Like many great writers, Ernest Hemingway also a great fabulist. Ken Burns’ Hemingway describes one of the first documented instances of his lies, following his return home after World War I. Hemingway had served on the Italian front as a Red Cross ambulance driver; in 1918, while handing out provisions, he was struck by an Austrian mortar shell. The blast turned him into a human pincushion, piercing his legs with over two hundred pieces of shrapnel and resulting in his hospitalization for the remainder of the war.
His recovery was so arduous that he did not return to Oak Park, Illinois until 1919, after the war’s conclusion. Still, he received a hero’s welcome and lapped up the acclaim. He continued wearing his uniform, relishing the attention. He began telling his war stories to local community groups for a fee.
And then, Burns relates, he began “embellishing.” Hemingway told audiences that, despite his crippling injuries, in the direct aftermath of the mortar’s explosion he had carried a wounded man to safety before collapsing. Although he had been bed-ridden for months following the blast, and although he returned home only able to walk with a cane, he claimed he had miraculously returned to the front and fought alongside an elite unit of the Italian army.
Such “embellishments” proved fodder for one of Hemingway’s early stories about the post-war experience, Soldier’s Home:
At first Krebs . . . did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.
His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.
Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration . . .
The lies Hemingway’s proxy soldier tells demonstrate how war numbs the sense of being fully human and alive. The soldier quickly realizes that his own ordeal is rendered meaningless given the totality of the atrocities that occurred. The incomprehensible scope of suffering has made his experience, no matter how horrific, banal, such that even sensational untruths fail to impress his listeners. In this sense, the inefficacy of the lies show how war has alienated the soldier from his self.
But in another sense, it is the lies themselves that have caused the alienation. By telling stories, Hemingway’s soldier exists less as himself and more as a character that he coldly manipulates for performative effect. He constructs a psychic distance that prevents him from inhabiting his own heart and mind. And the “nausea” that results, I’d argue, stems not only from his war experience, but from his intentional degradation and anesthetization of his self through deception.
That’s what lies do: they degrade and anesthetize you from being your self, with all your maddening complexities and contradictions, to being a mere character, a two-bit player in some stock play. Which is all the more reason why we should fight them.
Addicts lie to others but primarily to themselves. They are not only the most inventive and audacious bullshitters around, but the most convincing, since they believe their own bullshit. An addict lies to support his addiction, so believing is a must; the excuses and rationalizations, no matter how ridiculous, are vital to feeding his habit. And so he hangs on to them for dear life, even after everyone else has long stopped taking him at his word.
Astoundingly, though, every so often an addict can release that death-grip and not only drop the lie but denounce it for the self-serving dishonesty it is. Dostoevsky did something of the sort. His addiction to gambling at roulette is the stuff of legend. To feed his habit through repeated and devasting losses, he told himself a crazy whopper: that he had worked out a system for winning that was foolproof, as long as he remained dispassionate and in control of his emotions. Or, as he wrote to an associate in 1863: “I really do know the secret [of winning]: it is terribly silly and simple and consists of restraining oneself at every moment, at every phase of the game, and of not losing one’s head.”
Unfortunately, as Professor Richard J. Rosenthal notes, in practice Dostoevsky never got to test his “infallible system” because he was “incapable of sticking with it.” As soon as he got ahead, he would inevitably take greater risks, fall behind, then gamble recklessly in a desperate attempt to break even. Instead, he went broke, again and again. Yet to keep chasing that Big Win, he crafted an impressive, ever-growing network of lies. To friends and associates about the severity of his debt. To editors, claiming he was further along on projects so that he could secure advances that would allow him to return to the casino. And most of all to his wife, Anna, promising her that the last loss was the final one, that he was through with gambling and a reformed man.
Finally, something gave in 1871, when Dostoevsky was living in Dresden with Anna, their child Lyuba, and Anna’s mother. His compulsion drove him to the casino at Wiesbaden for another try at luck. The trip itself necessitated a lie: he and Anna told her mother that he was traveling to Frankfurt on business. Unsurprisingly, he lost all the money he’d brought, including the train fare home. But quite surprisingly, this time, the loss really did herald a transformation. As Dostoevsky wrote to Anna, he fled the casino “like a madman,” searching for a priest to whom he could confess his sins. He found what he believed to be a church, only to be told by shop-keeps that it was in fact a synagogue – a revelation he described as “like pouring cold water over me.” Then he returned to his room to write Anna a letter describing, with minimal elaboration, the internal switch that had occurred:
Anya, I prostrate myself before you and kiss your feet. I realize that you have every right to despise me and to think: “He will gamble again.” By what, then, can I swear to you that I shall not, when I have already deceived you before? But, my angel, I know that you would die(!) if I lost again! I am not completely insane, after all! Why, I know that, if that happened, it would be the end of me as well. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, and I shall come straight home! Believe me. Trust me for this last time and you won’t regret it . . .
But what can happen to me? I am tough to the point of coarseness. More than that: it seems as if I have been completely morally regenerated (I say this to you and before God), and if it had not been for my worrying about you the past three days, if it had not been for my wondering every minute about what this would do to you—I would even have been happy! You mustn't think I am crazy, Anya, my guardian angel! A great thing has happened to me: I have rid myself of the abominable delusion that has tormented me for almost ten years. For ten years (or, to be more precise, ever since my brother's death, when I suddenly found myself weighted down by debts) I dreamed about winning money. I dreamt of it seriously, passionately. But now it is all over! This was the very last time.
Here's the kicker: it was the very last time. As Dostoevsky biographer Alex Christofi observed, “he had lost his compulsion to gamble” and never indulged again.
What prompted such a sudden transformation, after years of relapses and broken promises? According to Dr. Rosenthal, a clinical psychiatrist and co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, this type of “natural recovery” or “spontaneous remission” is fairly common: “most addicted individuals, including those addicted to gambling, recover on their own without participating in professional treatment or a twelve-step program.” He identifies two factors as motivating natural recovery: (1) a rational decision to change based on a specific threat or consequence; and/or (2) “a dramatic, all-at-once type of experience, emotionally intense, and unexpected”, which “may involve a breakthrough of internal awareness in the form of an insight or epiphany, or a sense of being acted upon by something outside of the self, an experience of surrender to something mystical, spiritual, or religious.”
Although Dostoevsky’s letter to Anna is short on details, Rosenthal posits both of these factors were at play. As to the second, Dostoevsky’s mistaking a synagogue for a church, followed by his realization that there was no priest to give him the quick fix of absolution (so that he could get back to gambling), was a violent epiphany – as Dostoevsky himself put it, like a bracing drench of cold water. Rosenthal posits the scene may have uncomfortably reminded Dostoevsky of the suicide of his character Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment. Regardless, it carried symbolic meaning for Dostoevsky: that he did not recognize where his addiction had taken him, and that it was not a place he wanted to remain. His alarm at finding himself at a synagogue not only tapped into some of his deeply embedded anti-Semitism, but externalized his shock at just how far he had fallen.
As to the first factor, Dostoevsky’s expressed fear that Anna would “die” from his addiction was not entirely hyperbole. As Rosenthal notes, his gambling put Anna “in a state of helplessness and depression. He abandoned her while on their honeymoon; pawned her clothes and jewelry to get money for gambling; and left her alone in a city where she knew no one, when she was pregnant and ill.” Somehow, his final loss at Wiesbaden was the clarion call that awakened him not just to the suffering he had caused her, but what was at stake. He could lose her, forever, and he would be responsible.
In modern recovery parlance, this is called “hitting rock bottom”, and I know a little something about it. I have a close family member who became an alcoholic and I myself have a compulsion to overspend. For my family member, “rock bottom” arrived when he realized his job was in jeopardy and that he was literally drinking himself to death. For myself, it came when I confronted how much my reckless shopping sprees were hurting my marriage and family. And for both of us, “rock bottom” revealed just how small and contemptible were the lies we used to prop up our addictions – and Holy Hell, did we concoct a lot of lies. I drink a lot now because I’m under stress, but I’ll cut back once things ease up. I know that print cost a lot of money, but it’s a signed limited edition and I bought it for far less than its value – we can resell it some day at a profit. Hey, I actually made us money!
More than anything, hitting rock bottom exposes the proto-Lie, the Lie that Breeds, the deception that pumps the crooked heart of any addiction: I am special and therefore I shouldn’t have to feel sad, or lonely, or even bored by the ordinariness of things. I am special and therefore I deserve pleasure over pain.
Hemingway’s embellishments, Dostoevsky’s rationalizations – these are examples of individuals actively distorting the truth for their own purposes, however twisted. But there’s another type of lie: that which is imposed on individuals by third parties, by dint of threat or other coercion. Such lies force people into a stark choice. Should I silently acquiesce to, or even parrot, something that I know to be false? Or should I speak out in denial of the falseness and suffer the consequences?
It’s a familiar dilemma to anyone who has survived a totalitarian regime. In Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher examines the lives of those who, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, refused to participate in state-sanctioned lies, and offers prescriptions for how modern Americans can recognize and address encroachments on their freedom of faith. In laying the groundwork for his argument, Dreher shares the concept of ketman, as elaborated by the poet- and writer-in-exile, Czeslaw Milosz:
What do you do when . . . you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?
You become an actor, says Milosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.
What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Milosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.
I bring up ketman because, as part of my day job, I’ve had occasion to review several employee training workshops for their legality. Such workshops are best described as “Anti-Racism” or “White Privilege” training – hot-button terms for sure, made even hotter by their amplification in the media. The workshops were brought to my attention in the first place by aggrieved employees (almost all of whom worked in education/academia, healthcare, or the non-profit world) who objected to their content and wanted to know whether they had legal recourse against their employer for mandating them.
Now, I have pretty strong personal opinions about this type of employee training, so let me restrict myself here to a legal opinion: I think it flies directly in the face of state and federal anti-discrimination law. The aim of those laws is to ensure a race neutral workplace, in which employers are prohibited from making decisions – whether favorable or no – about any employee, or harassing any employee, based upon his or her skin color. For that reason, I think it’s illegal for an employer to require its workers to attend training where they are told one’s race makes one categorically, inherently and de facto “racist”, without regard to one’s individual intentions and actions. Or to use a specific example I’ve encountered, I believe telling a college instructor with stellar reviews and student outcomes that his very presence in his department is “problematic,” based on the bare fact that he is a white male, is discriminatory.
But back to ketman. In reviewing these “Anti-Racism” workshops, I noticed a common thread: they demanded the employees’ participation. For one, the employers made attendance mandatory. For another, the workshop facilitators didn’t allow attendees to simply sit back, listen, and potentially disagree in silence. Instead, the facilitators called upon employees to actively support and echo the facilitators’ ideology, in front of an audience of their co-workers and managers – the same superiors with firing and disciplinary authority over them. The facilitators asked employees to give examples of how their company furthers white supremacy; how their company should “dismantle” white supremacy; how they benefit from white supremacy in their personal lives outside the workplace. This participation imperative, of course, is designed to force employees into a choice: acquiesce in a distortion of the truth or speak out and risk punishment by management and Human Resources.
In my experience, the vast majority choose to acquiesce. They remain silent and parrot what they’re told, without complaint to the boss. It’s understandable. Losing a job or torpedoing a chance at a promotion and raise is a big deal – especially when the economy is looking shaky, or you have a family to support. And so they become actors, players in the modern workplace theater of ketman.
However, some don’t acquiesce. Some speak out in protest during training (which is often recorded or video-taped), or send an email to higher-ups expressing their belief that the training promotes discrimination and harassment based upon invidious racial stereotypes.
I’ve observed a common thread among those who refuse to acquiesce: they are usually Christian. The final straw that breaks their silence is the reduction of their faith to race essentialist terms. Training facilitators tell them that Christianity is part of the toolkit of white supremacy (one facilitator put it even more crudely with a Power Point slide stating “Christianity = White Supremacy.”). Facilitators imply that non-white Christians have been duped into “absorbing” white privilege by adopting the faith, that their dearly-held beliefs are no more than symptoms of their oppression in the racial power hierarchy. These are gross distortions of the historical record; willfully ignorant and inaccurate depictions of Christianity – lies, if you will. But a small subset of employees, white and non-white alike, call out the deception, often at risk to their own livelihoods.
Why this pattern? Why is it the faithful who raise a dissenting voice when so many others elect to put up and shut up? It’s an interesting question and one that consistently resurfaces in my line of work. Since I don’t consider myself, strictly speaking, a member of any religion, I certainly can’t answer with the insight of a true Christian. But it seems to me the faithful refuse to silently acquiesce in lies because they understand that doing so degrades their relationship with God. They know they’re being asked to not only refrain from expressing their faith, but to participate in its denunciation – and that denouncing their faith, even insincerely, may be the first step in dissolving it.
In Martin Scorsese’s film adaption of Shūsaku Endō’s Silence, the Jesuit priest Father Rodrigues hears Christ’s voice, permitting him to commit apostasy to save the lives of his Christian converts from their Japanese persecutors. Because he tramples on an icon of Christ, the authorities allow him to live on in Japan as a Buddhist, employing him and a fellow apostate to identify hidden Christian symbols in Japanese goods so that they may be destroyed. Scorsese ends the film (spoiler alert) on a powerful, hopeful note: Rodrigues dies and as he is being cremated in the Buddhist tradition, we see him cradling a small crucifix in his hands, indicating his internal Christian faith remained unshaken despite his outwardly living in opposition to it.
However, the ending of Endo’s novel takes a more ambiguous approach. Although strong hints are dropped that Rodrigues retained his faith, there is no unequivocal confirmation of it. Instead of dying cross-in-hands, he merely dies. This ambivalent ending, I think, is the truer one, as it recognizes the potential fragility of a faith that can only be observed in secrecy. Perhaps Rodrigues’ devotion to Christ grew only stronger despite his ostensible denial of it. Or perhaps Rodrigues struggled to persist in his devotion, despite troubling fault lines that crept into his faith due to his denial.
For that’s the point of lies: to create the fault lines that lead to fracturing, and ultimately, destruction. Of our integrity, of our bonds with others, of meaning itself. In this New Year, here’s hoping God grants us the resolve to choose honesty, so that we can know the blessing of lives that are unfragmented and whole.
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Thanks, Johanna. I think Endō was also exploring what’s left of faith when it’s been utterly trampled. He seems to suggest that its effaced forms can be more authentic than self-confident and doctrinaire versions. Relentless suffering is a hell of a leveller, after all, which includes religious badges. Maybe when someone is judged to have lost their faith, they’ve actually discovered a more authentic expression of it. Silence doesn’t necessarily mean cowardice and speaking out isn’t always heroic, but there comes a point when conscience will not be stayed.
Thanks Johanna. A really thoughtful and thought-provoking post.post.