Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

But what do we see here — the tyrant, part of the troupe of buffoons? Can the frail vagabond (and cultivated man of letters) recognize himself even in this new face, in this disfigured mask in which no one can see the good, the true, the beautiful, but only the opposite? A tyrant is someone who manipulates, gives orders, enforces discipline, punishes and rewards according to the sovereign and sadistic laws of evil, ugliness, and mendacity. The tyrant: innumerable perfidious travesties, a smug rictus, fastidious and ridiculous uniforms, attacks of hysteria marked by sharp and bestial cries, plaintive infantile whispers, the stamps and roars of boars in rut — or the icy immobility of the vampire.

It isn’t hard to believe that the poet — clown has already recognized that fact in his nightmares or in the course of his wanderings; it even seems that sometimes, somewhere, he has already borne tyrannical caprice and hatred. No doubt about it, this too is a human face, even when overlaid by wrinkled layers of fat and thick makeup. Yes, yes, the poor man — a vain fanatic, enthralled by the chimera of power, just a poor man, a solitary sufferer who turns his weakness into authority, his fear into assurance, his diseases into violence and farce.

And so, in the bright arena, Augustus the Fool faces the Clown of Power. Their eyes meet. Is all of human tragicomedy concentrated in that brief exchange? Is it attraction by repulsion, a powerful reaction catalyzed by the meeting of opposites? Can they be compared to one another, these actors playing different parts in the coded scenario called Life on Earth? Only if one watches the spectacle from the moon, or from so close up that one is blinded and can no longer see the contrasts in this global and rapidly changing masquerade.

An artist who has lived under tyranny (and even one who hasn’t) cannot ignore the insurmountable moral barrier that separates the two roles. He can watch the spectacle from a cosmic distance — and yet he is ready to play the part of his opposite to the point of identification with him; he will cross that distance in order to scrutinize the counterpart with all the curiosity, imagination, and precision required by his task. The history of the circus as History? With its strange couple: the Artist — Fool and the Clown of Power?

Is the artist Augustus the Fool, is the tyrant the White Clown? Is Hitler a White Clown, and is Chaplin, who has mimed him with childlike irony, a traditional Augustus the Fool? Is this moment of juncture in the human dynamic the moment of truth in the great circus of the world?

While I am to this day painfully aware of the sinister radiation with which Hitler and Stalin ravaged my childhood and youth, I would never have understood the true nature of this radiation if I hadn’t been compelled, in my adult years, to endure — to the point of suffocation — the paranoia of a small provincial tyrant who managed to expand, step by step, the small arena of his macabre circus to cover an entire country: “Antonioni is a silent Augustus the Fool, mute and melancholic …. Picasso? A triumphant Augustus the Fool, proud, confident, a jack-of-all-trades; he emerges victorious in his battle with the White Clown.” 3

In The Europeans, Luigi Barzini wrote about his impressions on first meeting Hitler: “To me, then, he looked like an improbable funny burlesque character, a sinister clown …. He was, I concluded, too improbable to last; there was nothing to worry about …. [He had] no more of a chance than Mussolini’s operatic attempt to reconstruct the Roman Empire.”

Hitler, a White Clown! And Chaplin, his imitator (or interpreter), is an Augustus the Fool. A buffoon, with a little black hat cocked over his ear, the oversized pants, and the elegant cane of a dandy.

The mask of the White Clown corresponds to the antinomy of good and evil we know from fairy tales and find so satisfying: “The face is white and spectral, with circumflexes above arrogantly raised brows; the mouth a narrow line, hard and unpleasant, distant, cold,” says Fellini, “icily authoritarian like certain nuns in charge of kindergartens,” but also, above all, “like those spiffy Fascists in shiny black silk and gold braid, riding crop in hand (typical clown gear), giving martial orders.”

Is it hard to define the dividing line between Augustus and the White Clown? “There are White Clowns who began as Augustuses, but no Augustus the Fool who started out as a White Clown. This is probably the case because it is easier for a tolerant nature to imitate authority than for an authoritarian one to slip into a tolerant character.” 4

Our pitiful local clown: his ridiculous, self-awarded, ever more pompous titles, his endless speeches full of vast platitudes with their perennial hoarse bathos, their monotonous invective, their grammatical mistakes. The fear fueling his fanaticism, and the clever camouflage of that fanaticism; his stutter and puppetlike gestures, his manic insistence and schizophrenic industry, and his perplexity when confronted with anything still alive and spontaneous.

Many have started out as Augustuses — mediocre housepainters, humble provincial seminarists, apprentices in a cobbler’s workshop. “The fascination of the moonstruck, the nocturnal, ghostly elegance” of the White Clown? “To children, the White Clown is a bogeyman because he embodies responsibility or — to use a fashionable term — repression,” says Fellini. Repression — a fashionable term? There was a time when I would have responded to that statement with a superior smile, or else with the anguished howl of a sick beast: repression was our tangible present, the air we breathed every day, the atmosphere in every office and restaurant. The children laughed at the tyrant and couldn’t understand why all the adults around them let him gain so much power over them. This too is a paradox, characteristic of this little clown who differs from Hitler or Stalin in that children find him merely ridiculous.

Ridicule has its own secret power, that of amusement, and it is vengeful. Repeatedly, Fellini refers to the anonymous citizen, “the child who is forced to play the part of Augustus” in his relationship to Mother (the state, the police, the authorities) and her constant prohibitions: “Don’t touch that!” “Don’t do that!”

By decree, our clown has changed the whole country into a huge kindergarten populated by militarized and industrious children; but he can’t stand his own “children,” or “subjects.” If they obey, he spits on them and beats them up; if they act up, he cuts off an ear; if they disobey, he sews their lips shut; if they get sick, he presents them with a coffin and a bill for funeral expenses. “Order and discipline” are the only virtues he permits the anonymous throng. He communicates with the humble ones — from whose ranks he, the “most beloved, the most honored, the most revolutionary son of the people,” has risen — but only through his guards. Anyone who dares intercept the presidential limousine with a petition invariably disappears, never to be seen again. The cape, the scepter, the palace, the anthem, the decorations ….

And his hunting parties!

The bears tranquilized, foaming at the mouth, bound, prevented from eating and drinking for many days before the hunt begins. The aerial surveillance of the hunting area. The red presidential helicopter landing in front of the castle. The guests from the Party circus, from the circus press, from the foreign embassies. Bit players from the secret police dressed as waiters, and the clown’s bodyguards waiting in ditches, camouflaged in the underbrush. The portable fence deployed like a funnel with the opening exactly in front of the president’s stand. The tranquilized bears gradually awaken and appear in the arena, unsteady and bellowing. The First Hunter of the Circus taking aim, closing his right eye, then his left. The moment the comrade places his finger on the trigger the Securitate snipers camouflaged in the underbrush also fire, with silencers, picking off the game. To the rhythm of the national anthem, the Supreme Clown thrusts out his chest for the gold medal; he is the best marksman of the time.