Dear Madame President of the MLA, with greetings to my fellow panelists and audience members:
Last night, at dinner, when you informed me that Julia Kristeva was not going to participate in our Presidential Forum due to health problems in her family, I must confess that, along with sadness at her absence, I found myself wondering whether this unfortunate circumstance might not allow me to save myself some embarrassment by reading out her speech instead of mine. But you had already asked someone else to do so and I find myself, therefore, unable to cover for the fact that I cannot deliver the words I had prepared for today’s plenary session. Something unexpected happened yesterday, unexpected and yet perhaps not unforseen. Please believe me that this is not your typical THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK excuse with which all of you in this audience of university professors are undoubtedly familiar.
This really happened.
Yesterday, upon my arrival from Latin America at Miami International Airport, at exactly 10:31 in the morning, two agents from the Department of Homeland Security impounded my speech on “The Role of the Intellectual in the Twenty-First Century.”
You might think that such things cannot happen in the United States. And indeed, you have the right to remain skeptical. In fact, that was one of the points in my speech: that we have not only the right, but the obligation to remain skeptical. And rebellious. And vigilant. The only right we do not have is the right to remain silent.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
The point is that the batteries in my computer ran out almost as soon as the plane took off from Caracas—maybe that’s why they stopped me, because I was coming from insubordinate, bothersome, chaotic Venezuela—and I made the mistake of spending the flight handwriting my speech, presuming that all fifteen pages would be easily transcribed once I had landed. But history is full of “I wish this” and “I wish that.” I could wish, for instance, that I had the total recall memory of Funes el Memorioso, that character in a story by Borges who did not know what a computer was, that I hadn’t been selected to step aside for what those men swore was a random check, that I had never watched my bags being ripped opened and every document and paper scrutinized. What would Funes el Memorioso have done if he had been forced to answer questions by two intimidating agents of homeland security? But then, he probably wouldn’t have minded if they kidnapped his speech to the MLA because all he would have had to do to retrieve it was dip into the endless archive of his memory.
But not me. I can’t recollect the exact details of what I wrote and my lawyers, working in conjunction with legal counsel from the ACLU and the journal Possession which was supposed to publish my remarks, have declared that it will take at least five years of judicial maneuvering to recuperate my manuscript, so that does leave me with the dilemma of what to do with my allotted time today. Given that the Kristeva gambit did not work, I contemplated the possibility of skipping ahead today to what every audience member really loves in any presentation, the juicy give and take of the q and a, but there is not supposed to be a question and answer period today and, besides, how can you ask questions about a speech I haven’t delivered? I considered the Nabokovian option of making up the questions and the answers, but no, better to simply describe to you what transpired between myself and those agents in that room where the portrait of Donald J. Trump glowered down at me from the wall in a rather foreboding way. I hesitate to call it a conversation, I dare not call it an interrogation, let’s just say it was a vigorous and frank discussion of the speech they held in their hands, particularly as it pertained to the new President and the so-called war on terror and the aftermath of September 11th 2001, what I called “the other September 11th.”
Which is what may have got me into trouble. What do you mean, “so-called”?, the agents kept asking, perusing the words with which I had started the speech I was never to deliver. What do you mean, that you cannot focus on the terrorist attacks on New York without linking them to this other remote and faraway and neglected September 11th in 1973, when Chile was devastated by a military coup? Does it mean, they asked, well, one of them, the shorter, stockier, beefier one asked, does it mean, he asked, that Chileans might be seeking retribution, revenge maybe, for the role the United States presumably had in the overthrow of the Allende government? Was I planning some act of aggression, nursed for more than forty years? Did I know anything about Chilean sleeper cells that would awaken now that Donald J. Trump occupied the White House?
No, I answered, in regards to revenge, my whole position was precisely the opposite. I explained that we Chileans had been victims, we had been attacked and we had not answered the violence inflicted on us with a surge of violence against the foreign power that had intervened in our democracy, we had not used terror against terror, had not imitated our aggressors. Here was a model, therefore, of how suffering can make you mature, I said, help you ask the right questions and maybe arrive at the right answers, no matter how tentative. And I repeated that word: tentative, as if it were a life saver, something to hold onto in that overly lit, overheated room.
They seemed to be listening to me quite assiduously and that’s when I thought to myself, hey, I can argue with them, I can talk them through this, that’s what I am, that’s what I’m supposed to be, someone who argues and remonstrates and reasons, believes in reason and scientifically proven facts—isn’t this what we’re here for, isn’t this the true role of the intellectual—or at least one of the possible roles—to convince the uninitiated? Hadn’t I written somewhere in my lost speech that the most formidable intellectual challenge of our era is not how to reach out yet one more time to the thousands who admire Susan Sontag but to connect instead with the immense audience that watched Celebrity Apprentice or the sixty-five million Americans who read the apocalyptic Left Behind series? Not that the two quite modest and self-effacing security agents looked as though they thought of themselves as worthy of appearing on a reality TV show nor believed, for that matter, in an imminent rapture that would end history and devour the unbelievers but, like any two bored bureaucrats, they seemed intent instead on devouring the good hot lunch that I was keeping them from.
Nevertheless, I sensed that this was a golden opportunity, here was praxis rather than theory, precisely what the left has been preaching we need to do in the age of Trump, reach across the blue-red divide. Here were two functionaries in all their glorious subalternity and marginality, people we never heard from in literary conventions, and they had read my speech not once but twice, and seemed furthermore willing to thrash out my ideas with me! Talk about q and a! I had uttered that word, tentative, which I somehow recalled as being central to my sequestered speech, so I decided to immediately address that issue, see if I could persuade my guards that to be tentative and nuanced is crucial at this moment in history, the need for uncertainty and ambiguity and philosophical insubordination, I told them, at a time when we are being fed official lies as if they were facts and facts as if there were an alternative to them and fake news as a way of ignoring the real news, and all the more important, therefore, to show ourselves humble to our adversaries, accept the insecurity of our own doubts, I said, warming to the subject, instead of the false security of complacency, the false—
The other agent interrupted me. “All right, all right, you’ve made your point.” He was taller and a bit gangly and more academic looking with his Trotsky-like glasses perched on his nose, and I wondered whether they had been told not to play the tired game of good cop/bad cop, been instructed to perform the roles of academic cop versus vulgar cop, nerd versus bully. Maybe they were a team that had been specially trained to weed out suspicious aliens with scholarly leanings and post-modern inclinations, maybe that’s where all our billions of tax dollars had been going, maybe they were smart enough to realize that I was absolutely harmless, so harmless that they could even give me back the speech. But did I really want to seem that harmless? Wasn’t that a way of accepting my own ineffectuality, admitting that it didn’t really matter at all what I wrote, what I proclaimed, what the whole MLA did or did not do, regardless of the rantings of Ann Coulter or Steve Bannon’s anti-elite tirades? Typical petit bourgeois angst: do we want to be dangerous and persecuted or do we want to be aloof and left alone? Are we members of a community or do we thrive on independence of opinion?
The brainy agent didn’t leave me much time to cogitate about this dilemma.
“We’re at war,” he said. “You know what wars are like. According to this speech of yours you were once in a life and death struggle to get rid of a dictator, and when you were in the midst of that, I don’t think you were so enthusiastic about ambiguity and tentativeness and nuance. This General Augusto What’s His Face was bad, you were good—didn’t you at that point embrace an inflexible position? Or were you full of cute intellectual fluffiness back then, maybe this, maybe that, maybe something else? Were you like that during the Allende years, when you were besieged by your enemies?”
He had a point. I have to admit this Homeland Security Agent with his Kansas accent had scored a point. I appealed to his sense of fair play.
“There’s no easy answer to that,” I said. “If you’ll just give me some minutes…” As the tall agent did not seem to object, I plunged on, trying to ignore his partner who was lolling back in his chair disrespectfully, picking his teeth with what seemed to be a—could it be a matchstick? “There are times,” I continued, and the words somehow sounded a bit hollow and artificial in that windowless room in the Miami Airport. Hadn’t I sworn to avoid manifestos, hadn’t I written in that very speech that we need to be wary of anything that smacks of preaching? But I was already swimming in my own words and there was nothing to do but keep at it. “There are times,” I went on, “when everyone is tested, times of national emergencies or even of world emergencies, when each person feels that life and death hang in the balance—their lives, what they believe in, the fate of the planet itself, all of it, hanging in the balance.”
“What?” interjected the beefier man, chewing the words as if they were another matchstick. “You believe in global warming? Another one who’s fallen for that hoax crafted by the Chinese so we’ll stop growing industrially and they can become Número Uno?”
“Hey, let him finish his thoughts,” his colleague said. “We’re not here to examine climate change. We’re here to determine if his speech needs to change, that’s our job: to do some extreme vetting of his words, understand if they pose some sort of danger to our national security, right, and we can’t do that unless we let him talk, right? So, you were saying something I happen to agree with, and our President believes as well, that there are perilous moments in our history…”
“Yes,” I took up the slack, “and those moments may shake intellectuals more than anyone else, because in an age of trouble and confusion, to think well suddenly seems to matter more than before, to understand the nature of the crisis we are facing may be a real contribution to ending that crisis, there may be no more important task than to find a strategy to communicate that quest for understanding to one’s fellow citizens. You’ve had those moments in your own history,” I said to those Homeland Security gents, “here in the United States, just before the Civil War, during the Depression, in the Sixties—when the turmoil was so immense that many artists and intellectuals felt the need to grapple with and engage in the vital issues of their day. We’re at one of those moments now. You gentlemen may not agree with me on what needs to be done, but at least we agree that the Republic faces clear and present danger.”
“So what makes you so special?” demanded the beefier man. “How come you know the answer?”
“I don’t. I have no idea what the answer is. I just happen to have some experiences that I have been struggling with for a long time, you know, searching for those answers. And those moments in my past, I had hoped they were somehow exemplary, might serve as a sort of guide for us in our current predicament, could be used to define the role of the intellectual, what’s in that speech which you have illegally seized.”
“Listen, Professor—you don’t mind if we call you Professor, do you?”
“You can call me Professor all you want, though I’m now retired.”
“You don’t look retired. You look obsessed. But anyway, Professor, retired or whatever, so tell us the formula, the gist of it, as you’re so hot on communicating to your fellow citizens. In one sentence, what is the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century? In twenty-one words or less, Professor. One for each century.”
And the other one, the brainy one, added, “You’re so interested in history? You know what Ike, President Eisenhower that is, called an intellectual? A man who takes more words than he needs to tell more than he knows. So give it to us in twenty-one words or less. And if you manage not to be excessively long-winded, you know what? We’ll let you go.”
I took a deep breath and started. I told them that there may not be a clear-cut definition, that perhaps we can’t safely speak of THE role of THE intellectual, as if there were only one. Rather, there are many different levels of intellectual activity, a multitude of often contradictory options. Because intellectuals react differently, as Edward Said once made clear, according to the historical circumstances they happen to find themselves in, that’s what I told them.
And that’s also when I stopped. I wondered whether quoting Said was wise, they probably thought he was Muslim and not of Christian birth if they even knew who he was, which I very much doubted, but they might know he had been born in Palestine, and they might start asking me my views on Netanyahu or maybe from there they’d veer to Iran and the enthusiasm for Rumi that I had expressed on NPR, who could tell what dossier about me they had compiled, and anyway I was way over my allotted quota of twenty-one words and at this rate would soon be closing in on twenty-one thousand. They wouldn’t fathom what I was talking about, they were hundreds of sound bite miles away from what I was saying, where I was coming from, the abyss between us was increasing with every word I uttered.
How to express in a formula what it had meant to feel life quicken and explode in the revolutionary Chile of Salvador Allende, when the underclass of a nation was fighting to express itself and take control of its destiny, and everything around me was bursting to find words and colors and thoughts that had never before been given a chance to emerge in our history? And how would these agents take it if I said that the present moment, right now in 2017, though far from revolutionary, was overflowing with energy and hope, the widespread resistance conjured up by a First Bully more imperious and imperial than any in the already violent past, so many movements, so many causes, so many unforeseen hurricanes and tempests of people, maybe even neighbors of these two agents, people who were struggling for a new language, were breaking out of the conventional strait jacket of politics? And that it was a matter of learning how to dream again. What would these agents say if I suggested intellectuals had to learn how to dream again? But if I said that, I would have to add that we also had to be careful not to allow the dreams to fly unfettered into the wild, that we needed to subject the dreams to scrutiny, that the critique of the enthusiasm was as important as the enthusiasm itself, that this was something I had learned and might come in handy in the years ahead. Because defeat also teaches you something. And then when democracy returned to Chile in 1990, victory also taught us something. That even in that delicate moment, when the military threatened to come back to power if we rocked the boat and were too critical, even at that risky moment, and above all at that moment, it was crucial to brutally question who we were, where we were going, why we were going there. Brutally crucial to be transgressive, especially in victory. But perhaps most valuable of all my experiences, most valid for the hazardous twenty-first century was what had happened to us after the coup of 1973. It was a dire situation and all the more dire because we were unprepared for it, we had not readied ourselves for what was coming. Most of the Chilean elite and the Chilean people themselves had never before lived under the shadow of such a ferocious dictatorship. On September 10th of 1973 we had been free to express ourselves, had books and newspapers and radios and TV stations and streets at our disposal and on September 12th we were being hunted down, arrested, executed, tortured, banished, forbidden. What mattered, of course, at first, was to survive—but survival is not enough, survival is never enough if you wish to change the world and not merely suffer it. So the years that followed forced intellectuals into many activities: at times nothing more than to denounce and offer information, fight amnesia, tell the truth as simply as possible. Because one true word is worth ten thousand lies, we have to believe that one true word is worth more than a million lies. And that was something to remember for today, for 2017, and for tomorrow.
For tomorrow, that is, if the planet and the species survived.
But I needed to be optimistic, to recall that there were other things we had done from exile and from clandestinity and from resistance: bear witness, for instance, offer a space for stories and voices to grow. And analyze, never stop trying to understand the new circumstances in which we found ourselves. And care for the word, care above all for the contaminated words, the words that had been deviated and abused and mal-appropriated by power, the words that we would have to nurse and heal and rescue if our children were ever to speak freely in a free land, carry the right vocabulary through the turmoil so that something survived the onslaught of mendacity and mediocrity and fear. Yes, fear. To be fearless, maybe that was the formula, that was the simple phrase I could furnish to these two homeland security agents.
But would they understand? Fear, they would snort. You’re afraid? Here in the United States? Just because we stopped you at random and read your stupid speech twice and are asking you some routine questions? You really think this is like Chile in 1973? You think we Americans have anything to learn about dictatorship, here, when you are free to leave as soon as we’ve chatted with you a bit, free to scurry off and make remarks at the MLA or the PMLA or the MLAPK or Muslim Liberation Alliance, or whatever it’s called?
And I knew that if we began to talk about the parallels between Chile and the US, well, then the discussion would get really entangled. I would have to explain the deadly process that had been crawling out of the swamp of September 11, 2001, the menace of what lay ahead, how sadly familiar the current state of affairs was to me, the renditions, the torture, the eavesdropping, even disappearances—desaparecidos here in the United States! —the imperial presidency, the secrecy and corruption, the cowed and submissive press, the inane justification of pre-emptive violence, the lies, the simplification of ideas, the degradation of discourse, the militarization of society, the fear, the fear.
And how all that had led, ultimately, despite Obama, perhaps because of Obama, as a reaction to the perceived menace of Obama, to Trump. And the nerdy agent would smirk at me, accuse me of simplifying when I had promised nuance, could I seriously accuse Trump of creating a police state, of emulating Pinochet? Was I going to throw around words like fascist without scrutinizing the clear historical differences?
And I would have to admit that, in effect, we don’t live in a police state, not yet, not yet, but who could deny that the same doctrine of national security which poisoned Chile is taking over every inch of public space and every corner of public dialogue, who could deny that all it would take was a really devastating attack, an act of colossal terror, for the landscape to change even more drastically, for democracy to founder, and then yes, I could well find myself back in this room and it wouldn’t be so easy to get out next time, it wouldn’t be a casual conversation next time. It could happen here, it can happen anywhere, that is what I needed to say, that is what I did not say. I did not say that we Chileans had indeed learned lessons of some value during the long years of repression and terror and banishment, discoveries also made by so many others in the precarious nations of the world. I did not say that now was specifically the time when an exchange of ideas and experiences across time and geography and cultures was required, now was the time to examine how remote intellectuals had sought to surmount the catastrophe which had befallen them in their forgotten lands, now was the time to remember how we had managed to think ourselves out of that catastrophe.
Think ourselves out of a catastrophe.
Not a bad formula. Isn’t that precisely what defines an intellectual in times of strife, in this present moment of adversity and also in the future as more disasters loom; isn’t that the best way to use our talents, our knowledge, our imagination, our intelligence in the twenty-first century?
So I formulated it to them: “Here are my twenty-one words. Count them: We’re living a catastrophe and need to find ways to think ourselves out of it, think ourselves out of the catastrophe. ”
The brainy one counted the words with pursed lips and nodded; his associate stood up from his chair.
“All right, you go and do that, Professor, go do some thinking. But you won’t be needing this speech, because it certainly doesn’t explain how to accomplish that, how to think yourself out of a catastrophe. So we’ll just keep it and that way you’ll have to figure out something else to tell your friends at the MLA. See it as a favor, our contribution to this debate, what do you think?”
I stood up to go. I gathered my belongings. They didn’t help me, just watched.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“You didn’t answer my question,” said the nerdy agent, his glasses twinkling. “About being ambiguous and tentative while you’re trying to serve a cause, fighting a war.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right,” I said. “That’s the foremost source of tension. Not only for the intellectual, but for every citizen: to battle for what you believe in and yet be critical, be suspicious of your own motives, your own positions, be relentlessly complex. That’s the difficulty, always has been. To be transgressive, a pain in the ass, even when the house is burning down.”
I turned to go.
Behind me, I heard the voice of the stocky one, the agent who had not even tried to pretend he was remotely interested in one syllable I was pronouncing. “One more thing,” that voice said. And I turned again, back towards him. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think you guys are too serious, take yourselves way too seriously. You want people to understand what the hell you’re talking about? Try a bit of humor, for a change, what do you say?”
He looked at me as if he were trying to remember my face. I knew I wouldn’t forget his.
“I’ll think about that,” I said. “I’ll just have to think about that.”
An inevitable postscript:
Everything I recounted above has, obviously, been a gigantic fabrication. Throughout my remarks to the audience at the MLA, I sprinkled numerous clues that I was engaged in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to illustrate the contradictions of intellectual life in our times of turmoil. I referred to Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, masters of deception and false manuscripts, pushing the absurdity of my tale to inverosimile extremes.
The whole exercise was a gentle way to poke fun at the self-importance of intellectuals like myself and my academic public by showing that my high-sounding arguments could not even persuade these two agents, one of whom suggested that I “try a bit of humor” if I wanted to persuade anyone who was not already convinced.
So I followed my own character’s advice and told the assembled professors this story.
But I quickly discovered that some took my whimsical literary inventions seriously, way too seriously. One professor later stopped me and wondered why the agents had not Googled my name to determine that I posed no real danger. Another wanted to know if my computer had been confiscated. Still others asked if “those brutes” had roughed me up. A former student of mine told me she was writing a letter to the Washington Post to protest my mistreatment. In an afternoon session, a graduate student confessed to me that my story had filled her with fear because if someone like me could be detained and interrogated, what might happen to ordinary people like her when they enter the United States?
It then dawned on me how deeply my fictional account of detention by Homeland Security agents had resonated with the unbridled fantasies seething inside the heads of so many of my colleagues. I doubted that any of them were about to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And as my spurious agents had pointed out when I tried to convince them that the U.S. is on the verge of becoming a police state, I was free to say anything I wanted at the Modern Language Association convention.
Yet there was no denying that my tale had tapped into a deep paranoia. If entirely rational men and women, experts in literary interpretation and ironical readings, believed me, it was because they must have already imagined the possibility of my sham experience befalling them. Not one of my friends and associates at the convention or afterward dismissed my tall tale as patently absurd. When I lamented the naiveté of my sophisticated audience, the response was unanimous: it was I who was naive.
Maybe they were right. My fraudulent yarn was apparently all too terrifyingly plausible in a country where citizens can be held indefinitely without charges, where domestic overseas telephone calls are monitored by an agency of the government without warrants, where a vice president defends the use of torture against alleged terrorists and where a president invades another country under false pretenses.
The sad truth about my story is that it comes straight out of the trepidation and terror caused by 9/11 and its aftermath that we are still living and that has led to a strongman like Trump being elected. Before that day, I would not even have thought of concocting it, because most Americans would not have understood what I was talking about. The joke would have fallen flat.
The sadder truth is that I can imagine an epilogue to my story.
The United States is hit by an even more lethal terrorist attack.
On that day, can I confidently say that there will not be a knock at my door and that two men, one tall and gangly, the other short and beefy, will not ask me if I recall spreading lies about their efforts to fight the war on terrorism? And that they will not demand that I accompany them, just for a few hours, for some routine questioning?