I'm reading my way through Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptoms and in one essay he discusses William Styron's Sophie's Choice. Sophie (aka Meryl Streep before she discovered her true calling as a comedienne) was in a German prison camp. A guard tells her she has to choose one of her two sons to be saved, or both will be killed. She chooses one and the other dies. This induces so much maddening guilt that well after the war she chooses a relationship with a struggling painter and the two of them commit suicide. Zizek takes the whole thing very seriously, and why not? It was a successful movie and Styron was one of the great mid-century Writer-Drunks.
It's a crock, of course. First, on the safe assumption that the sons are equally worthy of being saved, Sophie is not making a choice, she's flipping a coin. Choice needs reasons, and the story doesn't work if there are reasons for preferring one son over the other. If there are no reasons, there is no choice, there is only picking. It isn't Sophie's choice at all, and nor is it Sophie's choice. It was the guard's. He woke up that morning and decided to give Sophie this chance. He might not have.
A more appropriate reaction is not guilt, but thanks. Remember, Sophie was going to lose both sons until given this chance. A better reaction might be anger at having to lose even one son and at being in the situation where the only reason she didn't lose both was the arbitrary power of the guard. But that would be a tad political. It doesn't give us a set-up for hundreds of pages of emotional indulgence and a slow descent into a kind of madness.
No guilt, no story - no story at least that a drunk could write. So for reasons internal to the needs of his story Styron has to hide whose choice it really was. But we go along with it. We go along with it because as readers of a story we are willing to be lead where the story-teller wants us to go, but also because we accept that those in or wielding power are not to be called to account for their actions. They do what they do because they can. We do not have the right to demand explanations or to pass judgement: only those with power can do that.
When the British Airways cabin staff were lead to a twelve-day strike, the story was about them and Unite. It was not about a management who pay people a basic £13,500 a year and expect them to live near Heathrow or Gatwick. An expectation that is so unrealistic given the rents and costs of houses in those areas that it tells you just how arrogant the management of BA are. The management are not seen as contributing to the strike by paying a wage too small to cover rent and council tax, let alone food and heating. The actions of the powerful in this story are as invisible as the moral choices of the guard in Sophie's Choice. How on earth did this happen? How did the powerful get to be invisible? Because it's easier for the victim to blame themselves and treat the actions of the powerful as like the weather, than it is to blame the powerful and so be lead to the need for political action.
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