#111, December 6, 2006

Can Collateral Damage Speak?

“I am not Hamlet, nor was meant to be…”

– T.S. Eliot, “Prufrock”

T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock is far too genteel to be mistaken for collateral damage; and he certainly speaks, even if he doesn’t say very much of anything. But if, playing games of association (as we must), we turn to Hamlet’s “attendant lords,” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we may recognize in Tom Stoppard’s characters the literary embodiment of collateral damage. Here we have two figures who are constantly waiting in the wings to be called onto the stage, knowing all the while that they are caught up in some political intrigue that is larger than they are and which will inevitably kill them, but never being able to do anything about it. And while, from their perspective, the play was very much about them, they will only have managed “to move a scene or two” in the history books.

The category of collateral damage and the people that it encompasses take up a similar liminal or marginal position to that inhabited by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Were they to be agents or victims, then the story would be about them; they would be the winners or losers. If the former, then they (or at least their descendents) could take solace in the temporary favor that History has given them; if the latter, then they might become the martyrs upon whose deeds future challenges to hegemony may be built. But collateral damage is the spillage from this narrative of good and evil.

How like the category of subaltern, then, is collateral damage? As soon as it speaks it is prone to disappear – as Spivak might suggest. Indeed, the term becomes the sign for the unknown and unknowable, beyond the reaches of the impotent historian. These dead, what did they think of the turmoil swirling around their heads? Did it give meaning to their lives in some way? Did they identify with one side or another because of their race, their nationality, their class, or their gender? Or were they just bystanders, observing political theater beyond their concern? These things we cannot know, and, if we did, the category might become evacuated as we located allies and enemies among them. What we do know is that, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are dead.