Unothering the Other

My mother had a cousin (I never thought that I would write such a myopic sentence in these newsletters, but bear with me), and they were like two sisters as they grew up on two adjacent dairy farms where a little area of drained flatland made farming possible a few miles north of Arisaig (Camus Darroch, whose beach alone features in Local Hero). One day at the end of the cousin’s stay with my mother, they had an argument as sisters or close relations do, and the cousin was in tears as I drove her to the airport. Naturally I was upset to hear a woman in her eighties crying, but I might have forgotten the episode which caused no long-term damage to their relationship were it not for what she said: “I only come to see your mother because I remember the energetic little girl who was always picking flowers.” No doubt this statement could be dismissed as insignificant and the product of an upsetting moment, but if you pause to think about it, it is immediately clear that it is in fact dense with meaning. Obviously, my mother could not have always been picking flowers, as they are not always available, and even in the late spring of the Highlands this could not have been the sum of her behaviour.

This was what her cousin had chosen to remember of her, or more specifically this was the part of her that she had admired and loved.

The cousin probably did not pick flowers for various reasons, and being a more serious-minded and hardworking pupil (she was one of the few women who was able to go to university in the thirties), she probably put her energies into other things, but seventy years later this was what impressed her about my mother who, like every other member of our species, was much more than a single ephemeral trait.

Why am I bothering you with this?

Mainly because I would like to suggest an idea or perhaps even pose a question to you: is it not precisely the differences in others that attract us to them?

I think that there is a great deal of truth in this, though things are probably more complex still. There are other things we could distil from that sentence, such as the curious and apparently random nature of human memory, but the only supposition I want to consider here is this: we do not seek out “birds of a feather” or, to use the Gaelic analogy, we are not whales who swim the ocean in search of our own kind, but rather we seek out those who are profoundly different. Our most intense relationships are based on our own weaknesses, lacunae, inabilities, disabilities, fears and terrors, because their absence in others is perhaps reassuring or, in an age of neo-Darwinism, this makes sense in terms of our survival (though I would take this last one with a cupful of salt). Above all, we are an animal driven by curiosity or at least we are, if the conformism of our societies hasn’t blinkered us. Like mountain-climbing, intellectual curiosity is dangerous and can often lead to disaster, but people are still driven in part by an emotional instinct. I’ve said that it must be more complex than that, and undoubtedly some people do seek out an entirely different reassurance – that of the company of people who think and act just like them, which must be very dull (there is also the fact that some differences are more compatible with their respective opposites than others).

What is clear is that nature abhors uniformity: even within a single family, we can find great variety between siblings, and small villages are big enough to provide the whole spectrum of human diversity. What then are the differences between us and other cultures? We hear a lot of the “other” these days, and hopefully with kindly intentions. We are enjoined to understand these “other” peoples as though they were aliens from another planet. This is undeniably a good thing in a period of rising racism and xenophobia, but it is still profoundly mistaken. These others are groups of people who have the same vast differences of character in their midst as we do. What holds our groups together (nations, religions, ideologies, etc.) are in fact our internal differences, while what keeps the different groups apart is their innate similarities (including those internal differences).

But surely, many of you will object, such differences as language count for much, and I would agree. The bee in my bonnet which many friends and relations would like to swat is in fact my insistence on the difference between languages (as these newsletters have already demonstrated), but these are important but nuanced differences. The differences between religions as a whole are small (particularly in the case of Christianity and Islam), and each religion contains similar differences: so Quakerism and Sufism are similar because they believe in the validity of all religions, while Catholicism and Sufism are similar because they both pray to saints. On the other hand, Wahhabism and some extreme Protestant sects are similar because they believe absolutely that they are the one true religion. So, the main difference between religions is the way internal differences come together. None of the divisions have quite the same menu of dogmas, and this is how languages work: they categorise differently, and all languages are slightly deficient in different ways, but the overarching impression is that they do more or less the same things; otherwise translation would be impossible rather than merely quite difficult.

When we read literature in other languages, the difficulty varies with not only the linguistic difference but also and more markedly with the cultural difference.

All neo-Latin languages are slightly different, but there is undoubtedly a mindset that unites them all. In part this is syntax and vocabulary, but it is also the fact that they are all Catholic countries and all creations of the same ancient empire. Languages spoken in Christian countries have perhaps a particular approach, whether or not the writers are believers. Distant languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, will present much greater challenges and this may make them all the more interesting (perhaps I should say, “should make them”), but still we will recognise all the human types and all the similar human obsessions and confusions. Foreign literature doesn’t emphasise our differences (or if it does, only slightly so), but rather our common humanity with all its strengths and weaknesses.

But this process affects specific novels, as well as literatures. I have written elsewhere that novels are an exercise in empathy: the practice of reading about varied characters, being introduced to their psychologies and consequently sharing in their fates as though they were real people rather than figments of the imagination of some monomaniac, who couldn’t find something better to do with her or his life, must exercise our brains and help us to be more conscious of other people’s needs and even more importantly their varied motivations. Thus, a novel could also be judged on the basis of how it increases our understanding of different behaviours. I am not saying that this should be the principal yardstick, but it is a significant one. The formalists thought that it was defamiliarisation, and that too was a useful measure. But this is as far as I can go! A serviceable definition of literature eludes me, almost certainly because of a lack of intellect but perhaps such things in any case defy definition – even in the age of social sciences which believe that everything is measurable.

I hope that this explains why I at least have such a passion of translated literature, though I am far from being alone in this, but each and every one of us will have a different motivation – possibly demonstrating the truth of my contention above.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, October 2020