THE ART OF WAR

Author: Sun Tzu
Year: 2019 (1910/~500 BC)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator Bertil Häggman)

Some 500 years BC, or so the story goes, Sun Wu applied for a position as a military commander at the helm of King Helu’s army in what is today the Southern Jiangsu province of China. To test his leadership skills, the king asked him to train the royal concubines in performing military manoeuvres. Sun Wu accepted the challenge, divided the concubines into two groups, and appointed the king’s two favourite mistresses as officers in charge of each of them respectively. He proceeded to give the women basic military training but when it was time to present the king with the results, the women could not help but giggle and, understandably, make a joke out of the whole situation. Sun Wu declared that if the subordinates fail to obey orders, it is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that the orders have been clearly communicated and correctly understood. He therefore resumed training and applied strict pedagogical assiduity to secure complete understanding among the king’s concubines. Upon the next performance in front of the king, the women again found the situation bizarre and giggled through it. Sun Wu then declared that if the orders have been understood but still not followed, it is the fault of the officers, and had both the king’s favourite concubines severely punished, some versions of the story say executed. After this, Sun Wu no longer experienced any problems in exercising control over the women in his two units. And that is how he got the job.

Many years later, now known by his honorary name Sun Tzu, he would put his experiences, observations, and theories from and about the battle field into writing in what is today known as “Krigets konst” (“The Art of War”) in the Western world. Across 383 maxims grouped into 13 chapters dealing with such things as planning and evaluating, cunning, terrain, manoeuvring, attack by fire, and the usage of spies, Sun Tzu shares his philosophy on how to command an army and lead it to victory.

Unlike many other texts from antiquity, Sun Tzu’s writing was never lost and rediscovered but seems to have been part of Chinese philosophy, military training, and history since its inception until today. This notwithstanding, the origins of the book and even the purported originator himself remain disputed. The name of Sun Wu does not show up in the historical record until at last 300 years after his assumed death and is conspicuously missing from a contemporary source, Zuo Zhuan, that lists the most influential civil servants of the realm, including military commanders, and ought to have included a person as illustrious as he is claimed to have been. Furthermore, the name Sun Tzu simply means ‘Master Sun’ in Mandarin and it appears that there was another member of the Sun family a few generations later, Sun Bin whose historicity can be unambiguously confirmed, and he went by the honorary name Sun Tzu as well. It could well be that the two were conflated over time.

Whoever took the time to write down their thoughts about warfare in the 5^th century BC, the effort was not in vain. Military commanders, but also rulers, business leaders, teachers, philosophers, and artists over the centuries have drawn inspiration from the wisdom contained therein. However, as history has shown, the structure of the book, although simple and translucent, does provoke some misunderstanding. As is far too common in the world, many readers have difficulties grasping a bigger picture if faced with a smorgasbord of easily digestible information nuggets. Consequently, it is easy to understand why some reviews point to one part of the book as the key, omitting another that some other review might in turn consider essential. After all, this is how most Christian fundamentalists read the Bible. One may see declarations such as ‘The Art of War is about deception’ or ‘the best way to win a battle is to make your troops desperate.’   

I do not by any means claim to understand “Krigets konst” better than anyone else, but as a person who has spent most of his professional life in management positions in one way or another, my observation is that the leitmotif throughout Sun Tzu’s notes is knowledge, preparation, and patience.

The knowledge about the soldiers. Knowledge about the enemy. Knowledge about the terrain. Knowledge about technology and weapons. This also includes the obstruction of the enemy’s knowledge which is where deception and spreading of false information comes into the picture.

“All warfare is based on deception”

“Though the enemy be stronger in numbers, we may prevent him from fighting. Scheme so as to discover his plans and the likelihood of their success. Rouse him, and learn the principle of his activity or inactivity.”

Preparation is about ensuring allegiance of the troops before marching out. Preparing exit routes and defence lines. Preparation of supply lines and marching paths. And preparation by acquiring knowledge.

“Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.”

“Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.”

Patience, to tie it all together, can be applied to taking the time to prepare properly and making sense of collected intelligence. Patience is not allowing oneself to be provoked.

“The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy”

“He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.”

Co-incidentally; knowledge, preparation, and patience also seem to align with the five traditional cardinal virtues in the Chinese culture which are benevolence, uprightness of mind, self-control, wisdom, and sincerity, which are values that Sun Tzu must have been intimately familiar with.

Lastly, a few notes on the translation. The first translation into French came as early as 1772 and is likely to have been read by Napoleon Bonaparte. However, not until the English translation by Lionel Giles in 1910 did the book gain global fame, which was further amplified by the success of Mao Zedong in defeating the nationalists and establishing the People’s Republic of China. Lionel Giles work has since become the benchmark for many other translations, including the one into Swedish that I have read. I find Bertil Häggman’s version from 1989 to be airy with a good flow, but I am particularly happy that the translation also includes Lionel Giles’ annotations which, although not always comprehensible, provide context and oftentimes detailed explanations of what it is we are reading. When it comes to reading antique Chinese texts on warfare, at least This Banker sometimes needs a helping hand to put the pieces together.

 

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

Author: Ernest Hemingway
Year: 1975 (1952)
Publisher: Stiftelsen Litteraturfrämjandet
Language: Swedish (translator unknown)

”A man can be destroyed, but not defeated” is one of the most well-known quotes from what is arguably Ernest Hemingway’s most prominent novel, “Den gamle och havet” (“The Old Man and the Sea”) from 1952. In his inimitable minimalistic writing style, Hemingway manages to encapsulate the whole message of the novel in one potent sentence.

SPOILER ALERT

“Den gamle och havet” is a story about Santiago, an old fisherman well past his prime who has had a streak of really rotten luck not having caught a single fish for eighty-four days. His misfortunes have become the talk of the town, and the parents of his young helper and apprentice have even taken the boy away from him and allocated him to a boat that has proved to be more successful in recent times. The boy, deeply loyal to his mentor, keeps visiting Santiago and run errands for him but he cannot act against the will of his parents and therefore cannot sail with his aged friend.

Santiago knows that the gossip around town is that he has been cursed and even that he is finished as a fisherman, but he does not pay much attention to it. He is too old and experienced to believe in such nonsense. After all, he has been through this before. Rather than praying to God or performing magical rituals, he relies on his knowledge, experience, and patience.

On the eighty-fourth day of fishing without catch, like all days before it, Santiago sails out onto the Sargasso Sea in his small fishing-boat. Reading the signs of the sea and the animal life in and above it, he soon picks up the trail of what should be an attractive prize. When the fish bites his hook, the fight is on. Hour after hour, day after night after day, Santiago struggles with the largest fish that he has ever encountered and when it finally breaks the surface of the sea, Santiago’s assumption that it must be an enormous marlin is confirmed. This monstrosity is even bigger than Santiago’s boat. After finally having killed it, he ties it to the side of his vessel and turns the bow toward Havana, which during the prolonged tussle has disappeared below the horizon.

Alas, to kill the marlin, Santiago has to drive his harpoon through it, spilling its blood into the ocean. An ocean rife with all types of sharks. Soon enough, the first sharks begin to attack the carcass and Santiago attempts to fight them off. He uses his harpoon to kill the first ones. When one of them disappears with it lodged to its dead body, he ties his knife to one of the oars and continues the fight. When the knife breaks, he proceeds to hitting the feeding sharks over their heads with the rudder. Shark after shark annihilated or chased away, but not before taking a chunk of the marlin with it. When Santiago finally reaches the shores of his fishing village, all that remains of the once mighty fish is the head, the tail, and the spine to hold them together, meticulously cleaned of all meat.

It takes a great writer to make a story about a fishing trip, albeit one involving a remarkable catch, thrilling, touching, and thought-provoking at the same time, and Hemingway does just that. The protagonist’s fight against the forces of nature but also his musings about life, death, love, fate, and the meaning of identity and personal integrity are all interwoven into the fabric of the story in a way that it never loses pace. The reader never gets the feeling that the author pauses the chain of events for philosophy. It is all embedded in the progress of the plot. This short, simple, and linear novel without any elaborate subplots, interpersonal drama, despicable villains, betrayal, misunderstandings, money, sex, or violence is consequently laden with symbols. It is the universe captured in the meeting between a modest man in a tiny skiff and a fish.

No matter how important our personal challenges seem to us, on the vast ocean of life they are but insignificant trifles. The ocean is too great to be aware of every single fish in it, no matter how big, or every single man in a dinghy on it, no matter how determined.

“The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see.”

Santiago did not blame bad luck for his poor performance. Nor did he blame God, the weather, the fish, his boat, or his equipment. He certainly did not blame himself. He was old enough to know that any fisherman sometimes goes through a bad patch. He did not give up. He set out to sea like he had done every single one of the days prior to this one.

His epic battle with the fish goes on for two days. The old man’s endurance, experience, attention, and ingenuity are put to the test as never before. He is old and not as agile as he used to be. And he is alone. This is his fight. To each and every one of us, to Santiago as well as everyone else, that struggle is essential not for survival alone, but for the definition of who we are. We are, Hemingway seems to say, defined by our actions and choices more than by their outcomes. To choose to continue to live is to choose to continue to choose.

“- They beat me Manolin, he said. They truly beat me.
- He didn't beat you. Not the fish.”

Santiago’s marlin would have brought him a small fortune if he had been able to haul it back in one piece to the market. But he ended up not receiving even a dime. The man is destroyed but not defeated.

We learn one more thing in the very end of the story. While Santiago is recovering after the ordeal, two groups of people notice the remains of the fish by his boat. The first are his peers in the village. Those who looking at the carcass are able to assess and appreciate the old man’s achievement. The other is a group of tourists who mistake the animal for a shark and shrug it off as a mere curiosity. How often do you allow tourists to determine the value of your accomplishments and to put you down by the force of their numbers and ignorant confidence?

It is no mystery why “Den gamle och havet” has become a classic not only in American but in world literature, and Hemingway’s Nobel Prize and widespread renown are, in my view, very well motivated.

ANIARA

Author: Harry Martinson
Year: 1974 (1956)
Publisher: Bokförlaget Aldus
Language: Swedish

In a distant future where Earth has been laid to waste by pollution and war, a project of resettlement to Mars is underway. Scores of advanced interplanetary vessels navigate through the void transporting refugees from the once beautiful blue planet to its desolate red neighbour, which now, in comparison, despite its barren surface is more hospitable than Earth, or Doris as Earth is now known.

One of these vessels is the Aniara, carrying eight thousand souls. A carrier of hope embarking on a routine journey from chaos to order. Alas, shortly after Aniara leaves Earth’s atmosphere a wayward meteor forces her to veer from her plotted course and due to an irreparable malfunction, which renders the ship uncontrollable but otherwise undamaged, she drifts off helplessly into the cosmic dance of the stars. With her, the eight thousand captives encapsulated in the contourless fabric of eternity, trapped like “a little bubble in the glass of Godhead”.

As all hope evaporates, the denizens of Aniara form an earthly microcosm. A replica, or more accurately, an offshoot of society, with all the petty quarrels, personal ambition, sexuality, betrayal, and identity struggle that we recognise from our planet in our time. In their loss of direction, they turn to the ship’s computer, the Mima, for guidance and comfort. The Mima keeps record of all that ever happened on Doris and upon demand, shows the passengers bits and pieces of Doris, as it used to be. Seeing the long-lost beauty of their home planet gives the people a sense of security and belonging. In time, the humans begin to treat the Mima like a deity, including a cult complete with rituals and anniversaries, until one day, burdened with the anguish, regret, inadequacy, and wickedness of mankind, it exhibits the final destruction of Doris to the people on the ship who turn on it and demand it be switched off. The Mima, in a final decision of defiance, decides to incapacitate itself permanently to avoid being exposed to people ever again.

“There is protection from near everything,
from fire and damages by storm and frost,
oh, add whichever blows may come to mind.
But there is no protection from mankind.” Song 26

And thus abandoned they press on, aimlessly in the general direction of the Lyra constellation. The Lyra, the god Apollo’s sacred instrument, tuned to praise the Apollonian virtues of self-consciousness and moderation, while at the same time the society on Aniara is rife with denial and indulgence.

The author, Harry Martinson, one of Sweden’s most beloved 20^th century writers, captures the fate of the Aniara and the passengers incarcerated inside her gut, in the format of an epic poem. Across a total of 103 songs the fates of Aniara, but also some of the individuals that are doomed to live out their lives on her decks, are described in verse. The meter is indistinct, fleeting and free without boundaries or rules. Sometimes resting in an iambic blank verse only to eject into a perfectly free format which only briefly produces a rhythm or a rhyme as if to tease or test the reader. By making up words of his own, Martinson pushes the limits of poetry even further.

“The richest of the languages we know,
Xinombric, has three million words,
but then the galaxy you’re gazing into now
has more than ninety billion suns,
Has there ever been a brain that mastered all the words
in the Xinombric language?
Not a one.
Now you see.
And do not see.” Song 85

Martinson several times declared his distaste for Sartre’s iteration of existentialism and it could be argued that Aniara is an attempt to make a case in favour of absurdism as opposite to existentialism. While he seems to agree with the existentialist worldview that actions come from nothing, it is difficult to find traces of an end goal of the actions of the passengers on the tumbling spaceship. Man’s freedom, a key concept in Sartres theory of Bad Faith, is severely curtailed. All purpose eradicated. All meaning nullified. Options expunged. The most respected person on the uncontrollable Aniara is at the same time the most useless; Isagel the pilot. Even Isagel’s scientific discovery in Song 39, that would shift an entire scientific discipline, was ultimately pointless.

“[H]ere her breakthrough never could become
in any manner fruitful, just a theorem
which Isagel superbly formulated
but which was doomed to join us going out
ever farther to the Lyre and then to vanish.”   

In the end, what is the difference between Aniara and Earth? Are we not all trapped on a space vessel that is uncontrollably crashing through the galaxy due to no agency of our own on a journey whose destination none of us will live to arrive at. There is no difference between the yurg danced on Aniara and the yurg danced in Dorisburg. And so are we all dancing, loving, fighting, cheating, and toiling our way through the forever expanding futility that is the universe. There is no one to pilot our journey.

All quotes are from Martinson, H. (1998) Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem. USA: Story Line Press.