The End of a Village

Picture: Bettmann/Getty Images

In an article by The New York Review, Wallace Shawn analyzes Jonathan Schell's depiction of the destructed village of Ben Suc in Vietnam which exposed the fundamental issues inherent in many American interventions.

Jonathan Schell published “The Village of Ben Suc” in the July 15, 1967, issue of The New Yorker when he was twenty-three years old. (That same year the article came out as a book, published by Knopf.) I’d been Schell’s classmate and friend since we were very young, and in 1967 I had thought we were both still more or less boys, figuring things out. When I read his article I realized that Schell had mysteriously and secretly grown up. To my amazement, he’d somehow figured out how to express his intense and passionate outlook on the world through the cool and simple sentences of a factual article about a military campaign, and I could even see his characteristic sense of the absurd glinting out from behind the grimly serious story that he told.

Indeed, the essential features of his sensibility were all there in the unselfconscious pages of his first published work: a sort of tranquil respect for all living things; a steadiness of moral vision; an unblinking and almost semihumorous awareness of the ridiculousness in what people thought and said; and all the same, a warmth and affection that were extended even toward individuals whose actions he couldn’t accept; and underlying everything else, an unmistakable kindness and gentleness of spirit. And as it turned out, his article was the beginning of his speculation on the subject to which he devoted his life: human destructiveness—the apparently unquenchable madness that drives people to kill each other—with a particular focus on the citizens of the United States.