Harold Brodkey
A PARTISAN'S VIEW OF WORLD PEACE
Let me begin by asking you to consider with me, briefly,
one question first. Let us imagine that war has been banished from
the globe by some stroke or force of fire and inspiration - would that
peace silence tribal warfare? I assume that in a peaceful world, en–
croachments on so-called primitive territories would have stopped
and tribes would have survived. I would assume primitive peoples
would have territories assigned to them, areas, reservations . I pause
at the question of whether they should have hospitals as well- ought
their ways oflife and sickness and death be respected? Between peo–
ple of different civilizations what should the laws of mutual contact
be? How ought such laws be policed in a world that has turned its
back on the measurement of power that war is?
This subject has been treated in science fiction, in anthropology,
in structuralist discourse, in various novels. And it has occurred his–
torically and been much written about. It continues to occur as we
speak . It is happening in Israel and in Nicaragua - the Miskito In–
dians - in Guatemala, as well, and in Poland and Afghanistan.
It
may be the question which as the ground of analogy lies at the heart
of darkness.
Let me play now for a moment with the idea of a simplistic an–
swer.
It
is human to like such answers best. A simplistic answer, like
an ad, indicates, without honesty,
intention
and improvement; and the
intention may be Marxist or democratic or commercial and merely
friendly but consoling. And the brave are supposed to be clear-eyed
and to sidestep this and to be real and to live with the nightmare of
practical reason.
In
Tarzan of the Apes,
the central assumption and thing I loved
the most, was the idea of being an unaccommodated animal, an ape–
child, or rather, a child among apes . The confusion then of superior–
ities and inferiorities, the confusion of gifts and possibilities , and the
goodness and truth of all intentions and of the bonding, the truth and
unalterability, the absence of treachery in the bonds; and Tarzan's
being the leader, the chief policeman of the peace of the jungle, and
his being a brother
and
a superior mind: what I loved best was factu–
ally, zoologically what was most untrue, most simplistic .
