Where the Stress Falls (37 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
Of course, it was different for me. “I haven’t taken a bath in sixteen months,” a middle-aged matron said to me. “Do you know how that feels?” I don’t; I only know what it’s like not to take a bath for six weeks. I was elated, full of energy, because of the challenge of the work I was doing, because of the valor and enthusiasm of everyone I worked with—but I could not ever forget how hard it has been for each of them, and how hopeless the future looks for their city. What made my lesser hardships and the danger relatively easy to bear, apart from the fact that I could leave and they couldn’t, was that I was totally concentrated on them and on Beckett’s play.
UNTIL A WEEK
before it opened, I did not think the play would be very good. I feared that the choreography and emotional design I had constructed for the two-level stage and the nine actors in five roles were too complicated for them to master in so short a time; or simply that I had not been as demanding as I should have been. Two of my assistants, as well as Pašovi
, told me that I was being too amicable, too “maternal,” and that I should throw a tantrum now and then and, in particular, threaten to replace the actors who had not yet learned all their lines. But I went on, hoping that it would be not too bad; then suddenly, in the last week, they turned a corner, it all came together, and at our dress rehearsal it seemed to me the production was, after all, affecting, continually interesting, well made, and that this was an effort which did honor to Beckett’s play.
before it opened, I did not think the play would be very good. I feared that the choreography and emotional design I had constructed for the two-level stage and the nine actors in five roles were too complicated for them to master in so short a time; or simply that I had not been as demanding as I should have been. Two of my assistants, as well as Pašovi
, told me that I was being too amicable, too “maternal,” and that I should throw a tantrum now and then and, in particular, threaten to replace the actors who had not yet learned all their lines. But I went on, hoping that it would be not too bad; then suddenly, in the last week, they turned a corner, it all came together, and at our dress rehearsal it seemed to me the production was, after all, affecting, continually interesting, well made, and that this was an effort which did honor to Beckett’s play.I was also surprised by the amount of attention from the international press that
Godot
was getting. I had told few people that I was going back to Saravejo to direct
Waiting for Godot
, intending perhaps to write something about it later. I forgot that I would be living in a journalists’ dormitory. The day after I arrived I was fielding requests in the Holiday Inn lobby and in the dining room for interviews; and the next day; and the next. I said there was nothing to tell, that I was still auditioning; then that the actors were simply reading the play aloud at a table; then that we’d just begun on the stage, there was hardly any light, there was nothing to see.
Godot
was getting. I had told few people that I was going back to Saravejo to direct
Waiting for Godot
, intending perhaps to write something about it later. I forgot that I would be living in a journalists’ dormitory. The day after I arrived I was fielding requests in the Holiday Inn lobby and in the dining room for interviews; and the next day; and the next. I said there was nothing to tell, that I was still auditioning; then that the actors were simply reading the play aloud at a table; then that we’d just begun on the stage, there was hardly any light, there was nothing to see.
But when I mentioned to Pašovi
the journalists’ requests and my desire to keep the actors free from such distractions, I learned that he had scheduled a press conference for me and that he wanted me to admit journalists to rehearsals, give interviews, and get the maximum amount of publicity not just for the play but for an enterprise of which I had not altogether taken in that I was a part: the Sarajevo International Festival of Theatre and Film, directed by Haris Pašovi
, whose second production, following his
Alcestis
, was my
Godot
. When I apologized to the actors for the interruptions to come, I found that they, too, wanted the journalists to be there. All the friends I consulted in
the city told me that the story of the production would be “good for Sarajevo.”
the journalists’ requests and my desire to keep the actors free from such distractions, I learned that he had scheduled a press conference for me and that he wanted me to admit journalists to rehearsals, give interviews, and get the maximum amount of publicity not just for the play but for an enterprise of which I had not altogether taken in that I was a part: the Sarajevo International Festival of Theatre and Film, directed by Haris Pašovi, whose second production, following hisAlcestis
, was my
Godot
. When I apologized to the actors for the interruptions to come, I found that they, too, wanted the journalists to be there. All the friends I consulted in
the city told me that the story of the production would be “good for Sarajevo.”
And so I obediently changed my policy of no interviews to giving access to anybody who wanted it. This was easy, not only because it was what the actors and Pašovi
wanted, but because I never saw anything that was printed or televised (even the journalists at the Holiday Inn never saw their stories until they left Sarajevo). I regretted, though, that the rush of interviews in the first two weeks meant that most of the stories were done before the actors had learned their lines, and my conception of the play began to work.
wanted, but because I never saw anything that was printed or televised (even the journalists at the Holiday Inn never saw their stories until they left Sarajevo). I regretted, though, that the rush of interviews in the first two weeks meant that most of the stories were done before the actors had learned their lines, and my conception of the play began to work.The point is, of course, that any cultural activity in Sarajevo is a sideshow for correspondents and journalists who have come to cover a war. To protest the sincerity of one’s motives reinforces suspicion, if there is suspicion to begin with. The best thing is not to speak at all, which was my original intention. To speak at all of what one is doing seems—perhaps, whatever one’s intentions, becomes—a form of self-promotion. But this is just what the contemporary media culture expects. My political opinions—I would go on about what I regard as the infamous role now being played by UNPROFOR, railing against “the Serb-UN siege of Sarajevo”—were invariably cut out. You want it to be about
them
, and it turns out—in media land—to be about you.
them
, and it turns out—in media land—to be about you.
If it were only a matter of my own discomfort about some of the foreign coverage of my work in Sarajevo, none of this would be worth mentioning. But it illustrates something of the way such long-running stories as the one in Bosnia are transmitted and being reacted to.
Television, print, and radio-journalism are an important part of this war. When, in April, I heard the French intellectual André Glucksmann, on his twenty-four-hour trip to Sarajevo, explain to the local journalists who attended his press conference that “war is now a media event,” and “wars are won or lost on TV,” I thought to myself, Try telling that to all the people here who have lost their arms and legs. But there is a sense in which Glucksmann’s indecent statement was on the mark. It’s not that war has completely changed its nature, and is only or principally a media event, but that the media’s coverage is a principal object of attention, and the very fact of media attention sometimes becomes the main story.
An example. My best friend among the journalists at the Holiday Inn, the BBC’s admirable Alan Little, visited one of the city’s hospitals and was shown a semi-conscious five-year-old girl with severe head injuries from a mortar shell that had killed her mother. The doctor said she would die if she was not airlifted to a hospital where she could be given a brain scan and sophisticated treatment. Moved by the child’s plight, Alan began to talk about her in his reports. For days nothing happened. Then other journalists picked up the story, and the case of “Little Irma” became the front-page story day after day in the British tabloids and virtually the only Bosnia story on the TV news. John Major, eager to be seen as doing something, sent a plane to take the girl to London.
Then came the backlash. Alan, unaware at first that the story had become so big, then delighted because it meant that the pressure would help to bring the child out, was dismayed by the attacks on a “media circus” that was exploiting a child’s suffering. It was morally obscene, the critics said, to concentrate on one child when thousands of children and adults, including many amputees and paraplegics, languish in the understaffed, undersupplied hospitals of Sarajevo and are not allowed to be transported out, thanks to the UN (but that is another story). That it
was
a good thing to do—that to try to save the life of one child is better than doing nothing at all—should have been obvious, and in fact others were brought out as a result. But a story that needed to be told about the wretched hospitals of Sarajevo degenerated into a controversy over what the press did.
was
a good thing to do—that to try to save the life of one child is better than doing nothing at all—should have been obvious, and in fact others were brought out as a result. But a story that needed to be told about the wretched hospitals of Sarajevo degenerated into a controversy over what the press did.
THIS IS THE FIRST
European genocide in our century to be tracked by the world press and documented nightly on TV. There were no reporters in 1915 sending daily stories to the world press from Armenia, and no foreign camera crews in Dachau and Auschwitz. Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought--this was indeed the conviction of many of the best reporters there, like Roy Guttman of
Newsday
and John Burns of
The New York Times
—that if the story could be gotten out, the world would do something. The coverage of the genocide in Bosnia has ended that illusion.
European genocide in our century to be tracked by the world press and documented nightly on TV. There were no reporters in 1915 sending daily stories to the world press from Armenia, and no foreign camera crews in Dachau and Auschwitz. Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought--this was indeed the conviction of many of the best reporters there, like Roy Guttman of
Newsday
and John Burns of
The New York Times
—that if the story could be gotten out, the world would do something. The coverage of the genocide in Bosnia has ended that illusion.
Newspaper and radio reporting and, above all, TV coverage have shown the war in Bosnia in extraordinary detail, but in the absence of a will to intervene by those few people in the world who make political and military decisions, the war becomes another remote disaster; the people suffering and being murdered there become disaster “victims.” Suffering is visibly present, and can be seen in close-up; and no doubt many people feel sympathy for the victims. What cannot be recorded is an absence—the absence of any political will to end this suffering: more exactly, the decision not to intervene in Bosnia, primarily Europe’s responsibility, which has its origins in the traditional pro-Serb slant of the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign Office. It is being implemented by the UN occupation of Sarajevo, which is largely a French operation.
I do not believe the standard argument made by critics of television that watching terrible events on the small screen distances them as much as it makes them real. It is the continuing coverage of the war in the absence of action to stop it that makes us mere spectators. Not television but our politicians have made history come to seem like re-runs. We get tired of watching the same show. If it seems unreal, it is because it’s both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.
Even people in Sarajevo sometimes say it seems to them unreal. They are in a state of shock, which does not diminish, which takes the form of a rhetorical incredulity (“How could this happen? I still can’t believe this is happening”). They are genuinely astonished by the Serb atrocities, and by the starkness and sheer unfamiliarity of the lives they are now obliged to lead. “We’re living in the Middle Ages,” someone said to me. “This is science fiction,” another friend said.
People ask me if Sarajevo ever seemed to me unreal while I was there. The truth is, since I’ve started going to Sarajevo—this winter I hope to direct
The Cherry Orchard
with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin—it seems the most real place in the world.
The Cherry Orchard
with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin—it seems the most real place in the world.
WAITING FOR GODOT
OPENED, with twelve candles on the stage, on August 17. There were two performances that day, a Tuesday, one at 2:00 p.m. and the other at 4:00 p.m. In Sarajevo there are only matinees;
hardly anybody goes out after dark. Many people were turned away. During the first performances I was tense with anxiety. By the third performance, I started to be able to see the play as a spectator. It was time to stop worrying that Ines would let the rope linking her and Atko sag while she devoured her papier-mâché chicken; that Sejo, the third Vladimir, would forget to keep shifting from foot to foot just before he suddenly rushes off to pee. The play now belonged to the actors, and I knew it was in good hands. And at the end of the 2:00 p.m. performance on August 19, during the long tragic silence of the Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messenger’s announcement that Mr. Godot isn’t coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, my eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor was crying, too. No one in the audience made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theatre: a UN armored personnel carrier thundering down the street and the crack of sniper fire.
OPENED, with twelve candles on the stage, on August 17. There were two performances that day, a Tuesday, one at 2:00 p.m. and the other at 4:00 p.m. In Sarajevo there are only matinees;
hardly anybody goes out after dark. Many people were turned away. During the first performances I was tense with anxiety. By the third performance, I started to be able to see the play as a spectator. It was time to stop worrying that Ines would let the rope linking her and Atko sag while she devoured her papier-mâché chicken; that Sejo, the third Vladimir, would forget to keep shifting from foot to foot just before he suddenly rushes off to pee. The play now belonged to the actors, and I knew it was in good hands. And at the end of the 2:00 p.m. performance on August 19, during the long tragic silence of the Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messenger’s announcement that Mr. Godot isn’t coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, my eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor was crying, too. No one in the audience made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theatre: a UN armored personnel carrier thundering down the street and the crack of sniper fire.
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