Step Across This Line Part 15

At the frontier there has always been the threat, or, for a decadent culture, even the promise of the barbarians.

What are we waiting for all crowded in the forum?The Barbarians are to arrive today.Within the Senate-house where is there such inaction?The Senators making no laws what are they sitting there for?Because the Barbarians arrive today.What laws now should the Senators be making?When the Barbarians come they'll make the laws.. . . Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden, Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden,And confusion. How serious people's faces have become.Why are all the streets and squares emptying so quickly,And everybody turning home again so full of thought?Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.And some people have arrived from the frontier;They said there are no Barbarians any more.And now what will become of us without Barbarians?-Those people were some sort of a solution.

"What will become of us without Barbarians?" J. M. Coetzee's novel also called Waiting for the Barbarians Waiting for the Barbarians offers a dystopic gloss on the Cavafy poem. Those who spend their time on guard, waiting for the barbarians to arrive, in the end don't need any barbarians to come. In a dark variation on the ending of the "Conference of the Birds," they themselves become the barbarians whose coming they so feared. And then there are no solutions. offers a dystopic gloss on the Cavafy poem. Those who spend their time on guard, waiting for the barbarians to arrive, in the end don't need any barbarians to come. In a dark variation on the ending of the "Conference of the Birds," they themselves become the barbarians whose coming they so feared. And then there are no solutions.

"Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden?" It's not so long since the American frontier was a location of freedom, not unease. Not so long since Sal Paradise took off into Mexico with his pal Dean Moriarty to begin that part of his life you could call his life on the road. To re-read On the Road On the Road now is to be struck, first of all, by how well it has lasted: its prose sprightly, leaner, and less prolix than expected, its intense vision still bright. It's a celebration of the open road, and of the open frontier as well. To cross into another language, another way of being, is to take a step toward beat.i.tude, the worldly blessedness to which all dharma b.u.ms aspire. now is to be struck, first of all, by how well it has lasted: its prose sprightly, leaner, and less prolix than expected, its intense vision still bright. It's a celebration of the open road, and of the open frontier as well. To cross into another language, another way of being, is to take a step toward beat.i.tude, the worldly blessedness to which all dharma b.u.ms aspire.

I have always mentally paired On the Road On the Road with another cla.s.sic modern fable of the U.S.-Mexican border, Orson Welles's great film with another cla.s.sic modern fable of the U.S.-Mexican border, Orson Welles's great film Touch of Evil. Touch of Evil. The Welles picture is the dark flip-side of the Kerouac book. Like the novel, the film takes the openness of the frontier for granted: its story is made possible by the frontier's unpoliceability. However, the movie's b.u.ms are not of the dharma variety. Its characters are not blessed, or even seeking enlightenment. Welles's frontier is fluid, watchful, constantly s.h.i.+fting focus and attention: in a word, unstable. In the famous opening take, when minute after minute pa.s.ses without a cut, the inhabitants of Welles's transit zone engage in a cryptic dance of death. The frontier's everyday life may look ba.n.a.l, meaningless, and above all continuous, but it begins with the planting of a bomb and ends with the radical discontinuity of an explosion. This frontier is anonymous, denaturing; it strips humanity bare. Life, death. Not much else matters, except, maybe, alcohol. Marlene Dietrich says it best when she delivers the flawed hero's epitaph as he floats facedown in a shallow ca.n.a.l: "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?" The Welles picture is the dark flip-side of the Kerouac book. Like the novel, the film takes the openness of the frontier for granted: its story is made possible by the frontier's unpoliceability. However, the movie's b.u.ms are not of the dharma variety. Its characters are not blessed, or even seeking enlightenment. Welles's frontier is fluid, watchful, constantly s.h.i.+fting focus and attention: in a word, unstable. In the famous opening take, when minute after minute pa.s.ses without a cut, the inhabitants of Welles's transit zone engage in a cryptic dance of death. The frontier's everyday life may look ba.n.a.l, meaningless, and above all continuous, but it begins with the planting of a bomb and ends with the radical discontinuity of an explosion. This frontier is anonymous, denaturing; it strips humanity bare. Life, death. Not much else matters, except, maybe, alcohol. Marlene Dietrich says it best when she delivers the flawed hero's epitaph as he floats facedown in a shallow ca.n.a.l: "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

Some kind of a man. This crooked policeman had some good in him somewhere. A wh.o.r.e loved him, sort of. So what, he's dead. A man steps across a line, he suffers the penalty. This man got away with it for a long time and then did not get away with it. What else is there to say? The frontier watches the come-and-go of life. It does not judge. Another man, the dead man's antagonist, a Mexican lawman, comes to this border town with an American blonde. He, too, has crossed a line: the frontier of the skin, of racial difference. The blonde is his transgression, his crime against the natural order, in which such women are off limits to such men. She is therefore also his weakness. He is an honest man, but when his wife is attacked-drugged, framed-he stops being a lawman, puts down his badge, and becomes merely a man fighting for his woman. The frontier has stripped him of the law, of civilization. This is normal. The frontier strips you down, and then you are what you are and you do what you do. This is how it is. What does it matter what you say about people? This crooked policeman had some good in him somewhere. A wh.o.r.e loved him, sort of. So what, he's dead. A man steps across a line, he suffers the penalty. This man got away with it for a long time and then did not get away with it. What else is there to say? The frontier watches the come-and-go of life. It does not judge. Another man, the dead man's antagonist, a Mexican lawman, comes to this border town with an American blonde. He, too, has crossed a line: the frontier of the skin, of racial difference. The blonde is his transgression, his crime against the natural order, in which such women are off limits to such men. She is therefore also his weakness. He is an honest man, but when his wife is attacked-drugged, framed-he stops being a lawman, puts down his badge, and becomes merely a man fighting for his woman. The frontier has stripped him of the law, of civilization. This is normal. The frontier strips you down, and then you are what you are and you do what you do. This is how it is. What does it matter what you say about people?

The world-weariness-the word word-weariness-of all this is profoundly at odds with the eager, voluble world of the Beats, and the related world of the rest of literature, in which there is nothing more important than what you say about people, except how you say it. Gravel-voiced, shoulder-shrugging Marlene Dietrich saying good-bye to dead Orson echoes and invokes an older American idea of the frontier, that laconic world where actions spoke louder than words, the Boot Hill, OK Corral, Hole-in-the-Wall, outlaw frontier of which we perhaps still think most often when we combine the words "American" and "frontier," the westward-moving front-line, first of Natty b.u.mppo and later of Davy Crockett-but also of John Ford and the monosyllabic John Wayne. The West as it has come down to us is a myth of a largely pre-literate, almost pre-verbal world, a world of "kids"-Sundance, Cisco-who barely even needed names, and of "Bills"-Wild, Buffalo-for whom an epithet was enough, and at least one Bill, or Billy, who managed to be a Kid as well. Yet these men's reputations were constructed by writers, whose names we have not remembered: fabulist Boswells to the Wild West's desperado Johnsons, print-the-legend glamorizers who called themselves reporters. What does it matter what you say about people? Plenty, it turns out, if you're in the legend business. The American frontier affected to despise words, but it was a landscape built of words. And it's gone now, but the words remain. Animals, as they pa.s.s through landscape, leave their tracks behind. Stories are the tracks we leave.

The actually existing American frontier was officially declared to have disappeared forever in 1890, when the superintendent of the census reported, "At present . . . there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." Just three years after this somewhat dry funeral oration, the Frontier Thesis was born. At a meeting of the American Historical a.s.sociation in Chicago on July 12, 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, the thirty-two-year-old son of a journalist and local historian from Portage, Wisconsin, delivered his paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which would later be called "the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history," and suffered the traditional fate of the pioneer: that is to say, his ideas were completely ignored. Not for long, however. His star rose rapidly, and even though he never delivered the big books based on his ideas about the frontier-books for which he nevertheless signed contracts and accepted advances-he proved a skillful academic careerist and, after being courted by colleges from Berkeley to Chicago and Cambridge, he ended up on the faculty at, if I may mention the word, Harvard.

According to the Turner thesis, the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development . . . [which] has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

Turner characterizes the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization," a formulation that will not endear him to a more culturally sensitive modern audience. Less contentiously and more interestingly, he says that "at first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines." The frontier, he proposes, is the physical expression of Americanness. "The universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them." The frontier is created by this inherent Americanness, but it also creates much of what we recognize as quintessentially American. "The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." And: "The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political inst.i.tutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. . . . Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism." And also: "The frontier is productive of individualism . . . [so that] the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy."

All this adds up to nothing less than the American character.

To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coa.r.s.eness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier. The people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . . Movement has been [America's] dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.

The Frontier Thesis offers a triumphalist vision of America's coming-to-be with which it's easy to take issue, and since Turner first presented it, almost every single one of its ideas and a.s.sumptions has been contested. Most obviously, was there ever really such a thing as a frontier of free land, a virgin territory against which pioneer America measured itself? What, then, of the conquered and even annihilated Native American tribes-even before the coming of political correctness, I found it odd to speak, in the American context, of "Indians"-who were there long before the frontier's inexorable line began to step across their land? *33 *33 Turner concedes that what the settlers found at the frontier was "not tabula rasa," but his evident contempt for the displaced "savages" colors, and damages, his argument, or rather gives it a darker meaning he did not intend. "The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise." This optimistic formulation sounds almost imperialist now. If the original inhabitants of America were trampled over and brushed aside as the frontier snaked west, then should the rest of the world, that "wider field," now feel apprehensive of America's intentions? Turner concedes that what the settlers found at the frontier was "not tabula rasa," but his evident contempt for the displaced "savages" colors, and damages, his argument, or rather gives it a darker meaning he did not intend. "The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise." This optimistic formulation sounds almost imperialist now. If the original inhabitants of America were trampled over and brushed aside as the frontier snaked west, then should the rest of the world, that "wider field," now feel apprehensive of America's intentions?

Historians have further reasoned that the great differences between the East of the Puritans, the slavery-tainted South, and the West of gold rushes and railroads make it impossible to sustain any unified theory of frontier development-each of these is better understood as a discrete region, with its own historical dynamics. The frontier's supposed formative effect on the American self is also disputed. The land swallowed by the frontier was by no means handed out in democratically equal parcels to the early pioneers; and as regards the formation of the American character, it was a sense of community, not of rugged individualism, that enabled much of the West to thrive, and develop toward statehood. A contemporary account suggests that most migrant wagon trains, for example, were composed of extended kins.h.i.+p networks. Moreover, as the nineteenth century wore on, the role of the federal government and large corporations grew increasingly important. Corporate investors headquartered in New York laid the railroads; government troops defeated Indian nations who refused to get out of the way of manifest destiny; even the cowboys, enshrined in popular mythology as rugged loners, were generally low-level employees of sometimes foreign-owned cattle corporations. The West has not been the land of freedom and opportunity that both Turnerian history and popular mythology would have us believe. For many women, Asians, Mexicans who suddenly found themselves residents of the United States, and, of course, Indians, the West was no promised land. most migrant wagon trains, for example, were composed of extended kins.h.i.+p networks. Moreover, as the nineteenth century wore on, the role of the federal government and large corporations grew increasingly important. Corporate investors headquartered in New York laid the railroads; government troops defeated Indian nations who refused to get out of the way of manifest destiny; even the cowboys, enshrined in popular mythology as rugged loners, were generally low-level employees of sometimes foreign-owned cattle corporations. The West has not been the land of freedom and opportunity that both Turnerian history and popular mythology would have us believe. For many women, Asians, Mexicans who suddenly found themselves residents of the United States, and, of course, Indians, the West was no promised land. *34 *34 So it seems that poor old Turner was a dozen ways wrong. And yet he may, like Freud, have been wrong in the right way. Medievalist historians, applying Turnerian frontier theory to the development of Europe in the Middle Ages, have found his ideas useful. The medieval European frontier, pus.h.i.+ng outward from England into Wales and Ireland; and across central Europe; and clearing the great forests of Russia; and finally in the conflicts with Islam in the Crusader East and the Spanish Reconquista can be seen, to quote one specialist in the period, Professor C. J. Bishko of the University of Virginia, as being clearly "one frontier, a unity not in geographical contiguity but in its expression of the same deep forces of medieval dynamics and basic similarities of aims, techniques, and accomplishments.

"The frontier," Professor Bishko argues, created for history not only new lands of European culture, but new peoples-the Portuguese, the Castilians, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Great Russians, peoples who move swiftly to dominate the modern history of their respective countries. It produced a frontier literature in . . . heroic works like the Lay of Igor's Campaign Lay of Igor's Campaign or the or the Poema del Cid. Poema del Cid. It created in abundance new types of medieval men and women-the frontier n.o.ble, whether he be called bogatyr, caballero, lord marcher, or knight; it produced the Military Orders which were so prominent in frontier warfare and colonization; the frontier churchman, the colonizing bishop or abbot, the missionary, the priest of the lonely frontier parish; the frontier merchant and the frontier townsman; the land speculator and colonial promoter; above all, the frontier farmer, axe-swinging, plow-guiding, or stock-trailing. These are the frontiersmen who pushed forward the edges of medieval civilization, with or without the support of their rulers; these are the men whose warlike or peaceful dealings with non-Europeans first raise for medieval thinkers the great questions of the rights of native peoples and the legitimacy of just war against them-the beginning of the controversies that in the sixteenth century were enlarged to include the Indians of the New World and led medieval-minded Spanish theologians and jurists to lay the foundations of international law and the rights of non-European man. For many medieval men, who never saw the rising royal capitals, the bustling mercantile cities, the ancient feudal domains, or the new books and universities of the medieval renaissance, the medieval frontier represented the chief best hope of life, the call to robust adventure and to the risks and rewards of courage and enterprise. And like so many things medieval, the frontier did not end in 1453, or 1492, or 1500, but pa.s.sed on into the making of modern civilization. It created in abundance new types of medieval men and women-the frontier n.o.ble, whether he be called bogatyr, caballero, lord marcher, or knight; it produced the Military Orders which were so prominent in frontier warfare and colonization; the frontier churchman, the colonizing bishop or abbot, the missionary, the priest of the lonely frontier parish; the frontier merchant and the frontier townsman; the land speculator and colonial promoter; above all, the frontier farmer, axe-swinging, plow-guiding, or stock-trailing. These are the frontiersmen who pushed forward the edges of medieval civilization, with or without the support of their rulers; these are the men whose warlike or peaceful dealings with non-Europeans first raise for medieval thinkers the great questions of the rights of native peoples and the legitimacy of just war against them-the beginning of the controversies that in the sixteenth century were enlarged to include the Indians of the New World and led medieval-minded Spanish theologians and jurists to lay the foundations of international law and the rights of non-European man. For many medieval men, who never saw the rising royal capitals, the bustling mercantile cities, the ancient feudal domains, or the new books and universities of the medieval renaissance, the medieval frontier represented the chief best hope of life, the call to robust adventure and to the risks and rewards of courage and enterprise. And like so many things medieval, the frontier did not end in 1453, or 1492, or 1500, but pa.s.sed on into the making of modern civilization. *35 *35 It is one of the great characteristics of frontiers to be disputed. Give me a line drawn across the world and I'll give you an argument. We can concede the point of almost all of F. J. Turner's adversaries' criticisms-can agree that the frontier was differently formed and meant different things in different parts of America; that much of what went on in frontier society was more oligarchic than democratic; that the country into which it moved was "free" only in the sense that the white settlers refused to accept the previous inhabitants' rights over the land; and that community values, corporatism, and federalism were far more important than Turner allowed-in short, we can reduce great swathes of the thesis to ashes, and still, in the midst of the smoking ruins, something substantial remains standing. The image persists of a line snaking westward across a continent, changing everything as it goes, making up a world. That line acts upon our imaginations as it acted upon the imaginations of those engaged in pus.h.i.+ng it onward, and indeed the imaginations of those engaged in resisting its advance. In American literature from Twain to Bellow we recognize the workings of that frontier intellect whose characteristics Turner so eloquently set down, and in the dark side of modern America, in its government-hating militias and Unabombers, we recognize that dominant individualism, working for evil, whose existence he so perfectly understood. Take away the triumphalist note, and Turner's thesis seems to foreshadow much of American history since the closing of the frontier: a history of fluctuations, in which there are periods of energetic engagement with the world, a pus.h.i.+ng out of frontiers, an expansion of America's sphere of influence, and then periods of retreat behind the fortress walls of a frontier that no longer possesses the power of movement.

The old imperial powers, such as the British, have found it hard to adapt to their new, diminished status in the post-colonial world. For the British, their empire was a kind of transcendence, a way not only of overwhelming nations, subsuming their frontiers within the larger frontier of the pax Britannica, but also of breaking out of the frontiers of the self, casting off the reticence of England and becoming an unb.u.t.toned, operatic people, hot and large, striding across the great stage of the world instead of the cramped boards of home. In empire's aftermath, they have been pushed back into their box, their frontier has closed in on them like a prison, and the new opening of political and financial borders in the European Union is still viewed by them with suspicion. America, the closest thing we have to a new imperial power, is experiencing this problem in reverse; as its influence spreads across the planet, America is still battling to understand its new, post-frontier self. Beneath the surface of the American century, with its many triumphs, we may discern something unsettled, a disquiet about ident.i.ty, a recurring uncertainty about the role that America should play in the world, and how it should play it.

Time, perhaps, to propose a new thesis of the post-frontier: to a.s.sert that the emergence, in the age of ma.s.s migration, ma.s.s displacement, globalized finances and industries, of this new, permeable post-frontier is the distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of our times, and, to use Turner's phrase, explains our development as nothing else can. For all their permeability, the borders snaking across the world have never been of greater importance. This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and s.h.i.+fting lines.

Part Two

Uncertainty is not only America's curse. All of us now face the future with varying degrees of foreboding. To a large degree, I want to suggest, this is because of the change in the nature of the frontier that has taken place in our globalized world. From the most intimate of frontiers, that of the home, to the largest, pan-global scale, the new permeability of the frontier has become the overriding issue. Terrorism is the most appalling consequence of the permeable frontier, but terrorism, after all, is only one of the forces in the modern world that expressly reject frontiers in the way of the empires of the last century and the century before. The twin worlds of business and finance do the same thing, and the concerns of many people about the consequences of the globalized economy don't need to be rehea.r.s.ed here. Other groups-artists, scientists-have always scorned the limitations that frontiers represent, drawing freely from whatever wells they please, upholding the principle of the free exchange of knowledge. The open frontier, created by the bringing down of walls, has been and remains a symbol of other opennesses. But, if I may quote a pa.s.sage I wrote a couple of years ago in an article about, of all things, rock and roll music, The music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. As long as Orpheus could raise his voice in song, the Maenads could not kill him. Then they screamed, and their shrill cacophony drowned his music, and then their weapons found their mark, and he fell, and they tore him limb from limb.Screaming against Orpheus, we too become capable of murder. The collapse of Communism, the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the Wall, was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. Instead, the postCold War world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many of us stiff. We retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller stockades, imprisoned ourselves in narrower, ever more fanatical definitions of ourselves-religious, regional, ethnic-and readied ourselves for war. *36 *36 The most precious book I possess is my pa.s.sport. Like most such bald a.s.sertions, this will come across as something of an overstatement. A pa.s.sport, after all, is a commonplace object. You probably don't give a lot of thought to yours most of the time. Important travel doc.u.ment, try not to lose it, terrible photograph, expiry date coming up soonish: in general, a pa.s.sport requires a relatively modest level of attention and concern. And when, at each end of a journey, you do have to produce it, you expect it to do its stuff without much trouble. Yes, Officer, that's me, you're right, I do look a bit different with a beard, thank you, Officer, you have a nice day too. Yes, Officer, that's me, you're right, I do look a bit different with a beard, thank you, Officer, you have a nice day too. A pa.s.sport is no big deal. It's low-maintenance. It's just ID. A pa.s.sport is no big deal. It's low-maintenance. It's just ID.

I've been a British citizen since I was seventeen, so my pa.s.sport has indeed done its stuff efficiently and un.o.btrusively for a long time now, but I have never forgotten that all pa.s.sports do not work in this way. My first-Indian-pa.s.sport, for example, was a paltry thing. Instead of offering the bearer a general open-sesame to anywhere in the world, it stated in grouchy bureaucratic language that it was valid only for travel to a specified-and distressingly short-list of countries. On inspection, one quickly discovered that this list excluded almost any country to which one might actually want to go. Bulgaria? Romania? Uganda? North Korea? No problem. The USA? England? Italy? j.a.pan? Sorry, sahib. This doc.u.ment does not ent.i.tle you to pa.s.s those ports. Sorry, sahib. This doc.u.ment does not ent.i.tle you to pa.s.s those ports. Permission to visit attractive countries had to be specially applied for and, it was made clear, would not easily be granted. Foreign exchange was one problem. India was chronically short of it, and reluctant to get any shorter. A bigger problem was that many of the world's more attractive countries seemed unattracted by the idea of allowing us in. They had apparently formed the puzzling conviction that once we arrived we might not wish to leave. "Travel," in the happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking, interest-pursuing, vacationing Western sense, was a luxury we in India were not allowed. We could, if we were lucky, be granted permission to make trips that were absolutely necessary. Or, if unlucky, denied such permission, which was just our tough luck. Permission to visit attractive countries had to be specially applied for and, it was made clear, would not easily be granted. Foreign exchange was one problem. India was chronically short of it, and reluctant to get any shorter. A bigger problem was that many of the world's more attractive countries seemed unattracted by the idea of allowing us in. They had apparently formed the puzzling conviction that once we arrived we might not wish to leave. "Travel," in the happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking, interest-pursuing, vacationing Western sense, was a luxury we in India were not allowed. We could, if we were lucky, be granted permission to make trips that were absolutely necessary. Or, if unlucky, denied such permission, which was just our tough luck.

In Among the Believers, Among the Believers, V. S. Naipaul's book about his travels in the Muslim world, a young man who has been driving the author around in Pakistan admits that he doesn't have a pa.s.sport and, keen to go abroad and see the world, expresses a yearning for one. Naipaul reflects, more than a little caustically, that it's a shame that the only freedom in which this young fellow appears to be interested is the freedom to leave the country. When I first read this pa.s.sage, years ago, I had a strong urge to defend that young man against the celebrated writer's celebrated contempt. In the first place, the desire to get out of Pakistan, even temporarily, is one with which many people will sympathize. In the second and more important place, the thing that the young man wants-freedom of movement across frontiers-is, after all, a thing that Naipaul himself takes for granted, the very thing, in fact, that enables him to write the book in which the criticism is made. V. S. Naipaul's book about his travels in the Muslim world, a young man who has been driving the author around in Pakistan admits that he doesn't have a pa.s.sport and, keen to go abroad and see the world, expresses a yearning for one. Naipaul reflects, more than a little caustically, that it's a shame that the only freedom in which this young fellow appears to be interested is the freedom to leave the country. When I first read this pa.s.sage, years ago, I had a strong urge to defend that young man against the celebrated writer's celebrated contempt. In the first place, the desire to get out of Pakistan, even temporarily, is one with which many people will sympathize. In the second and more important place, the thing that the young man wants-freedom of movement across frontiers-is, after all, a thing that Naipaul himself takes for granted, the very thing, in fact, that enables him to write the book in which the criticism is made.

I once spent a day at the immigration barriers at London's Heathrow Airport, watching the treatment of arriving pa.s.sengers by immigration personnel. It did not amaze me to discover that most of the pa.s.sengers who had some trouble getting past the control point were not white but black or Arab-looking. What was surprising is that there was one factor that overrode blackness or Arab looks. That factor was the possession of an American pa.s.sport. Produce an American pa.s.sport, and immigration officers at once become color-blind and wave you quickly on your way, however suspiciously non-Caucasian your features. To those to whom the world is closed, such openness is greatly to be desired. Those who a.s.sume that openness to be theirs by right perhaps value it less. When you have enough air to breathe, you don't yearn for air. But when breathable air gets to be in short supply, you quickly start noticing how important it is. (Freedom's like that, too.) The reason I needed that first Indian pa.s.sport, limited as its abilities were, was that eight weeks after I was born a new frontier came into being, and my family was cut in half by it. Midnight, August 1314, 1947: the part.i.tion of the Indian subcontinent, and the creation of the new state of Pakistan, took place exactly twenty-four hours before the independence of the rest of the former British colony. India's moment of freedom was delayed on the advice of astrologers, who told Jawaharlal Nehru that the earlier date was star-crossed, and the delay would allow the birth to take place under a more auspicious midnight sky. Astrology has its limitations, however, and the creation of the new frontier ensured that the birth of both nations was hard and b.l.o.o.d.y. My own Indian Muslim family was fortunate. None of us was injured or killed in the Part.i.tion Ma.s.sacres. But all our lives were changed, even the life of a boy of eight weeks and his as-yet-unborn sisters and his extant and future cousins and all our children, too. None of us are who we would have been if that line had not stepped across our land.

One of my uncles, my mother's younger sister's husband, was a soldier. At the time of Independence he was serving as an aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, commanding officer of the outgoing British Army in India. Auchinleck, known as the Auk, was a brilliant soldier. He had been responsible for the reconstruction of the British Eighth Army in North Africa after its defeats by Erwin Rommel, rebuilding its morale and forging it into a formidable fighting force; but he and Winston Churchill had never liked each other, so Churchill removed him from his African command and packed him off to oversee the sunset of Empire in India, allowing his replacement, Field Marshal Montgomery, to reap the glory of all Auchinleck's work, by defeating Rommel at El Alamein. Auchinleck was a rarity among World War II field marshals in that he resisted the temptation of publis.h.i.+ng his memoirs, so this is a story that came down to me from my uncle, his ADC, who later became a general in the Pakistani Army and for a time a minister in the Pakistani government as well.

My uncle the general told another story, too, which created a ripple of interest when he published his own memoirs late in life. The Auk, he said, had been convinced that he could stop the Part.i.tion Ma.s.sacres if he were allowed to intervene, and had approached Britain's prime minister, Clement Attlee, to ask for permission to do so. Attlee, rightly or wrongly, took the view that the period of British rule in India was over, that Auchinleck was there only in a transitional, consultative capacity, and should therefore do nothing. British troops were not to get involved in this purely Indo-Pakistani crisis. This inaction was the final act of the British in India. What Nehru and Jinnah would have felt about a British offer of help is not recorded. It is possible they would not have agreed. It is probable they were never asked. As for the dead, n.o.body can even agree on how many there were. One hundred thousand? Half a million? We can't be sure. n.o.body was keeping score.

During my childhood years my parents, sisters, and I would sometimes travel between India and Pakistan-between Bombay and Karachi-always by sea. The steamers plying that route were a pair of old rust-buckets, the Sabarmati Sabarmati and the and the Sarasvati. Sarasvati. The journey was hot and slow, and for mysterious reasons the boats would always stop for hours off the coast of the Rann of Kutch, while unexplained cargoes were ferried on and off: smugglers' goods, I imagined eagerly, gold, or precious stones. (I was too innocent to think of drugs.) When we reached Karachi, however, we entered a world far stranger than the smugglers' marshy, ambiguous Rann. It was always a shock for us Bombay kids, accustomed as we were to the easy cultural openness and diversity of our cosmopolitan hometown, to breathe the barren, desert air of Karachi, with its far more closed, blinkered monoculture. Karachi was boring. (This, of course, was before it turned into the gun-law metropolis it has now become, in which the army and police, or those soldiers and policemen who have not been bought off, worry that the city's criminals may well be better armed than they are. It's still boring, there's still nowhere to go and nothing to do, but now it's frightening as well.) Bombay and Karachi were so close to each other geographically, and my father, like many of his contemporaries, had gone back and forth between them all his life. Then, all of a sudden, after Part.i.tion, each city became utterly alien to the other. The journey was hot and slow, and for mysterious reasons the boats would always stop for hours off the coast of the Rann of Kutch, while unexplained cargoes were ferried on and off: smugglers' goods, I imagined eagerly, gold, or precious stones. (I was too innocent to think of drugs.) When we reached Karachi, however, we entered a world far stranger than the smugglers' marshy, ambiguous Rann. It was always a shock for us Bombay kids, accustomed as we were to the easy cultural openness and diversity of our cosmopolitan hometown, to breathe the barren, desert air of Karachi, with its far more closed, blinkered monoculture. Karachi was boring. (This, of course, was before it turned into the gun-law metropolis it has now become, in which the army and police, or those soldiers and policemen who have not been bought off, worry that the city's criminals may well be better armed than they are. It's still boring, there's still nowhere to go and nothing to do, but now it's frightening as well.) Bombay and Karachi were so close to each other geographically, and my father, like many of his contemporaries, had gone back and forth between them all his life. Then, all of a sudden, after Part.i.tion, each city became utterly alien to the other.

As I grew older the distance between the two cities increased, as if the borderline created by Part.i.tion had cut through the landma.s.s of South Asia as a taut wire cuts through a cheese, literally slicing Pakistan away from India, so that it could slowly float away across the Arabian Sea, the way the Iberian Peninsula floats away from Europe in Jose Saramago's novel The Stone Raft. The Stone Raft. In my childhood the whole family used to gather, once or twice a year, at my maternal grandparents' home in Aligarh, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. These family gatherings held us together; but then my grandparents moved to Pakistan, the Aligarh house was lost, the gatherings ended, and the Indian and Pakistani branches of the family began to drift apart. When I met my Pakistani cousins I found, more and more, how unlike one another we had become, how different our basic a.s.sumptions were. It became easy to disagree; easier, for the sake of family peace, to hold one's tongue. In my childhood the whole family used to gather, once or twice a year, at my maternal grandparents' home in Aligarh, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. These family gatherings held us together; but then my grandparents moved to Pakistan, the Aligarh house was lost, the gatherings ended, and the Indian and Pakistani branches of the family began to drift apart. When I met my Pakistani cousins I found, more and more, how unlike one another we had become, how different our basic a.s.sumptions were. It became easy to disagree; easier, for the sake of family peace, to hold one's tongue.

As a writer I've always thought myself lucky that, because of the accidents of my family life, I've grown up knowing something of both India and Pakistan. I have frequently found myself explaining Pakistani att.i.tudes to Indians and vice versa, arguing against the prejudices that have grown more deeply ingrained on both sides as Pakistan has drifted further and further away across the sea. I can't say that my efforts have been blessed with much success, or indeed that I have been an entirely impartial arbiter. I hate the way in which we, Indians and Pakistanis, have become each other's others, each seeing the other as it were through a gla.s.s, darkly, each ascribing to the other the worst motives and the sneakiest natures. I hate it, but in the last a.n.a.lysis I'm on the Indian side.

One of my aunts was living in Karachi, Pakistan, at the time of Part.i.tion. She was a close friend of the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (19111984). Faiz was the first great writer I ever met, and through his oeuvre and his conversation he provided me with a description of the writer's job that I accepted fully. Faiz was an exceptional lyric poet, and his many ghazals, ghazals, set to music, earned him literally millions of admirers, even though these were, often, strangely unromantic, disabused serenades: set to music, earned him literally millions of admirers, even though these were, often, strangely unromantic, disabused serenades: Do not ask of me, my love,that love I once had for you . . .How lovely you are still, my love,but I am helpless too;for the world has other sorrows than love,and other pleasures, too.Do not ask of me, my love,that love I once had for you.

He loved his country, too, but one of his best poems about it took, with lyrical disenchantment, the point of view of the alienated exile. This poem, translated by Agha Shahid Ali, was put up on posters in the New York subway a couple of years ago, to the delight of all those who love Urdu poetry: You ask me about that country whose details now escape me,I don't remember its geography, nothing of its history.And should I visit it in memory,It would be as I would a past lover,After years, for a night, no longer restless with pa.s.sion, with no fear of regret.I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.

An uncompromising poet of both romantic and patriotic love, Faiz was also a political figure and a very public writer, taking on the central issues of his time both inside and outside his poetry. This double-sided conception of the writer's role, part-private and part-public, part-oblique and part-direct, would, thanks in large part to the influence of Faiz's example, become mine as well. I did not share his political convictions, in particular his fondness for the Soviet Union, which gave him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, but I did quite naturally share his vision of what the writer's job is, or should be.

But all this was many years later. Back in 1947, Faiz might not have survived the riots that followed Part.i.tion had it not been for my aunt.

Faiz was not only a Communist but an outspoken unbeliever as well. In the days following the birth of a Muslim state, these were dangerous things to be, even for a much-loved poet. Faiz came to my aunt's house knowing that an angry mob was looking for him and that if they should find him, things would not go well. Under the rug in the sitting room there was a trapdoor leading down into a cellar. My aunt had the rug rolled back, Faiz descended into the cellar, the trapdoor closed, the rug rolled back. And when the mob came for the poet, they did not find him. Faiz was safe, although he went on provoking the authorities and the faithful with his ideas and his poems-draw a line in the sand and Faiz would feel intellectually obliged to step across it-and, as a result, in the early 1950s he was obliged to spend four years in Pakistani jails, which are not the most comfortable prisons in the world. Many years later I used the memory of the incident at my aunt's house as the inspiration for a chapter in Midnight's Children, Midnight's Children, but it's the real-life story of the real-life poet, or at any rate the story in the form it reached me by the not entirely reliable route of family legend, that has left the deeper impression on me. but it's the real-life story of the real-life poet, or at any rate the story in the form it reached me by the not entirely reliable route of family legend, that has left the deeper impression on me.

As a young boy, too young to know or love Faiz's work, I loved the man instead: the warmth of his personality, the grave seriousness with which he paid attention to children, the twisted smile on his kindly Grandpa Munster face. It seemed to me back then, and it seems to me still, that whatever endangered him, I would emphatically oppose. If the Part.i.tion that created Pakistan had sent that mob to get him, then I was against it. Later, when I was old enough to approach the poems, I found confirmation there. In his poem "The Morning of Freedom," written in those numinous midnight hours of mid-August 1947, Faiz began: This stained light, this night-bitten dawnThis is not the dawn we yearned for.

The same poem ends with a warning and an exhortation: The time for the liberation of heart and mindHas not come as yet.Continue your arduous journey.Press on, the destination is still far away.

The last time I saw Faiz was at my sister's wedding, and my final, gleeful memory of him is of the moment when, to the gasping horror of the more orthodox-and therefore puritanically teetotal-believers in the room, he proposed a toast to the newlyweds while raising high a cheery gla.s.s br.i.m.m.i.n.g with twelve-year-old Scotch whiskey on the rocks. When I think about Faiz and remember that good-natured, but quite deliberately transgressive incident, he looks to my mind's eye like a bridge between the literal and metaphorical worlds, or like a Virgil, showing us poor Dantes the way through h.e.l.l. It's as important, he seems to be saying as he knocks back his blasphemous whiskey, to cross metaphorical lines as it is to cross actual ones: not to be contained or defined by anybody else's idea of where a line should be drawn.

The crossing of borders, of language, geography, and culture; the examination of the permeable frontier between the universe of things and deeds and the universe of the imagination; the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world's many different kinds of Thought Policemen: these matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circ.u.mstances of my life, rather than chosen by me for intellectual or "artistic" reasons. Born into one language, Urdu, I've made my life and work in another. Anyone who has crossed a language frontier will readily understand that such a journey involves a form of shape-s.h.i.+fting or self-translation. The change of language changes us. All languages permit slightly varying forms of thought, imagination, and play. I find my tongue doing slightly different things with Urdu than I do "with," to borrow the t.i.tle of a story by Hanif Kureis.h.i.+, "your tongue down my throat."

The greatest writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier, Vladimir Nabokov, enumerated, in his "Note on Translation," the "three grades of evil [that] can be discerned in the strange world of verbal transmigration." *37 *37 He was talking about the translation of books and poems, but when as a young writer I was thinking about how to "translate" the great subject of India into English, how to allow India itself to perform the act of "verbal transmigration," the Nabokovian "grades of evil" seemed to apply. He was talking about the translation of books and poems, but when as a young writer I was thinking about how to "translate" the great subject of India into English, how to allow India itself to perform the act of "verbal transmigration," the Nabokovian "grades of evil" seemed to apply.

"The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge," Nabokov wrote. "This is mere human frailty and thus excusable." Western works of art that dealt with India were riddled with such mistakes. To name just two: the scene in David Lean's film of A Pa.s.sage to India A Pa.s.sage to India in which he makes Dr. Aziz leap onto Fielding's bed and cross his legs in which he makes Dr. Aziz leap onto Fielding's bed and cross his legs while keeping his shoes on, while keeping his shoes on, a solecism that would make any Indian wince; and the even more unintentionally hilarious scene in which Alec Guinness, as G.o.dbole, sits by the edge of the sacred tank in a Hindu temple a solecism that would make any Indian wince; and the even more unintentionally hilarious scene in which Alec Guinness, as G.o.dbole, sits by the edge of the sacred tank in a Hindu temple and dangles his feet in the water. and dangles his feet in the water.

"The next step to h.e.l.l," Nabokov says, "is taken by the translator who skips words or pa.s.sages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers." For a long time, or so I felt, almost the whole of the multifarious Indian reality was "skipped" in this way by writers who were uninterested in anything except Western experiences of India-English girls falling for maharajas, or being a.s.saulted, or not being a.s.saulted, by non-maharajas, in nocturnal gardens, or mysteriously echoing caves-written up in a coolly cla.s.sical Western manner. But of course most experiences of India are Indian experiences of it, and if there is one thing India is not, it is cool and cla.s.sical. India is hot and vulgar, I thought, and it needed a literary "translation" in keeping with its true nature.

The third and worst crime of translation, in Nabokov's opinion, was that of the translator who sought to improve on the original, "vilely beautifying" it "in such a fas.h.i.+on as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public." The exoticization of India, its "vile beautification," is what Indians have disliked most. Now, at last, this kind of fake glamorizing is coming to an end, and the India of elephants, tigers, peac.o.c.ks, emeralds, and dancing girls is being laid to rest. A generation of gifted Indian writers in English is bringing into English their many different versions of the Indian reality, and these many versions, taken together, are beginning to add up to something that one might call the truth.

In dreams begin responsibilities. The way we see the world affects the world we see. As our ideas of female beauty change, so we see different sorts of women as beautiful. As our ideas of healthy living change, so we begin to look at the things we eat differently. Our dreams of our own and our children's future shape the everyday judgments we make, about work, about people, about the world that either enables or obstructs those dreams. Daily life in the real world is also an imagined life. The creatures of our imagination crawl out from our heads, cross the frontier between dream and reality, between shadow and act, and become actual. The way we see the world affects the world we see. As our ideas of female beauty change, so we see different sorts of women as beautiful. As our ideas of healthy living change, so we begin to look at the things we eat differently. Our dreams of our own and our children's future shape the everyday judgments we make, about work, about people, about the world that either enables or obstructs those dreams. Daily life in the real world is also an imagined life. The creatures of our imagination crawl out from our heads, cross the frontier between dream and reality, between shadow and act, and become actual.

Imagination's monsters do the same thing. The attack on the World Trade Center was essentially a monstrous act of the imagination, intended to act upon all our imaginations, to shape our own imaginings of the future. It was an iconoclastic act, in which the defining icons of the modern, the world-shrinking airplanes and those soaring secular cathedrals, the tall buildings, were rammed into each other in order to send a message: that the modern world itself was the enemy, and would be destroyed. It may seem unimaginable to us, but to those who perpetrated this crime, the deaths of many thousands of innocent people were a side issue. Murder was not the point. The creation of a meaning was the point. The terrorists of September 11, and the planners of that day's events, behaved like perverted, but in another way brilliantly transgressive, performance artists: hideously innovative, shockingly successful, using a low-tech attack to strike at the very heart of our high-tech world. In dreams begin irresponsibilities, too.

I am trying to talk about literature and ideas, but you see that I keep being dragged back to catastrophe. Like every writer in the world, I am trying to find a way of writing after September 11, 2001, a day that has become something like a borderline. Not only because the attacks were a kind of invasion but because we all crossed a frontier that day, an invisible boundary between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and it turned out to be the unimaginable that was real. On the other side of that frontier, we find ourselves facing a moral problem: how should a civilized society-in which, as in all civilizations, there are limits, things we will not do, or allow to be done in our name, because we consider them beyond the pale, unacceptable-respond to an attack by people for whom there are no limits at all, people who will, quite literally, do anything-blow off their own feet, or tilt the wings of an airplane just before it hits a tower, so that it takes out the maximum number of floors?

The evil that men do lives after them,the good is oft interred with their bones.

It is not surprising that the word "evil" has been used a great deal these past months; perhaps too often. The terrorists became "the evildoers," their leader became "the evil one," and now comes the discovery of that unusual phenomenon, an "axis of evil," on which the president of the United States is threatening to make war. It's an oddly contradictory word, "evil," too freighted with absolute meaning to be an appropriate description of the messy relativity of actuality, too debased by over-use to mean as much as it should. Thus the comedy website SatireWire.com reveals that bitter after being snubbed for members.h.i.+p in the Axis of Evil, Libya, China, and Syria today announced that they had formed the Axis of Just as Evil, which they said would be way eviler than that stupid IranIraqNorth Korea axis. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia, and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable. Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst but Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice but Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Sometimes Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick."That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do," said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.

I wish, myself, that the president had not promised to "rid the world of evil"-that's a big project, a war he probably can't win. "Evil" is a term that can obscure as well as clarify. For me, the greatest difficulty with it is that it dehistoricizes these events, depoliticizes, and even depersonalizes them. If evil is the devil's work, and in this deeply religious administration one must a.s.sume that many people in high places think it is, then that, to my unbeliever's way of thinking, actually lets the terrorists off the hook. If evil is external to us, a force working upon us from outside ourselves, then our moral responsibility for its effects is diminished.

The most attractive thing about the Shakespearean att.i.tude to evil is its emphasis on human, not divine, responsibility for it. "The evil that men do, that men do," Mark Antony says, and that's the only kind that interests Shakespeare. The conspirators in Julius Caesar Julius Caesar are obsessed with omens and auguries. "Never till now," says Casca, are obsessed with omens and auguries. "Never till now," says Casca, Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.Either there is a civil strife in heaven,Or else the world, too saucy with the G.o.ds,Incenses them to send destruction.

And that's not all.

Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.And yesterday the bird of night did sit,Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigiesDo so conjointly meet, let not men say"These are their reasons, they are natural";For, I believe, they are portentous thingsUnto the climate that they point upon.

The conspirators talk themselves into believing that the omens and portents, the signs from the G.o.ds, justify, even necessitate, their crime. To read the transcript of the so-called smoking-gun bin Laden videotape, the notorious "giggling" video in which he laughs about his crimes and the deaths of his own men, is to be struck by the similarities between the mind-set of Al-Qaida and that of Caesar's murderers. The tape is full of talk about prophetic dreams and visions. Bin Laden himself says: "Abu al-Hasan al-Masri told me a year ago: 'I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!' He said the game went on and we defeated them. So that was a good omen for us." Or, again: "This brother came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America. . . . I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream." At this point, on the tape, another person's voice is heard recounting yet another dream about two planes. .h.i.tting a big building.

Dreams and omens are murderers' exculpations. Shakespeare knew better. It is again Casca, portent-ridden Casca, who speaks: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, / but in ourselves, that we are underlings." He's talking about the need for a coup. But after the a.s.sa.s.sination, we forget the final clause; it is the first part of the couplet, the part about responsibility for one's own actions, whose truth we are made to feel. "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, / but in ourselves." It is Shakespeare's genius to put in the mouth of an a.s.sa.s.sin the very thought that will d.a.m.n him afterward. Shakespeare doesn't believe in the devil's work. In the last scene of Oth.e.l.lo, Oth.e.l.lo, when the Moor finally learns how he has been duped by Iago, he says, "I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable." No cloven hoofs protrude from the villain's hose. "If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee." The world is real. There are no demons. Men are demonic enough. when the Moor finally learns how he has been duped by Iago, he says, "I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable." No cloven hoofs protrude from the villain's hose. "If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee." The world is real. There are no demons. Men are demonic enough.

The evil that men do, in Shakespeare, is always a kind of excess. It has to do with the denial of limits, the willingness to cross any moral frontier. Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth, Iago: for them, the end justifies everything. By any means necessary. By any means necessary. Whereas Hamlet is the opposite: a man so beset by moral qualms that it takes him an eternity to act. The great question of action and the frontiers of action-how far can we go? How far is too far, how far is not far enough?-is at the heart of Shakespeare's world; also, now, of ours. Whereas Hamlet is the opposite: a man so beset by moral qualms that it takes him an eternity to act. The great question of action and the frontiers of action-how far can we go? How far is too far, how far is not far enough?-is at the heart of Shakespeare's world; also, now, of ours.

The problem of limits is made awkward for artists and writers, including myself, by our own adherence to, and insistence upon, a no-limits position in our own work. The frontierlessness of art has been and remains our heady ideology. The concept of transgressive art is so widely accepted-"if it isn't transgressive, it isn't underground"-as to const.i.tute, in the eyes of conservative critics, a new orthodoxy. Once the new was shocking not because it set out to shock but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is is the new; and shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily. Like the children in the Disney movie the new; and shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily. Like the children in the Disney movie Monsters, Inc., Monsters, Inc., we don't scare as easily as we used to. So the artist who seeks to shock must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence. And now, in the aftermath of horror, of the iconoclastically transgressive image-making of the terrorists, do artists and writers still have the right to insist on the supreme, unfettered freedoms of art? Is it time, instead of endlessly pus.h.i.+ng the envelope, stepping into forbidden territory, and generally causing trouble, to start discovering what frontiers might be necessary to art, rather than an affront to it? we don't scare as easily as we used to. So the artist who seeks to shock must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence. And now, in the aftermath of horror, of the iconoclastically transgressive image-making of the terrorists, do artists and writers still have the right to insist on the supreme, unfettered freedoms of art? Is it time, instead of endlessly pus.h.i.+ng the envelope, stepping into forbidden territory, and generally causing trouble, to start discovering what frontiers might be necessary to art, rather than an affront to it?

The British writer (and lawyer) Anthony Julius addresses such questions in a new book, Transgressions: The Offences of Art. Transgressions: The Offences of Art. Dealing mainly, but not only, with the visual arts, he valuably reminds us of the word's arrival in English in the sixteenth century, "freighted with negative scriptural overtones," and its rapid acquisition of other layers of meaning: "rule-breaking, including the violation of principles, conventions, pieties, or taboos; the giving of serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries." He examines the transgressive art of Edouard Manet in the 1860s; in Dealing mainly, but not only, with the visual arts, he valuably reminds us of the word's arrival in English in the sixteenth century, "freighted with negative scriptural overtones," and its rapid acquisition of other layers of meaning: "rule-breaking, including the violation of principles, conventions, pieties, or taboos; the giving of serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries." He examines the transgressive art of Edouard Manet in the 1860s; in Olympia, Olympia, a picture of a wh.o.r.e to which Manet gave a name often used by the wh.o.r.es of the period, he visited the frontier between art and "p.o.r.nography"-which