Outrage is the most basic, but also the most limited, of political emotions. It can spur one to action–but it can also lead to a peculiar paralysis. We can gain a certain smug satisfaction in outrage, taking refuge in our own offended purity. This is why the literature of exposure rarely serves to eradicate what it exposes. The problem isn’t that people don’t know that evil exists. The real problem is that they don’t care–or that they do care but can’t see what can be done about it.
But though Millett can set down her main themes with grace and power, she seems unable to grapple with the subtle specifics of the individual cases she’s drawing on. Despite the range of her subjects, Millett’s accounts of torture blend together into a suspicious homogeneity. She forces her narratives to fit her preconceptions, only occasionally allowing her subjects to tell their own stories. She seems wary of details, as if afraid they’ll disrupt the grand sweep of her narrative. She observes in some of the writings of torture survivors a peculiar (and probably telling) fixation on the incongruous detail: the reproduction of van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the wall of the office in which South African writer Molefe Pheto was tortured, the smell of barbecued meat that accompanied the repeated gang rapes of an Argentinean painter. For Millett, such details serve only to “heighten . . . brutality, giv[ing] it a further surreal quality.” Can this be all? I would think that such details might also have served, among other things, to anchor the victims in the real world. In any case we don’t get to hear what the torture victims make of such details: Millett has substituted her reaction for theirs.
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But Millett is drawn much more strongly to the rhetoric of victimization, a rhetoric that takes its force from the presumed moral superiority of the victimized. She speaks of the “helplessness” of torture victims (while frequently implying that we all live in a state of helplessness). She speaks of the “terror of the individual before the state”–as if the state can do nothing but evil and as if we have no power to challenge or even withstand such evil. At times her writing resembles nothing so much as a Cliffs Notes summation of Kafka: “Dizzy and overcome by a labyrinthine terror, the individual watches as official authority . . . defines and codifies reality. At times it merely crushes all before it. At other times it first picks the meat from the bones of contention, cruel with an elaborate intellectualism. There are moments when it is as blunt as a boot, as the pounding at the door. At other times it is complex as Christian theology, as ponderous as scientific classification.” Millett reduces all of us to the condition of the wounded soldiers in W.H. Auden’s poem “Surgical Ward”: “They are and suffer; that is all they do.”
The failure of Millett’s book is as much psychological as political: her writing is ultimately undone by her unwillingness to look beneath the surface, to look beyond her most immediate and obvious reactions. “Why does one study torture? Read about it, think about it, analyze and “obsess’ over it?” she writes. “Because of hating it, fearing it, having felt or imagined or somehow experienced it. Because of wanting to see it end.” This is a simple, logical, even honorable explanation–and an unconvincing one.
