentioned him and, while they admired him, they were put off by his Serbian nationalism.
As well they should have been since, five years later, he would join the Bosnian Serbs when they launched war on the newly declared republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (they wanted to remain attached to Serbia). What followed were unspeakable atrocities, including the wholesale slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and the three-year siege of Sarjevo, which resulted in 11,541 deaths. For much of the war, Koljević was a close confidant of Radovan Karadžič, the “Butcher of Bosnia” upon whom the villain in O’Brien’s book is based and who was himself a poet as well as a psychiatrist.
O’Brien takes liberties with history. Whereas in real life Karadžič disguised himself as a doctor in herbal medicine and hid out in Belgrade to escape from the International Criminal Court in the Hague, in Little Red Chairs he flees to rural Ireland, where he sets himself up a New Age healer and therapist. Taking the name Dr. Vlad, he achieves a fair degree of success—he even gets the childless protagonist Fidelma pregnant—but then the authorities catch up with him and imprison him. Eventually we learn of the horrific acts of brutality conducted under his watch and sometimes at his command.
(Fidelma, meanwhile, pays a price for her encounter. Three of Vlad’s former fellows, feeling betrayed by him, discover her pregnancy, kidnap her, and abort her with a crowbar, leaving her half dead. Her husband, meanwhile, turns on her for her infidelity and she flees to London, finding refuge in the immigrant community.)
The passage that caught my eye was a dream that Vlad/Karadžič has involving a conversation with the Shakespeare scholar my colleagues had mentioned, who is referred to as “his old friend K.” K/Koljević notes that Vlad has stopped writing poetry and observes, “It stands to reason, with so much going on you had no time to reflect and maybe no wish to.” He then goes on to talk about their shared love of Shakespeare.
At one point, K takes a passage from Hamlet and twists it to apply to the slaughter at Srebrenica. The passage is:
I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.
Somewhat perversely, K understands this to mean that Hamlet would sacrifice 40,000 men for Ophelia’s sake:
As I say, I read more while the siege went on. I re-read Hamlet and thought for all his protestation of loving Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers, he too was a specialist in the macabre.
Then there’s a reference to Brutus’s famous quote about needing to strike when the tides are high. The reference, of course, is to killing Caesar:
You raved, you ranted, your Utopia, that diamond city enfolded in hills was beginning to slip from your grasp. Everyone was betraying you, the whole world was against you and you resolved on even greater conquest. There were more territories to be taken. Ethnic purification must happen, even if in the end you ruled over a land of ghosts. Shakespeare must have come to your mind—that tide in the affairs of man, yet you mastered any doubts you might have had. So came the next bonanza. Srebrenica. A killing spree.
The K in Vlad’s dream goes on to reminisce about their carefree student days:
[B]etween us there was that oath, we were brothers, best friends in our youth and university days, a little competitive in our reverence for William Shakespeare. We loved Goethe and Musil, but Shakespeare was God….[We would cycle] through snug little towns and to the amazement of people, spouting Shakespeare. We loved our country and vowed to leave it a better place than when we had been born into it. But poetry came first.
There are certainly Shakespeare plays that touch on what happened with Koljević and Karadžič—Macbeth, Richard III—but at this point in the dream K shifts to Conrad. Few characters in literature lose their way as thoroughly as Kurtz, and K quotes from Heart of Darkness when he feels that his former blood brother is tuning him out:
So I began, as things unraveled up there in our lair, to talk to you, as in the old days, to talk of literature and why not, since we both loved it so. I said, “Do you remember Mr. Kurtz?” and you said of course, because that time in the mountain, along with Goethe and Musil and Shakespeare, we read every word of Heart of Darkness. Who wouldn’t. We followed the pallet on which the dying Kurtz was carried and pictured the crazy woman, who came abreast of the steamer, with her wild incantations, her necklaces of glass and I said to you, “Do you remember Kurtz’s last words?” and you went silent and I spoke them to you, The horror! The horror! And I put it to you if Kurtz was not trying to expiate his own horror and ask for remission of some kind.
And at this point, K says, he realizes that Vlad is inexorably lost, that the rope binding them has been severed:
You looked at me and I trembled because I knew that for you, at that moment, my death was as necessary and as meaningless as all the other death that had gone before.
In real life, Kolejević, whom the Americans and Europeans had been hoping would succeed Karadžič as the most moderate member of the leadership, blew his brains out. The K in the book explains why:
As time went on my nausea worsened. That warehouse [in Srebrenica], with its seven thousand men of reproductive age, kept coming into my mind, along with the leitmotif of the spattered roses on the square [a Sarajevan girl killed by sniper fire]. I began to believe I could breathe better dead than alive. You see, we all became unhinged in our bastion.
So does literature have any impact on psychopaths? Even if it doesn’t necessarily prevent evil, can it at least bring about remorse? Of course, Dr. Vlad and K are just literary characters, not actual Bosnian Serbs, but it’s still worth looking at O’Brien’s thoughts.
Her answer seems to be: in some cases yes, in others no. Fidelma detects no sign of repentance when, during Vlad’s trial, she gets a private interview with him. Instead, as we saw K observe, Vlad may even have twisted Hamlet to suit his own ends: after all, Hamlet doesn’t want to kill 40,000 men to save Ophelia. And if Vlad has in fact taken Brutus as his model, he sees only the assassination and none of Brutus’s tortured reflections.
In other words (to riff off a passage from Merchant of Venice), he’s a devil who can quote Shakespeare for his purpose.
K differs from Vlad (at least in Vlad’s dream) since literature eventually alerts him to the enormity of what he and his comrades have done. Although Kurtz, once the apogee of European Christian enlightenment, has descended into a desire to “exterminate the brutes,” at least (as narrator Marlow points out) he catches a glimpse of how far he has fallen. Maybe in the end he rediscovers his soul.
There are two other mentions of Shakespeare in the novel. In a dream fantasy, Fidelma imagines confronting the imprisoned Vlad with a passage from As You Like It:
“You remember in Cloonoila,” she begins. “One day, in the classroom, you read the children a speech from Shakespeare about the Seven Ages of Man—They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.You must have known it then that you had chosen the wrong part, the worst part, the way you know it now…that it could all have been different, you might be the poet you boasted of being and no one of the damned…it will find you yet…in all that solitude…it always does…”
“Don’t go,” he says and in that moment he is almost repentant, the mendicant, the broken Faustus, finally at a loss.
But this is only a dream and perhaps as overly hopeful one at that. And as one Bosnian Serb, a man who at one point followed orders to kill and at another deserted, tells Fidelma, “You want answers…Explain himself…you won’t get it…he can’t…feelings not the same, from where you are to where he is…carnage…Go home.”
In other words, her dream that literature will prompt a moment of truth-telling is illusory.
But Shakespeare also proves to have healing properties, and this novel, with its graphic accounts of unspeakable horror, ends with the immigrant community finding temporary peace in a performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although their production is a “very free interpretation,” in the end the magic comes through as “wrongs were righted, true love and its virtuous properties restored. Nuptials were celebrated, twine rings exchanged, and packets of rice wantonly thrown on the heads of the eternally betrothed.”
There’s also an additional finale in which the word Home, so longed for by the immigrant community, is sung and chanted in the 35 different languages of the performers. At first it appears the moment will fizzle, but then
one woman stepped forward and took command, her voice rich and supple, a wine-dark sea filled with the drowned memories of love and belonging. Soon others followed, until at last thirty-five tongues, as one, joined in a soaring, transcendent Magnificat. Home. Home. Home. It rose and swelled, it reached to the rafters and through the walls, out onto the lit street, to countryside with its marsh and meadow, by graveyard and sheep fold, through dumbstruck forests, to the lonely savannahs and reeking slums, over seas and beyond, to endless, longed-for destinations.
In this novel with its heartrending accounts of people forced from their homes, a transcendent moment is reached. As O’Brien concludes,
You would not believe how many words there are for home and what savage music there can be wrung from it.
And that’s a good way to describe O’Brien’s own novel: savage music.