The Ministry of Special Cases
by Nathan Englander
Reviewed by Betsy Ross
Set during Argentina’s Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s, The Ministry of Special Cases captures a society in which passivity is paramount and truth is what the government says it is. Thus, when the government kidnaps suspected dissidents (or unsuspected innocents, as appears to be the case with the book’s character Pato), and denies it has done so, the Patos of society are spoken of as being “disappeared,” and a lie becomes truth – as if the disappeared never existed at all.
What makes this scenario possible is a society suffering from a malignant complicity – “No government can do anything to a nation when the whole nation wants it otherwise,” one of Englander’s characters observes. But, of course, the sticking point is obtaining consensus, and consensus requires identification with others and a desire for the common good. The genius of the government is in using fear as its tool so that identity is broken down into smaller and smaller units – us becomes us against them becomes me against you – and the common good, and with it any consensus necessary for opposition, is lost entirely.
Trust does not extend beyond the iron door newly-purchased by Pato and his mother, Lillian, to keep out the government’s minions, and oft-times does not exist within, as Englander raises the question, “When you close ranks, who is on the inside, and who the outside?” The answer to that question lies in the issue of identity, as it must.
When Pato is “disappeared,” Lillian, and Pato’s father, Kaddish, diverge in their responses to their son’s kidnapping based upon how they see themselves, and with whom they identify. Already outsiders in Argentine society as Jews, Lillian and Kaddish are also outsiders within the Jewish community – Kaddish being an hijo de puta within an old Jewish community of moral outcasts. Having grown up as an outcast, Kaddish identifies himself as an outcast, and thus does not trust the government (the Ministry of Special Cases) or the mainstream Jews to help find his son. In fact, he is convinced that Pato has been tortured and killed – dropped alive from a plane into the river, as he believes all the “disappeared” are. Lillian, on the other hand, refuses to believe in Pato’s death, and seeks help in finding him from all the places that Kaddish will not. The objective truth denied them (that Pato has been kidnapped and killed – or not), they live their different, subjective truths, and Pato’s own father and mother can no longer identify with each other. Pato’s father leaves, spending his nights sleeping under the bench in the old Jewish synagogue.
The height of Englander’s brilliance is that even the reader is denied the objective truth – whether Pato is alive or dead – although he introduces a pivotal character, a “disappeared” girl who occupies the dungeon cot that had been Pato’s and finds his wadded-up notes hidden in the bedding, and so knows at least portions of Pato’s fate. Yet Englander does not share the notes, and, in fact, writes with pointed nonchalance directly to the reader:
An obvious omission. It’s fair to wonder about the contents of those notes. It’s true that the girl got to read them and memorize them and swallow them down. It wouldn’t be right, though, to share Pato’s message when neither Kaddish nor Lillian will hear it, when neither parent will learn that those notes ever were.
The objective truth behind which to unite is wrested from the reader, as it is denied Lillian and Kaddish, even as its possibility is dangled before us.
Englander implies that we choose our truths based upon our identity which in turn is based on preexisting truths. And implicit in the statement “we choose our truths” is that the truths we choose may be lies. Both truth and identity are mutable, and it is this mutable nature of identity that the government exploits by manipulating the truths of our daily lives. That mutable nature is nowhere more poignant than in the breakdown of the identities of the “disappeared” themselves:
The girl does not yet know where she is or where she is headed. Where she came from has broken down and simplified itself only to before and now, above and below. That is, she does not connect herself to her name and her life, to her studies and her friends, to her family and her dog and the last book she read. The girl wouldn’t have guessed that in being disappeared she would find it easier, better, to disappear herself – complicit in her nonexistence. It is too much to be as was.
Back to this malignant complicity in which not just society generally, but the disappeared themselves are forced to participate. A complicity that accepts truths as lies and lies as truths – and makes enemies of husband and wife as they find themselves on different sides. It is no coincidence that Englander (himself raised an Orthodox Jew) tells a story of Jews within this story of a nation’s abuses and its citizens’ passivity. Echoes of the very sensitive issue of Jewish complicity in the Holocaust can be heard. And, indeed, Lillian reminds the Jewish leader to whom she has gone for help, who accepts and even touts his impotence in negotiating with the government as a kind of power, that he is engaging in the “grand tradition of Jewish diplomacy: Never acknowledge catastrophe until it’s done.… Afterward you’ll raise up a tall building around it. You’ll enlist a great Jewish after-the-fact army to fight with all of hell’s fury over how it is to be remembered.” The universal truth is that lies, and acceptance of lies, engender impotence.
Universality is what makes Englander’s book important. In an interview (concerning Englander’s previously published short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges) Englander said “I have no interest in a fiction that isn’t universal; if it’s not universal, then it’s not functioning…the stories are more about the setting facilitating the subtext than vice versa.”
While I agree and feel some connective assuagement in the existence of universals, this statement is also depressing. Does the fact that there will always be a setting in which truth is a victim of the human will to power, the human ability to treat others as abstractions or the justifiable means to a rationalized ends, mean that we will never get beyond the abuses and suffering of our past and present Argentinas, Germanies, Chinas, Darfurs, and, yes, even the United States? What will it take to refute the lies, to expose the Machiavellis, to find common ground and unite for the common good?