The Reader

If you think Trifles presents an ethical dilemma (see previous post), consider this 1995 novel by Bernhard Schlink, later made into an Academy Award nominated film, starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes.

What if you loved a criminal? What if that criminal may have taken advantage of your youthful vulnerability for her own pleasure, yet you love her? What if that criminal was somehow extremely vulnerable and disadvantaged during the commission of the crime? What if the criminal was doing what she was hired and paid to do during the commission of the crime? What if the criminal used her victims for her own pleasure during the commission of the crime? What if during the criminal’s trial she was unable to understand the written charge, the indictment or the written evidence against her? What if the criminal confessed to a false charge rather than reveal her illiteracy? What if the criminal, while incarcerated, attempted to better understand the crime she had committed and to make amends for the wrongs she had done to others?

If you loved that criminal, how would you weigh her guilt, her extenuating circumstances, and her efforts at self-redemption? If you loved that criminal, how would you judge yourself? If you loved her victims, how would you judge her?

These are the unresolved questions that emerge from a story that is told in a much simpler and more direct style than the troubling moral ambiguities with which it concerns itself.

I saw the film before reading the book and was troubled, not only by the moral ambiguity of a WW II concentration camp guard, forced to take jobs that did not require literacy, since she could neither read nor write, but also by her sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy, who loved her and benefitted, in self-esteem and self-confidence, from his relationship with her, but who also learned at an early age how to keep secrets that alienated him from his family and his peers and who never succeeded in an intimate relationship during adulthood.

Reading the book only increased the moral complexity, the emotional disturbance, and the troubling unresolved questions.

At one level Michael’s relationship with Hanna can be viewed in Freudian terms as an Oedipal dilemma, in which the young man never frees himself from attachment to a mother figure who betrays him, as mother and as lover, though he feels his own guilt of having betrayed her as intensely as he feels he could not stop loving her.

At another level this Oedipal complex is analogous to the dilemma of a whole generation of post-WW II Germans who loved their parents, who they also felt were criminals for their complicity with the Third Reich, were somehow themselves victims of extenuating circumstances, were guilty and yet not guilty, were betrayers of their children and yet victims of betrayal by their children.

All this is complicated by the theme of literacy and the huge incapacitating effect of illiteracy, the urgent need for literacy, and the overwhelming, life-changing shame of illiteracy. Does deception become such a way of life for the illiterate that they lose all capacity for the naked honesty of true intimacy? Does deception as a way of life destroy one’s ability to engage in a fully human relationship, whether it be with those under one’s power or with those that have power over one, with one’s family, one’s peers, one’s lover, or even with oneself?

Is it the deception over illiteracy or illiteracy itself or both that condemns one to a life of isolation, of misunderstanding, of unresolved anger and cruelty, of indifference, of self-protection?

And if one is literate and can enable the literacy of others, as Michael does for Hanna during her incarceration, does one have even less excuse for failure in human relationships?

And what of Hanna’s suicide? And the role of Michael’s judgment of her and distance from her in that suicide?

And what if one is a Jewish reader of this novel? Is it possible to transcend one’s own sense of historical horror and unjust victimization to sympathize with one’s oppressor? Can the oppressor be oppressed? If the lover or child of the oppressor cannot forgive, how can it be possible for the oppressed to forgive?

Can the oppressed be an oppressor?

Can one, indeed, “love the sinner and hate the sin”?

Such questions are typical of a work designed to unsettle all us “readers.”