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

“The only female clown to achieve lasting fame is Miss Lulu. Gelsomina and Cabiria in my movies belong to the genus Augustus the Fool. They aren’t women, they are sexless,” says Fellini. “Charlot, an Augustus, is equally devoid of human gender, just a happy cat that cleans its fur and walks where it pleases.” Laurel and Hardy, “two more of the same type, they even sleep together like innocent children, as if sex did not exist. Exactly that was what made the world laugh.”

And the Pussycat? The lover with poor teeth, the erudite illiterate, the commissar in skirts, the witch, the hysterical one, Auntie Porno? The spouse of the White Clown: is she, too, a White Clown?

People snicker, not only in secret, about the first couple of the land, forever locked in the presentation of the same routine: the first couple. In full regalia, the parvenus stage an imperial intoxication of bliss not seen anywhere outside the circus. He wears a sash and carries a scepter; she dresses in the toga of an empress, conscious of her fame as a scientist, confident in her vaccination certificates. He holds his secret councils with Kojak, Abdullah Jasser, Santiago Carlos, Kim Kung Kang or Benito Mafioso — to discuss the next worldwide measures to be taken for the liquidation of his adversaries and for the conditioning of the survivors to an existence in the catacombs.

Prudish and shy, he airs his obsessions in endless, repetitive, stammering tirades of invective, both at home and at the office. His little Lulu, on the other hand, takes in several sex movies every night, instead of sleeping pills, and falls asleep in a similarly pornographic position, mouth and robe wide open.

Miss Lulu, Lulette, Lena, Lean ta — a vicious White Clown who dominates her partner and terrorizes his entourage. Out of perversity? Insecurity? Frustration? All of the above, in mutual fidelity; compared to him, Hitler was just a waif. “The hermaphrodite” is what they call Hitler, and it is possible to remain a hermaphrodite even though one’s spouse has used one to produce children. Hard to imagine our clown in that position, much easier to see her in it — uninhibited, grinning, urging him on, screaming. The most elevated couple: a hermaphrodite and a stale matron … Miss Lulena, who walks like a duck, baring her gums above small yellow teeth, mouth open, threads of saliva dripping: and the engorged hermaphrodite, stammering in his red jammies decorated with braid and medals, advancing upon her. Miss Honorary Doctorate, the shameless hussy.

A supreme commander who has never seen combat, a supreme scholar who never finished school. In a golden frame on her ostentatious desk stands his portrait, retouched by the best experts of Interpol. On his desk, framed in platinum, we see the precious smile of her ugliness, decorated with flowerlets and little stars: Miss Lulena, decked out in jewelry and medals and false diplomas, still nothing but a fraudulent Pussycat.

She always spreads her legs, even in the most festive presidential photographs, and always holds her little purse right in front of her pussy, the demotic designation of that unnameable primal spot.

I have taken an infantile, vengeful pleasure in Fellini’s text, reading it only from one perspective, reading and rereading it, always with this subtext in mind — to align our ridiculous national clown with all those other White Clowns. Yes, indeed: “the mouth a thin line, cold, full of antipathy, remote” in an ugly face whose homeliness becomes monstrous with its liver spots and its wrinkles born of so much cursing. “Icily authoritarian, like certain nuns in charge of kindergartens”—yes! “Like those spiffy Fascists in shiny black silk and gold braid, riding crop in hand”—yes! A Clown in White in his “striving for higher goals,” in his hilarious honky-tonk small-town improvisations, lacking in style and definition, in his sterile, cartoonlike animation à la Duvalier and Idi Amin.

I have exhausted Fellini’s text in my secret enjoyment of it; I was incapable of reading it impartially. In a totalitarian state, every detail of everyday life, every word and gesture acquires a distorted and hidden meaning that reveals itself only to the indigenous dwellers. Only those who live in more or less normal societies can find this code lunar and fascinating. That poor, ridiculous creature! An illiterate upstart! Stammerer! Chimpanzee! Monster! Vermin! Leech!

A White Clown? That’s too great an honor …. He was too small, too unfinished, too stupid for that. Yet it is much harder to see him as belonging to the seemingly more modest, in reality far more distinguished, category of Augustus the Fool. That’s unthinkable. Augustus is much too dear to me; I have always seen the artist as an Augustus, a loser.

In my last year there, I read Montale’s great poem “The Poet” countless times. 6In a time of increasing deterioration and degradation of everyday life, the sovereign sarcasm of his verses helped me at times to endure the ubiquity of the dictator. I knew the poem by heart and repeated it to myself with sadistic determination, carefully measuring out the poison the poet had distilled so masterfully.

“Only a short thread is left me / but I hope I’ll be able to dedicate / my humble songs to the next tyrant.” Thus Montale begins the confession he ascribes to “a poet.” I wasn’t alone in sensing that only a short thread was left me: over the years, the tyrant had worn us down, insinuating himself into our daily nightmares, and I knew that even if I managed to save myself, I would be scarred forever by the toxins of this macabre period of my life.

“He will want / spontaneous praise gushing from my grateful / heart and will have it in abundance,” I repeated, making faces, thinking of the ghost possessed by this very desire for “spontaneous praise,” who lorded it over not only a crowd of poets but also the thousands and again thousands of anonymous frightened people squeezed into his circus prison.

“All the same I shall be able to leave / a lasting trace,” I consoled myself, thinking about my famous and not-so-famous predecessors and contemporaries who felt that their only responsibility was to posterity.

The final lines, however, I would whisper, since that was the only way I could enjoy the exaltation with which art proclaims its fundamental truth, parodying it at the same time: “In poetry / what matters is not the content / but the form.”

That gave me satisfaction. I had already succeeded several times in finding the right form for the encoding of my antipathy for the tyrant; what’s more, in my novella “Robot Biography” the aggressive “content” took on a high-risk form when I made January 26 the sinister main character’s birthday — the day of tremendous festivities in honor of the tyrant’s birth.* The horrified reaction of my friends to this impertinent frivolity both delighted and terrified me, but it also gave me hope that other readers would notice how spontaneous aversion had made me demonstrate that form and content are indeed united in works of art.

“Better to be a free human being, never mind all the problems with which one may be burdened, than to be the buffoon of a lamentable buffoon,” a friend wrote to me in a letter around the time of the buffoon’s birthday. The friend enclosed a big bundle of newspapers that sang the praises of the event. Every year, huge festivities are organized in his honor, with pomp as solemn as it is provincial, making even the policemen laugh as they form the thousand-long human chains to restrain the merriment and pressure of the masses.

For me, this sinister carnival was already a thing of the past; I was on the other side of the wall and had landed in West Berlin, a city that brought to mind similar caricatures and a similar collective brutalization.