Coventry Page 5

  The liberal elite, meanwhile, have evolved a theory: it is their belief that many of the people who voted to leave the European Union now regret their decision. There is no more tenuous comfort than that which rests on the possibility of another’s remorse. In psychoanalysis, events are reconstructed in the knowledge of their outcome: the therapeutic properties of narrative lie in its capacity to ascribe meaning to sufferings that at the time seemed to have no purpose. The liberal elite are in shock; they fall upon the notion of the victors’ regret as a palliative for their mental distress, but because the referendum result is irreversible, this narrative must adopt the form of tragedy.

  Unlike the victors, the losers are loquacious. They render the logic of their suffering with exactitude and skill, waxing to new expressive heights. The deluge of fine writing that follows the referendum contrasts strangely with the reticence that preceded it. The liberal elite are defending their reality, but too late. Some urge a show of tolerance and understanding; others talk about the various stages of grief; others still call for courage in standing up for the values of liberalism. These are fine performances, but it is unclear whom they are for. I have often noticed how people begin to narrate out loud when in the presence of mute creatures, a dog, say, or a baby: who is the silent witness to this verbal outpouring?

  Meanwhile, in the Essex town of Harlow, a Polish man is murdered in the street by a gang of white youths who apparently heard him speaking his native language.

  *

  How can we ascertain the moral status of rudeness? Children are the members of our society most often accused of being rude; they are also the most innocent. We teach children that it is rude to be honest, to say, ‘This tastes disgusting’ or ‘That lady is fat.’ We also teach them that it is rude to disrespect our authority. We give them orders: we say, ‘Sit still’ or ‘Go to your room.’ At a certain point, I got into the habit, when addressing my children, of asking myself whether I would speak in the same way to an adult and discovered that in nearly every case the answer was no. At that time, I understood rudeness to be essentially a matter of verbal transgression: it could be defined within the morality of language, without needing to prove itself in a concrete act. A concrete act makes language irrelevant. Once words have been superseded by actions, the time for talking has passed. Rudeness, then, needs to serve as a barrier to action. It is what separates thought from deed; it is the moment when wrongdoing can be identified, in time to stop the wrong from having to occur. Does it follow, then, that a bigoted remark – however ugly to hear – is an important public interface between idea and action? Is rudeness a fundamental aspect of civilisation’s immunity, a kind of antibody that is mobilised by the contagious presence of evil?

  In the United States, Hillary Clinton calls half the supporters of Donald Trump ‘a basket of deplorables’. At first the remark impressed me. I approved of Clinton for her courage and honesty, while reflecting on her curious choice of words. ‘Basket of deplorables’ almost sounded like a phrase from Dr Seuss: it would be typical of him to put deplorables in a basket, for the moral amusement of his young readers. A sack or a box of deplorables wouldn’t be the same thing at all, and a swamp of deplorables is too Dante-esque; but a basket is just the kind of zany, cheerful container that makes light of the deplorables while still putting them in their place. It quickly became clear, however, that as a public utterance, the phrase was malfunctioning. The basket began to speak, to distinguish itself: inside it were a number of offended individuals. Clinton had made the mistake of being rude. The ‘basket of deplorables’ wasn’t Dr Seuss after all. It was the snobbish language of the liberal elite, caught committing the elemental moral crime of negating individual human value. Yet Clinton’s adversary regularly committed this crime with impunity. Were Clinton’s and Trump’s two different kinds of rudeness?

  In Britain, a man tweets that someone should ‘Jo Cox’ Anna Soubry. The amorality of the English tongue: in the run-up to the referendum, Jo Cox, a member of parliament, was shot and stabbed to death by a far-right nationalist; to ‘Jo Cox’ someone is to murder a female member of parliament who advocates remaining in the European Union. The man who posts the tweet is arrested. The police, it seems, are trying to get on top of our verbal problems. It has now become commonplace for proponents of liberal values to receive death threats. The death threat, I suppose, is the extreme of rudeness: it is the point when word finally has to be taken as deed, when civilisation’s immunity reaches the point of breakdown. ‘I could kill you,’ my mother often used to say to me, and I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. It is true that I frequently fell foul of her and others through my habit of outspokenness. The sharpness of my phrases maddened her. I was quite capable of the basket-of-deplorables mistake, the confusion of cleverness with insult, the belief in language as an ultimate good, the serving of which was its own reward. No one could mind what you said if you said it with sufficient skill, could they? Later I came to believe that the good of language lay entirely in its relationship to truth. Language was a system through which right and wrong – truth and untruth – could be infallibly identified. Honesty, so long as it was absolute, was a means for individuals to understand all good and evil.

  The liberal elite, as far as I am aware, do not make death threats. Is this because they have better manners? Do they in fact wish that their enemies were dead but would just never say so? And if they do wish it – albeit politely, in the manner of a white lie – is the sin somehow less cardinal for being courteous? The anti-liberals do not seem to find their own penchant for death threats problematic. In America, Trump even makes a veiled one against Clinton. We are told by the newspapers that Trump invited the Clintons to his wedding, that their daughters are good friends. Is this verbal violence, then, simply incompetence? Is it the verbal equivalent of someone who has not learned the piano sitting down and trying to play Rachmaninov’s Third?

  The rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill – rudeness – they find that they are the masters. My mother’s death threats undoubtedly arose from her frustration with my own use of language. What I did not take into account when I spoke to her was the difference in our social positions. She was a housewife with little education and a rapidly retreating beauty, for whom life was a process of discovering that no greatness had been held in store for her. She did such things for me as cook and clean, while I was on my way to university and liberty. Yet to my mind, she had an extraordinary power, the power to blacken my mental outlook and ruin my prospect of life. When I spoke to her, I thought I was addressing a tyrant in whose overthrow my only weapons were words. But words were the very things that roused her to violence, because at her life’s core, she had been separated from them. Her labour, her maternal identity, her status were all outside the language economy. Instead, she formulated a story of herself whose simplifications and lies infuriated me. I aimed to correct her with truth – perhaps I thought that if only I could insult her with sufficient accuracy, we would be reconciled – but she refused to be corrected, to be chastened. In the end, she won by being prepared to sacrifice the moral basis of language. She didn’t care what she said, or rather, she exacted from words the licentious pleasures of misuse; in so doing, she took my weapon and broke it before my eyes. She made fun of me for the words I used, and I couldn’t respond by threatening her with death. I couldn’t say ‘I could kill you’ because it wasn’t true, and in language I had staked everything on telling the truth.

  *

  If inequality is the basis on which language breaks down, how is it best to speak?

  In a clothes shop in London, I sift through the rails, looking for something to wear. The instant I came in, the ass
istant bounded up to me and recited what was obviously a set of phrases scripted by the management. I dislike being spoken to in this way, though I realise the assistant doesn’t do so out of choice. I told her I was fine. I told her I would find her if I needed anything. But a few minutes later, she’s back.

  How’s your day been so far? she says.

  The truth? It’s been a day of anxiety and self-criticism, of worry about children and money, and now, to top it all off, I’ve made the mistake of coming here in the unfounded belief that it will make me look nicer, and that making myself look nicer will help.

  It’s been fine, I say.

  There’s a pause in which perhaps she is waiting for me to ask her about her own day in return, which I don’t.

  Are you looking for something special? she says.

  Not really, I say.

  So you’re just browsing, she says.

  There is a pause.

  Did I tell you, she says, that we have other sizes downstairs?

  You did, I say.

  If you want something in another size, she says, you just have to ask me.

  I will, I say.

  I turn back to the rails and find that if anything, my delusion has been strengthened by this exchange, which has made me feel ugly and unlikeable and in more need than ever of transformation. I take out a dress. It is blue. I look at it on its hanger.

  Good choice, the assistant says. I love that dress. The colour’s amazing.

  Immediately I put it back on the rail. I move away a little. After a while, I begin to forget about the assistant. I think about clothes, their strange promise, the way their problems so resemble the problems of love. I take out another dress, this one wine-coloured and dramatic.

  God, that would look amazing, the assistant says. Is it the right size?

  According to the label, it is.

  Yes, I say.

  Shall I put it in the fitting room for you? she says. It’s just easier, isn’t it? Then you’ve got your hands free while you keep browsing.

  For the first time, I look at her. She has a broad face and a wide mouth with which she smiles continually, desperately. I wonder whether the width of her smile was a factor in her being given this job. She is older than I expected. Her face is lined, and despite her efforts, the mouth betrays some knowledge of sorrow.

  Thank you very much, I say.

  I give her the dress, and she goes away. I find that I no longer want to be in the shop. I don’t want to try on the dress. I don’t want to take my clothes off or look at myself in a mirror. I consider quietly leaving while the assistant is gone, but the fact that I have caused the dress to be put in the fitting room is too significant. Perhaps it will be transformative after all. On my way there, I meet the assistant, who is on her way out. She widens her eyes and raises her hands in mock dismay.

  I wasn’t expecting you to be so quick! she exclaims. Didn’t you find anything else you liked?

  I’m in a bit of a hurry, I say.

  God, I know exactly what you mean, she says. We’re all in such a hurry. There just isn’t time to stop, is there?

  The fitting rooms are empty: there aren’t any other customers. The assistant hovers behind me while I go into the cubicle where she has hung the dress. I wonder whether she will actually follow me in. I pull the curtain behind me and feel a sense of relief. My reflection in the mirror is glaring and strange. I have stood in such boxlike spaces before, alone with myself, and these moments seem connected to one another in a way I can’t quite specify. It is as though life is a board game, and here is the starting point to which I keep finding myself unexpectedly returned. I take off my clothes. This suddenly seems like an extraordinary thing to do in an unfamiliar room in a street in central London. Through the gap in the curtain I can see into a dingy back room whose door has been left open. There are pipes running up the walls, a small fridge, a kettle, a box of tea bags. Someone has hung a coat on a hook. I realise that the theatre of this shop is about to break down, and that the assistant’s manner – her bad acting, her inability to disguise herself in her role – is partly to blame.

  How is everything? she says.

  I am standing there in my underwear, and her voice is so loud and close that I nearly jump out of my skin.

  How’s it going in there? How are you getting on?

  I realise that she must be speaking to me.

  I’m fine, I say.

  How’s the fit? she says. Do you need any other sizes?

  I can hear the rustle of her clothes and the scraping sound of her nylon tights. She is standing right outside the curtain.

  No, I say. Really, I’m fine.

  Why don’t you come out? she says. I can give you a second opinion.

  Suddenly I am angry. I forget to feel sorry for her; I forget that she did not choose to say these things; I forget that she is perhaps in the wrong job. I feel trapped, humiliated, misunderstood. I feel that people always have a choice where language is concerned, that the moral and relational basis of our existence depends on that principle. I wish to tell her that there are those who have sacrificed themselves to defend it. If we stop speaking to one another as individuals, I want to say to her, if we allow language to become a tool of coercion, then we are lost.

  No, I say. Actually, I don’t want to come out.

  There is a silence outside the curtain. Then I hear the rustling of her clothes as she starts to move away.

  All right then, she says, in a voice that for the first time I can identify as hers. It is a flat voice, disaffected, a voice that expresses no surprise when things turn out badly.

  I put my clothes back on and take the dress on its hanger and leave the cubicle. The assistant is standing with her back to me on the empty shop floor, her arms folded across her chest, looking out the window. She does not ask me how I got on or whether I liked the dress and intend to buy it. She does not offer to take the dress from me and hang it back on its rail. She is offended, and she is very deliberately showing it. We are, then, equal at least in our lack of self-control. I hang up the dress myself.

  It wasn’t my day, I say to her, by way of an apology.

  She gives a small start and utters a sound. She is trying to say something: she is searching, I see, for one of her scripted phrases in the effort to reassume her persona. Falteringly, she half-smiles, but her mouth is turned down at the corners like a clown’s. I imagine her going home this evening, unhappy.

  When I tell the story afterwards, making myself both its villain and its butt, it goes like this: I, currently dismayed by the sudden ascent of rudeness in our world and wondering what it means, am betrayed into rudeness myself by a personal sensitivity to language that causes me to do the very thing I despise, which is fail to recognise another human’s individuality. But the person I tell it to doesn’t hear it that way at all. He hears it as a story about how annoying shop assistants are.

  I hate it when they do that, he says. It was good you made an issue of it. Maybe she’ll give feedback to the management, and they’ll stop making people say all that stuff.

  *

  What Jesus did was sacrifice himself, use his body to translate word to deed, to make evil visible. While being crucified, he remained for the most part polite. He gave others much to regret. Their regret sustained two thousand years of Christianity. Is regret, then, the most powerful emotion after all?

  My mother and I don’t speak to each other any more, but I’ve been thinking about her lately. I’ve been thinking about facts, about how they get stronger and clearer, while points of view fade or change. The loss of the parent–child relationship is a fact. It is also a failure. It is regrettable. The last time my parents spoke to me, my father said something very rude. He said I was full of shit. He put the phone down straight away after he said it, and I have not heard from him again. For a long time afterwards, I was profoundly disturbed by his words: for my father to speak to me of shit, and claim that I was full of it, seemed to remove my basis for exis
ting. Yet he was half of me: it was, I realised, for that reason that he felt he could speak to me the way he did. I was his child; he forgot that I was as real as he. It could be said that one half of our country has told the other it is full of shit, deliberately choosing those words because it knows that their object finds rudeness – the desecration of language – especially upsetting.

  In Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, the man who suffers most is also the man with the most powerful weapon, an infallible bow that could be said to represent the concept of accuracy. The hard-hearted Odysseus abandoned the wounded Philoctetes on an island, only to discover ten years later that the Trojan War could not be won without Philoctetes’ bow. He returns to the island determined to get the bow by any means. For his part, Philoctetes has spent ten years in almost unendurable pain: it is decreed that he cannot be healed other than by the physician Asclepius at Troy, yet he would rather die than help Odysseus by returning with him. Time has done nothing to break down the impasse: Philoctetes still can’t forgive Odysseus; Odysseus still can’t grasp the moral sensitivity of Philoctetes. It is for the third actor, Neoptolemus, a boy of pure heart, to resolve the stand-off and bring an end to war and pain. Odysseus urges Neoptolemus to befriend Philoctetes in order to steal the bow, claiming it is for the greater good. Philoctetes, meanwhile, tells Neoptolemus the story of his dreadful sufferings and elicits his empathy and pity. In his dilemma, Neoptolemus realises two things: that wrong is never justified by being carried out under orders, and that the bow is meaningless without Philoctetes himself. The moral power of individuality and the poetic power of suffering are the two indispensable components of truth. For his part, Neoptolemus might be said to represent the concept of good manners. In this drama, the expressive man and the rude man need each other, but without the man of manners, they will never be reconciled.