The Said Symphony: move 12

To Bob Dylan, “One too many mornings” and the lines “You’re right from your side / I’m right from mine” – juxtaposing them like that, is there a moral equivalence implied?

Dylan’s overview doesn’t sound too optimistic about the possibility of any kind of reconciliation of the opposites: “We’re both just one too many mornings / An’ a thousand miles behind…”

Accordingly, this may be an appropriate point at which to note that Edward Said thought the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was asymmetrical and irreconcilable.

In the interview from which I borrowed Said’s notion of a “symphonic” reading of the conflict, the question and answer immediately following that paragraph reads thus:

Q: Is this a symmetrical conflict between two peoples who have equal rights over the land they share?

A: There is no symmetry in this conflict. One would have to say that. I deeply believe that. There is a guilty side and there are victims. The Palestinians are the victims. I don’t want to say that everything that happened to the Palestinians is the direct result of Israel. But the original distortion in the lives of the Palestinians was introduced by Zionist intervention, which to us – in our narrative – begins with the Balfour Declaration and events thereafter that led to the replacement of one people by another. And it is continuing to this day. This is why Israel is not a state like any other. It is not like France, because there is continuing injustice. The laws of the State of Israel perpetuate injustice.

This is a dialectical conflict. But there is no possible synthesis. In this case, I don’t think it’s possible to ride out the dialectical contradictions. There is no way I know to reconcile the messianic-driven and Holocaust-driven impulse of the Zionists with the Palestinian impulse to stay on the land. These are fundamentally different impulses. This is why I think the essence of the conflict is its irreconcilability.

Comment:

Are the two narratives symmetrical? Is there a moral equivalence between them?

The great early Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein wrote that “the juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot plus another — as it does a creation.”

His colleague Vsevolod Pudovkin goes further:

Kuleshov and I made an interesting experiment. We took from some film or other several close-ups of the well-known Russian actor Mosjukhin. We chose closeups which were static, and which did not express any feeling at all-quiet close-ups. We joined these close-ups, which were all similar, with other bits of film in three different combinations. In the first combination the close-up of Mosjukhin was immediately followed by a shot of a plate of soup standing on a table. It was obvious and certain that Mosjukhin was looking at this soup. In the second combination the face of Mosjukhin was joined to shots showing a coffin in which lay a dead woman. In the third the close-up was followed by a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear. When we showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been let into the secret the result was terrific. The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.

What I am getting at here is, first and foremost, that juxtaposition is a rhetorical and aesthetic device, and that how to “read” a given juxtaposition is not necessarily obvious.

In a subsequent move, I shall discuss the specific philosophical problem involved in weighing one body of suffering against another…

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