"So much water, so close to home": Complicity and Literature

general courses

There is scarce truth enough to keep societies secure

But security enough to make fellowships accursed.

(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)

Roughly since 1898 when Émile Zola denounced the Dreyfus trial as a conspiracy – in the words, “Je ne veux pas être complice” – complicity has been a key-word and defining condition of our times. To be complicit is to go along with wrongdoing. At one end of the spectrum this is straightforward (as in accomplicity to a crime), at the other it is ethically bewildering: “try as we might to live well, we find ourselves connected to harms and wrongs, albeit by relations that fall outside the paradigm of individual, intentional wrongdoing” (Kutz, 2000, 1). The more connected we are, the more deeply enmeshed in systems of causality, the more likely is our complicity. Systemic pressure is also a factor. Is a population complicit in an unjust war prosecuted by their leaders? Of the war in Ukraine, Pope Francis has declared, “we are all guilty”. The likelihood of complicity is arguably greater under totalitarian government and military occupation. Yet complicity seems just as rife in democracies. And what of earlier times and other kinds of political and social order? Has complicity always haunted us? If so, has it always been known by this name? Has it always looked, felt and worked the same? This course seeks to address such questions via a selection of aesthetic texts from widely differing cultural and historical domains. We shall also make use of a selection of critical and theoretical reading.

Texts

Bertrand de Born…poet maudit

Carver, Raymond. "So much water, so close to home"

Dardenne, Luc & Dardenne, Jean-Pierre, Deux Jours Une Nuit (2014) [compare The Inspector Calls]

Hitchcock, Alfred. I Confess (1953) (+ Paul Anthelme, Nos Deux Consciences, 1902)

Priestley, J.B. An Inspector Calls (1945) [compare Deux Jours, Une Nuit]

Racine, Andromaque (1667)

Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader, tr. Carol Brown Janeway, (London, Phoenix, 1997).

Schrader, Paul. First Reformed (2017).

Shakespeare, William. Richard III

The York Crucifixion, The York Plays, a modernization by Chester N. Scoville and Kimberley M. Yates (online, 2003). No.35, The Pinners’ Play: The Crucifixion. https://pls.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/york.html

THEORETICAL WRITING, on complicity and associated issues

• Kutz, Christopher, Complicity, law and ethics for a collective age (Cambridge UP, 2000)

• Screech, M.A., Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, (London, Allen Lane, 1997), esp. “5. The Mocking of the Crucified King” & “6. The Old Testament Gospel”, 17-23.

• Zola, Émile, “J’Accuse”, in, L’Aurore, Paris, Jan.13, 1898.

• Plato, Republic, 2.357 – 2.359d. (Glaucon’s thesis of the relative weakness of man’s love of justice, as illustrated in the story of Gyges)

• Jaspers, Karl, The Question of German Guilt (1961)

• Arendt, Hannah, “Some Questions in Moral Philosophy”, (49-146) & “Collective Responsibility” (147-58), in her, Responsibility and Judgement, (Schocken Books, New York, 2003), 49-146.

• Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York, Harper Perennial, 1993).

• Levi, Primo, “The Gray Zone”, in his, The Drowned and the Saved (London, Abacus, 1989).

• Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Paris under the Occupation”, Sartre Studies International 4:2, (1998).

• Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Qu’est-ce qu’un Collaborateur?” (What is a collaborator?), Situations III, (Gallimard, Paris, 1949).

• Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Mauvais Foi”, in, L’Être et le Neant, (Gallimard, Paris, 1943), tr. Hazel E. Barnes, “Bad Faith”, in, Being and Nothingness, (Methuen, London, 1957).

• Sartre, Jean-Paul, Les Mains Sals, pièce en sept tableaux, (Gallimard, Paris, 1948); tr., Lionel Abel, as, “Dirty Hands”, in, No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, (Vintage, New York, 1989).

• Orbison, Roy, Get a little dirt on your hands (popular song & lyrics)

• Milosz, Czelaw, The Captive Mind, (1953).

• Havel, Vaclav, The Power of the Powerless (1978, (online text).

• Adorno, Theodor, “Lecture 15: Metaphysics and Materialism (July 20, 1965)”, in Rolf Tidemann, ed., , Can one Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, (Stanford UP, Stanford, 2003).

• Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2 (1973), 160-80.

• Berlin, Isaiah (Sir), “The Question of Machiavelli”, The New York Review of Books, 4 November, 1971.

• Berger, Harry, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, (Stanford UP, 1997).

• Gillies, John, “Furtive Majesty in John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck”, Sillages Critique 31, (2021)