Book Review : Eloquent Anger Over Sorry Civilization

Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow by Brian Fawcett (Grove Press: $16.95, 208 pages)

“This is an essay, a short story, a novella, a harangue, a poem, a rant--whatever is dictated by the necessities of my subject matter,” Brian Fawcett announces in “Cambodia,” his jeremiad against capitalism and the technology of mass communications as the destroyer of memory, imagination and, ultimately, civilization. “That puts me in the jungle, as an insurgent and as a guerrilla.”

Fawcett is a purely intellectual guerrilla who has declared war on what he insistently calls the Global Village--that is, the limitless domain of Western capitalism, which uses mass media to obliterate human thought and identity and replace it with “franchise consumerism.” He is also a man obsessed with the agonies of the Cambodian people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge--and, intriguingly, he sees the Cambodian genocide as a concrete example of the essential evil of the modern world:

“I’m going to argue that Cambodia is the subtext of the Global Village, and that the Global Village has had its purest apotheosis yet in Cambodia,” Fawcett explains. “The Disney-fied platonists of the Global Village are intent on returning us to Eden. They are planning to do it by humiliating consciousness and destroying memory. That’s what the Khmer Rouge--admittedly by much more crude and violent methods--also attempted to do.”

Typographical Gimmick

Fawcett’s book is literally built on an odd typographical gimmick--13 short pieces are collected here, but the core of the book is a long, untitled essay that appears along the bottom third of each page, almost like a single book-length footnote. The author explains that his intent is to “make the subtext of this book visible and literal.” His device is not especially successful, but not especially distracting, either. After briefly attempting to scan the subtext while reading the main text, I gave up and simply read the book twice--once for the collected short stories, and once for the extended essay.

The short pieces are uneven but mostly intriguing--an imagined encounter between St. Paul and Marshall McLuhan on the road to Damascus (“He is an ancient Henry Ford,” Fawcett says of Paul, “or Lee Iacocca dressed up in a burnous”); a reverie about the experience of driving on a franchise-lined freeway (“A kind of anti-memory device which keeps pounding images into your head that tell you what to buy or what’s fashionable”); and a sublime but wildly improbable tale of two Tibetan peasants who find themselves in a prisoner-of-war camp in England during World War II (“They survived because from the very first day they believed that they were dead”).

But the heart and soul of “Cambodia” is its “subtext”--a thoughtful, well-informed and provocative examination of the linkages between the atrocities of colonialism in the Belgian Congo (as contemplated by, among others, Joseph Conrad and Hannah Arendt), the more recent acts of genocide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the crimes against humanity that are embodied in “the Global Village.” If the collected stories are sometimes oblique, the “subtext” is plainspoken and explicit:

“Khmer Rouge barbarism . . . , emptied of all but cold ideology and the lethal bureaucracy that accompanied it . . . , began to obliterate the identities of Cambodians in the name of efficiency, simplicity and purity,” Fawcett writes. “I would like you, my readers, to consider that, in a less direct and violent way, the Global Village is doing the same thing to us.”

Equivalent Phenomena

Fawcett insists on treating the Cambodian genocide and the alienation of dissenting intellectuals in the West as equivalent phenomena--or, more accurately, as manifestations of the very same phenomenon. I was not wholly convinced by his passionate arguments, nor was I moved by Fawcett’s plea to be seen as a victim of oppression. (“I grew up and still live in the Canadian West, which has always had a Third World economy,” he writes. “I am still a colonial--perhaps the only kind left.”)

But Fawcett’s eloquent anger on the subject of our sorry civilization is much more persuasive. “For North Americans living in the 1980s, memory is not yet a crime, and imagination, particularly if it has some entrepreneurial panache, is sometimes rewarded,” Fawcett points out. “But within a culture that is attempting to make individual memory and imagination superfluous, both are becoming political acts.” And he concludes his book with a ringing call for a blow against the Global Village--and a kind of self-liberation--through the very acts of remembering and imagining.

“Basic human rights should be . . . direct and simple-minded,” Fawcett writes. “To have the right to remember the past and to have the right to imagine a future.”