The torture of Baha Mousa - P mentioned more than in passing

[Kunal Shah]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/27/adam-thirlwell-baha-mousa-author


In the lunch break, reading Pynchon's cartoon novel, the violence seemed
like cartoon violence. It seemed made-up. And I continued with Pynchon's
conspiratorial gadget, his crazed apocryphal stories of the New York sewers,
and their severe conclusion: "It is this way with sewer stories. They just
are. Truth or falsity don't apply."

After the break, the hearing was shown a video of something resembling the
"choir". And I rethought my theory. The "choir" wasn't a choir at all.
Because there's no such thing as cartoon violence. It is only a cartoon in
edited descriptions. The TDF was a dirty concrete cube, with a painted-out
window, where men hooded in sandbags, their shirts imprinted with damp
patches of sweat or blood or water, slumped and cried while a soldier
screamed at them. (And suddenly, the heat was visible. The heat was nearly
60C. I had thought this was unimaginable. I didn't think this now.)

But then I remembered another sentence in Pynchon. In the introduction to *Slow
Learner*, a collection of his fiction written before *V*., the older Pynchon
itemises the younger Pynchon's faults. One, he argued, was the way death is
dissolved in the fantasia of his style. Whereas, Pynchon worried: "When we
speak of seriousness in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude
toward death . . . Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever
brought up with younger writers . . ."

The two separate ideas – that some stories are so crazed that this crazed
unreality is part of their form, and that, on the other hand, death should
not be treated in such a delinquent way – seem to describe two halves of a
problem for the apprentice novelist: how to be true to the world's
appropriation of fantastical forms, and simultaneously the recalcitrant
facts.

So I sat there, and listened. One soldier, said the lawyers, had been
accused of sitting a hooded prisoner in front of an open jerrycan of petrol.
The prisoner could smell the fumes. Then liquid was poured on his head. Then
his hood was removed. And a soldier lit a match, as if about to burn the
prisoner alive. The liquid was really water. The prisoner was hysterical.

This isn't, perhaps, so implausible. The stealth torturer is fond of mock
executions. And so it might also be possible to say this: nothing is ever
one thing. Torture can share a structure with a practical joke.

After all, I thought, in the airconditioned room, finding equivalents for
this gruesome coincidence of horror and comedy isn't impossible. There's Tom
Stoppard's great play *Every Good Boy Deserves Favour*, which finds a
fantastical levity in the Soviet incarceration of dissidents in lunatic
asylums. And there are Pynchon's own pastiche novels about brutal power. And
then . . .

Then I went home tired and watched cartoons.

-- 
Kunal Shah
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