Images of War and Justice: The Painter of Battles

The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Random House, 2008.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag contemplated the ethics of war photography, and how it affects those who view it. The questions she raised in the book persist today: does such photography lead to an increased awareness of suffering that motivates people to take action and provide assistance? Or does it desensitize viewers to violence, making them callous and indifferent? Or worse—is it more akin to pornography, titillating viewers with images of atrocity? Are these photographers helping people, or exploiting them, victimizing them in a new way? Sontag’s book, written in 2003, and taking up some concerns articulated in her seminal text of 1977, On Photography, remains required reading for people interested in reflecting on the ethical implications of photojournalism. But I’d like to suggest that The Painter of Battles, the newest novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, be added to this particular canon.

Ethics is ultimately a question of how one exists among others in the world, whether one’s interactions with other people help or harm them. And for all the ethical hand wringing over whether or not war photography objectifies or exalts its subjects, rarely does anyone bother to actually ask them. The Painter of Battles offers a somewhat unique take on the issue by staging a confrontation between a photographer and one of his subjects, and thus provides a forum in which to explore these ethical questions at their most basic level; as a discussion, or rather, conflict, between two people.

For it is indeed a conflict. The novel opens with the photographer, Andrés Falques, leading a retired life in a tower, where he is working on a massive painting—what he sees as his final, and perhaps greatest, work. One day, a stranger arrives, a Croatian named Ivo Markovic, whom Falques photographed during the Battle of Vukovar. “Why have you come looking for me?” Falques asks. “Because I’m going to kill you,” Markovic replies. But vengeance is not so simple, as it turns out. “I need to know you better, to be sure you realize certain things,” Marko explains. “I want you to learn and understand... After that, I’ll be able to kill you.”

So begins the novel’s morbid tête-à-tête. Although it is Marko who will do most of the talking, the novel is told from the perspective of Falques, and heavily supplemented with his memories, few of which he chooses to relate to Marko. The text thus combines his testimony with a kind of genealogy of his beliefs, relating the experiences that have shaped his worldview.

Falques is guided by a kind of abstract vision of the world, a quest for meaning. The text provides a curious juxtaposition in this regard: on the one hand is Marko, who has personally lived through the horrors of war as an involuntary participant, with its atrocities destroying the fabric of his everyday life. Falques, on the other hand, has lived through far more scenes of military conflict, but voluntarily, as an observer whose own life is largely not implicated in what he witnesses. He has cultivated a detachment, largely as a tool of survival, but also as an artist in pursuit of his next photograph. He has learned over time to look upon a scene of misery and remain unmoved by it, to think only of how to best capture it on camera. As such, it would be easy to portray him as a cold-blooded, pathologically detached villain, but the novel refuses to do so, devoting a great deal of energy to humanizing him.

Falques’ detachment arises not from indifference, but rather from a kind of scientific rigor. In his work, he seeks a form of transcendental meaning in what he sees, a greater truth. Is it God’s plan that humans undergo so much suffering, or is this misery a defiance of the plan, a flaw in mankind? His work is an attempt to understand the universal meanings hidden in the scenes he witnesses, and his detachment is therefore of a philosophical nature. To allow himself an emotional engagement in the events he photographs would taint the purity of his philosophical inquiry. In a sense, his work is an academic undertaking: it’s a quest for knowledge and understanding, for a “higher truth.” We are accustomed to treating such pursuits as noble undertakings, and seeing their lack of emotional involvement as a kind of ascetic purity.

As Falques reflects on these truths, he contemplates, also, how they can be revealed. He has retired from photography and become a painter precisely because he has decided that it is in painting that this mystery may be brought to life. Not in the picture of a particular war, but in a painting that is about all wars: the culmination of his research, in a sense. But the purpose of this task is not to convey his wisdom to the world: he doesn’t intend for anyone else to ever see the painting. The intellectual pursuit, raised here to perhaps its purest form, is resolutely solitary. That is, until Markovic arrives.

Markovic is an artfully composed foil to Falques. A relatively simple, uneducated man, his awful experiences have forced him into contemplation, a desire to understand what has happened to him. But as a participant rather than an observer, he has a very different perspective, insisting always on a kind of layman’s approach to the issues and refusing any sort of academic or philosophical detachment. The discussion between the two men is thus also a kind of encounter between the ivory tower and the real world, which questions the ethics of the pursuit of knowledge and the uses it is put to.

As the novel progresses, Markovic’s ominous greeting develops into a reflection on vengeance, justice, and satisfaction. To want to kill someone is perhaps not so baffling; to insist that they must know certain things before they can die, that they understand what they have done, is a bit more complex. It seems to ask that your victim assent to his own execution—ideally, it would appear, you would explain your reasons, and he would agree, and go willingly. But if this best-case scenario is reached, then it raises the question of whether it remains necessary, or moral, to kill them. In other words, it interrogates the principles of justice, alongside the ethics of vengeance.

To be clear: the novel is not flawless. It veers occasionally into a rather irritating self-indulgence, and worse, cliché. The prose can’t quite live up to its lofty inspirations—whether the flaw is on the part of the author or the translator, I can’t say, but nonetheless, the text falls somewhat short of greatness, even if it is generally a highly engaging read. The true merit of the work is in the way it sets up a debate, presenting various perspectives on the question by embodying them in characters, literally fleshing them out. The novel raises a whole host of fascinating issues, and the voices of the characters linger after reading, echoing off the pages of newsstand magazines and their images of today’s conflicts.

Born in Poland, raised by vagabond mathematicians, Katarzyna Kunicka is currently working on a PhD in Comparative Literature. She loves books, movies, language, food, and hiphop. More of her inner monologue can be found at http://www.kasiapontificates.blogspot.com/