Starr's Witch Trial, From today's New York Times
nytimes.com
September 22, 1998
America's Raciest Read
By STEPHEN GREENBLATT
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- First the best-selling book; now the movie. Millions of Americans are still engrossed in reading "The Starr Report," particularly the 121-page section called simply "Narrative."
The ostensible point of this description of the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, along with the release of the
videotapes of the grand jury testimony, is to refute his earlier statements -- statements based on what the report characterizes as "a close parsing of the definitions that were used to describe his conduct."
Against the detailed, analytical legalism of "parsing," however, with its minute attention to language, its technicalities and
fine distinctions, the Starr report offers the time-honored literary pleasures and perils of narrative. The authors, for example, apologize for their "unfortunate" rehearsal of "highly personal," "sexually explicit" and "possibly offensive" details (a literary come-on at least as old as the preface to Defoe's "Moll Flanders," published in 1722), but insist there is no other
way to make manifest the President's falsehoods.
According to this argument, Congress and the nation may not need to read the highly abstruse legal case Starr has developed against Clinton. After all, how many Americans could give a coherent and accurate account of how the independent counsel managed to get from an investigation of a real estate deal to an investigation of a clandestine affair? What they need, it seems, is a plausible story.
The result is a peculiar literary production: inserted at the core of the Starr report's legal finding, with its thousands of pages of documents, is a nonfiction novel, written at public expense by two lawyers, one of whom, Stephen Bates, once studied advanced fiction writing at Harvard.
This nonfiction novel uses many traditional techniques of fiction: mutual erotic interest first occurs, as in Ovid or Petrarch, through eye contact and then, when there is an unexpected stilling of ordinary business (the Government is shut down because of the budget crisis), quickly develops into a series of passionate encounters.
The young woman is insecure and prone to depression; the man is intensely busy and only sporadically aroused, though sufficiently interested to contrive meetings and, when the woman becomes upset at his subsequent indifference, to reassure her of his romantic admiration. They exchange gifts, quarrel and reconcile, call each other endearing names, drift apart, return to each other once again and then decisively separate.
The narrative offers some of the things that master fiction makers like Balzac, George Eliot and Henry James offer: plausible characters; the patient unfolding of linked events; the building of suspense; the intertwining of desire, fear and reproach in the doomed lovers; the intervention of a host of lesser characters; the intensification of pressure as the implacable pursuit grows hot and the lovers' mutual pledge of secrecy begins to crack -- and finally their public exposure and shaming.
But Kenneth Starr and his associates are not master fiction makers, and it is difficult to gauge the tone of their narrative or identify its genre. It has many elements of comedy: the fumbling in the dark, the sudden interruptions, the mixing of pizza and sex, the cunning evasion of the ever-watchful spies, even the powerful man's feeble attempt to deal with the nagging that follows his few moments of pleasure. "I don't want to talk about your job tonight," he reportedly says at one point. "I'll call you this week, and then we'll talk about it. I want to talk about other things."
Yet it is impossible to find much that is funny in the report, not only because the stakes have become so insanely high, but
also because the authors allow no room for the laughter that Boccaccio or Chaucer or Fielding allow in comparable moments, laughter that depends upon a tolerant, bemused acceptance of human weakness.
Some have claimed the genre is pornography. Certainly there are many pornographic elements. Still, though the
Congressmen who rushed to put this document on the Web have no doubt given the nation's children something to think
about, the narrative hardly offers a vision of sex as ecstatic pleasure.
On the contrary, a current of sadness runs through this chronicle that in the hands of Flaubert or Chekhov would provoke tears rather than lubricity. But the authors lack the compassion of a Chekhov. Instead they offer, for what purpose I cannot say, a multitude of graphic details.
The nausea provoked by these details may provide the key to the genre of this narrative. The only other texts I know that
include comparable details -- cold, clinical accounts of humans stripped of all the protective covering with which we contrive to cloak our nakedness -- are the legal documents of the witchcraft trials in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, trials that extended in America well into the 17th century.
Prosecutors and judges in those trials were so certain the alleged crimes posed a danger to society, so convinced the accused were absolutely evil, so determined to achieve the public finality of conviction and execution, that they violated every principle of equity, respect, ordinary common sense and decency. Mothers were threatened with imprisonment if they did not testify against their daughters, friends were turned into spies, families were destroyed. Laws were twisted to allow judicial torments undreamed of by their framers, and the most intimate spaces in the community, the home and the body itself were ruthlessly violated and exposed to common view. Since the enemy was thought to be Satan, all measures were justified.
Conveniently, the legal proceedings themselves produced exactly the evidence the inquisitors were feverishly seeking. The
accused were publicly stripped and shaved and searched with minute attention until the "witch's mark" was discovered, and, under enough pressure, the confessions tumbled out.
The report's closest analog is not "Tom Jones," "Lolita" or "The Story of O." It is the "Malleus Maleficarum" -- "The Hammer of Witches" -- by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprengerr.
The Starr report is our version of the documents that proudly published these confessions. It is not finally about sex or
even about perjury. It is about the power of narrative to expose everything, about the ripping away of dignity and respect, about what unleashed and merciless state auhorities can do to a person, even to the President himself.
Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of literature at Harvard, is the general editor of "The Norton Shakespeare." |
