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The Idle Book Club 23: Silence

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I finished this one somewhat later than expected since my book got lost in the post. Very much enjoyed the podcast, as usual.

 

I was reminded a great deal of Joseph Conrad throughout. There’s a superficial similarity with Heart of Darkness in terms of the plot – a man travels to a distant land, searching for a person who has undergone a kind of special change – and even in some of the descriptions, which suggest a beautiful place seen as a world of dreadful stillness. The inversion of Sebastian’s expectations with regards to how the Japanese treat him as a prisoner -- that idea that other people suffering on your behalf might actually be worse than suffering yourself -- is also a typically Conradian touch. But above all that, those two authors have the same essential preoccupation with (what Chris rightly mentioned in the podcast) as the essential impossibility of knowing what's in the mind of someone else. We live as we dream: alone, etc.

Endo still does a great many things that Conrad would never do, of course. The questions of religion raised in this book are, to my mind at least, some of the only questions still worth raising about any religion; Conrad's position on all that stuff veered between sceptical and nihilistic. As a non-believer myself (I’m reluctant to write ‘atheist’) I wondered throughout if it would be possible for a Catholic reading to mount an ethical or spiritual defense of Sebastian. 

By any other measure there is something deplorable in what he does. His actions seem at times like the responses of a conditioned animal; and yet they are, at the same time, awfully human failings. At one point his reasoning is that as a missionary, the Church requires that he preserve himself above the lives of the peasants in order that he can go on teaching – but this seems to contradict what he feels about martyrdom, and about the example of the eternal suffering of Christ.
 
I'm torn as to whether or not we can really consider Sebastian responsible for the actions of his Japanese captors. It is they, after all, who have placed him in this trap; as readers, we need not trust anything to their motivations. We don't even have to believe them when they say they would release the peasants if he surrendered his faith. I wonder if there is anything at all to be salvaged from Sebastian's example; after all, the buried references to Christianity in the ending chapters suggest that it has survived in spite of his mission, or perhaps because of it. Is there any sense in which we could consider Sebastian's mission a success?

Perhaps the ultimate suggestion of the novel is that whatever the merits of religion, there is something inherently cruel in the way it which it places its followers in these contradictions. And Sebastian’s definition of cruelty lingers with me, too: the idea of inflicting pain on another while not even necessarily noticing, or caring, that you are doing so. I don’t know what to call the dilemma Sebastian has been placed in by his own Church if not cruel.
 

 

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On 3/14/2017 at 6:52 AM, marginalgloss said:

I finished this one somewhat later than expected since my book got lost in the post. Very much enjoyed the podcast, as usual.

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I was reminded a great deal of Joseph Conrad throughout. There’s a superficial similarity with Heart of Darkness in terms of the plot – a man travels to a distant land, searching for a person who has undergone a kind of special change – and even in some of the descriptions, which suggest a beautiful place seen as a world of dreadful stillness. The inversion of Sebastian’s expectations with regards to how the Japanese treat him as a prisoner -- that idea that other people suffering on your behalf might actually be worse than suffering yourself -- is also a typically Conradian touch. But above all that, those two authors have the same essential preoccupation with (what Chris rightly mentioned in the podcast) as the essential impossibility of knowing what's in the mind of someone else. We live as we dream: alone, etc.

Endo still does a great many things that Conrad would never do, of course. The questions of religion raised in this book are, to my mind at least, some of the only questions still worth raising about any religion; Conrad's position on all that stuff veered between sceptical and nihilistic. As a non-believer myself (I’m reluctant to write ‘atheist’) I wondered throughout if it would be possible for a Catholic reading to mount an ethical or spiritual defense of Sebastian. 

By any other measure there is something deplorable in what he does. His actions seem at times like the responses of a conditioned animal; and yet they are, at the same time, awfully human failings. At one point his reasoning is that as a missionary, the Church requires that he preserve himself above the lives of the peasants in order that he can go on teaching – but this seems to contradict what he feels about martyrdom, and about the example of the eternal suffering of Christ.
 
I'm torn as to whether or not we can really consider Sebastian responsible for the actions of his Japanese captors. It is they, after all, who have placed him in this trap; as readers, we need not trust anything to their motivations. We don't even have to believe them when they say they would release the peasants if he surrendered his faith. I wonder if there is anything at all to be salvaged from Sebastian's example; after all, the buried references to Christianity in the ending chapters suggest that it has survived in spite of his mission, or perhaps because of it. Is there any sense in which we could consider Sebastian's mission a success?

Perhaps the ultimate suggestion of the novel is that whatever the merits of religion, there is something inherently cruel in the way it which it places its followers in these contradictions. And Sebastian’s definition of cruelty lingers with me, too: the idea of inflicting pain on another while not even necessarily noticing, or caring, that you are doing so. I don’t know what to call the dilemma Sebastian has been placed in by his own Church if not cruel.
 

 

 

Great look at the way religion is dealt with. Is it wrong to say that Silence has an individualist take on religion? A view that we are all responsible for our own religious feeling and adding an administrative structure - like the Catholic Church - just creates more problems. 

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