Best Thing You Can Do Is Laugh at the Devil

Flannery O'Connor

Becoming and being a writer, I would imagine, is assuming and accepting some kind of “habit of being” in the words of Flannery O’Connor.  What I always liked (and still do) about O’Connor’s work is that she took it seriously but not so seriously that she neglected the reality of life.  After all, it was precisely that reality which informed her fiction.

Another thing which informed her fiction was her Catholic faith.  As I’ve written in other blog entries here, I am not Catholic, but no matter – I still find O’Connor’s relationship to God and her vocation as a writer quite intriguing.

When I was teaching religion for a brief period of time in a Catholic school for boys, I had a quick exchange with an assistant principle about teaching.  I assured them that despite the fact that I am Muslim, I have no problem teaching Catholic theology and looking at it objectively as I do with any intellectual endeavor.  The assistant principle said to me that Catholicism is an ideology just like any other ideology and I should teach it as such.  Of course, I disagreed with him on this greatly.  If he said “dogmatic,” then maybe I would have even slightly nodded (which in itself is a complex matter), but ideological?  Absolutely not.

This brings me back to O’Connor.  I never thought that she wrote “Catholic books.”  (I certainly wouldn’t find her as interesting as I do if she did.  I read my share of fiction books, whose sole purpose was to convert the reader, and God, there is nothing more anti-literature, or anti-art than that).  O’Connor’s faith was that “habit of being,” and as such it was an inevitable part of her being as a writer.  But she did not set out to preach the Gospel in her fiction, even if she was open to it. 

My objective here in this blog entry is not get into the notion of “Catholic fiction,” whatever that may be.  What I am trying to say, by using O’Connor as an example of “dialogic writer,” is that she was not driven by ideology or some simplistic, emotionalist Catholic-ism.  She had some attitude, which worked in her favor in her courage to write, but as she noted many times, it worked against her in some interpersonal relationships.  She was not the nicest of people.   She admitted it, and she tried to apologize to those she hurt or offended.

What does it mean to be a writer?  I think I am one, and because of that I wonder about it.  It isn’t just putting words together (I certainly hope not because my strength is not in wordsmithing, that’s for sure!).  The product, namely a book, has to be an extension of writer’s personality.  But even more than that, a mirror image (albeit imperfect) of writer’s being – all the stuff he or she is made of: the past, the present, pain, happiness, vision. 

Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land (2001)

And so, I find myself conflicted.  It didn’t occur to me until now but one of the reasons why I oscillate between one voice and then another is because I feel that there are these two beings at odds.  On one hand, I have my experiences of war.  I am fully committed to the remembrance of war and the dead.  Evil exists.  Genocide happens and we are never safe.  Words like “never again” have no meaning.  We are fully capable of such acts again and again and again. 

On the other hand, I find myself to be mischievous and attracted to humor and have a tendency for “imaginative cynicism,” if you will.  I am hardly Ms. Serious.  In fact, I couldn’t possibly spend one day without laughter. 

So, if these two parts of myself are parts of my being, and if writing is directly and inevitably linked to the being, then I ask myself how in the world can these two parts be reconciled?  Should they be reconciled?  Am I making a problem out of something, which is not a problem at all?

In my daily interactions of people, I am fully aware of nuances of their interior conditions.  I know perfectly well when one laughs and when one is in compassionate silence with a fellow human being.  I would hope that what I’ve been writing thus far reflects that.  I would never ever say to myself that I need to change in my encounters with people.  I would never say that one part of me must be vanquished in order for the other to live, particularly when neither one of the parts is destructive.  So why would I deny such gifts in my writing?

Mel Brooks' The Producers (1968)

But you must admit, dear reader, that there is certainly some tension between evil and humor.  Can we really talk about evil in a humorous way?  Yes, I think we can.  As long as we are completely aware of the edge of the cliff or a line which cannot be crossed, I think we are in good shape.

There is this wonderful scene in a Bosnian film by Danis Tanovic, No Man’s Land (2001), which takes place during the Bosnian war.  The primary motif in the film is UN’s neglect and mishandling of the war.  In any case, in the scene, a group of Muslim soldiers is in the midst of fighting.  One of them is reading a newspaper and remarks: Have you read this, man?  There’s some bad stuff going on in Rwanda - genocide.  His fellow soldiers are not as amused as he is, for obvious reasons.  The absurdity of war.

Mel Brooks said something so profound in relation to the making of his film The Producers (1968).  “I was never crazy about Hitler,” he said.  “If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with with a dictator you never win…that’s what they do so well: they seduce people.  But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win.  You show how crazy they are.”