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

I looked at the pile of papers. They seemed to have been printed on toilet paper and tore as soon as you turned a page. The ink left red, green, and black smudges on my fingers. I was barely able to read a few sentences: dementedly repetitive, the clichés chased one another and promptly induced lethal boredom. All the years endured in that empire of horror and perverted language, all the neuroses and nightmares, stirred up the old, indissoluble poison in me.

*January 26, Ceau sescu’s official birthday.

In those same weeks of painful, intermittent recovery, I came across a repulsive but useful potboiler, a godsend to the Western media’s appetite for sensation. Repulsive because of its subject (our little dictator with the speech impediment) and also its author (a former general who had been in charge of the dictator’s secret police and now had entered the service of “freedom” and new masters), but useful because of the revelations this connoisseur was offering the public in his depiction of a clan of upstarts, a gang of circus clowns made up of philistines, crooks, and cynics who had gained power and used it to develop their mediocrity and meanness to the fullest degree. There was the trade in Jews and Germans for convertible currencies, euphemistically called “reuniting families”; there was the espionage and disinformation, the hobnobbing with Arab terrorists, fire-eaters, hypnotists, animal tamers from the KGB. There were the situations that made our “Leader” throw up — when, for instance, American authorities wouldn’t comply with his demand for an “official” ban on protest demonstrations during his visit to New York, or when he heard that he’d been betrayed by one of his most faithful servants; the attack of hysteria when he first met the new US ambassador, who was black (an insufferable insult to an old internationalist). I read about the tantrums of his spouse, the one with many honorary degrees, directed against their circus house managers when they had forgotten to place orders for special toilet bowls from Paris or London. I found out about her piquant “hobby” of watching movies of adultery committed by some of the highest figures of the state, clandestinely filmed by Securitate specialists for this express purpose.

It was probably no accident that during this same period between Inferno and Purgatory (tyranny and exile) I found, in a Parisian journal, these sentences addressed to Julien Hervier by Ernst Jünger: “The artist has to focus on his painting, his poetry, his sculpture, the rest is ridiculous. That is why I could never criticize an artist who benefits from the favors of a tyrant. He can’t say: ‘I’ll wait until the tyrant is overthrown!’ because that might take ten years, and in the meantime his creative power would wane.”

I agreed that “the rest is ridiculous.” It is, however, not just a question of the ridiculous but also, first and foremost, of the horror, the destruction of the last enclaves of quotidian normality, the daily risk of physical and spiritual death. It was impossible to escape from that “rest,” which had become the all-encompassing, aggressive, absurd, and suffocating whole.

The buffoon of a lamentable buffoon? To the best of my ability, I managed to sidestep the monster’s masks and traps. I never vied for the tyrant’s favors, I wouldn’t have granted him a syllable of praise. Dead-eyed, I stared at the dead pages of the dead newspapers. Suddenly, Fellini’s “impertinent loudspeaker” came to mind: “A loudspeaker, an Augustus, simply refuses to transmit the program given by a White Clown.”

All the dishonest newspapers that poisoned our days with their unchanging refrain, all the loudspeakers playing the same tune: what if, one day, they provoked a revolt, what if they found a method of revenge, of mockery, by changing, reversing the code? A warped sentence, a missing letter that simply escapes from one of his great honorary titles, an impertinent blot on the idyllic retouched photograph …. At the right moment, the “impertinent loudspeaker” manages to pull off a gag that serves to demean the tyrant: “It surrounds him, ridicules him, mocks everything the White Clown utters,” says Fellini. “It is the revolt of the means of communication — altered news to counter the insulting nonsense loudspeakers were forced to disseminate during the Fascist years.” And not only during those: our generation had its own White Clowns and everyone was his Augustus.

I refused to serve our tyrannical clown not because I disdained his favors but because I tried to ignore him as best I could. I wasn’t even interested in that realm of the “ridiculous” that can only be called “the rest” of the very first shaky and confused days of terror that later mounted rapidly and murderously, like an avalanche that collects, devours, annihilates everything in its path. I took good care not to hate him, because that would have meant granting him too much importance — even though like a huge, tireless octopus he had already discharged so much shit that we were almost suffocating under it. Now that everybody hated him and hoped for his death, there was no longer anything one could do against him.

Only when a disaster has become obvious and irreversible does hatred become irreversible: against Hitler, only in the final months of the war, when disaster overwhelmed the entire German people; against Stalin only after his death, when the monster was no longer dangerous and the myth had turned rancid.

All the heads of state of both East and West received our ridiculous national monster with highest honors. Even during his first period in power, while he was still exploiting misconceptions and presented himself as a champion of the good, he disgusted me just as much as in his final decade. I was instinctively appalled by him even before he started baring his teeth in the horrendous Grand Guignol performance. It would not have been possible for me to dismiss the entire masquerade only as the “ridiculous rest.” With increasing frequency, he unsheathed his claws, and his bark grew ever louder. His demonic, murderous ridiculousness was no negligible “rest,” it was the whole , and no one was able to escape.

Not long after the tyrant came to power, a writer who moved in medical circles showed me a “psychiatric profile” of the tyrant prepared by a group of respected specialists. Even then there was reason to fear the worst: even then, this leader, this best-beloved son of the people, should have been taken into custody without delay, on grounds provided by these documents.

Soon his paranoia became evident: in labor legislation that tied every wage earner to his place of employment, to force obedience and facilitate surveillance; in family legislation that made divorce difficult to obtain, banned abortion, and discriminated against unmarried couples; in school legislation aimed at the politicization and militarization of children. It was obvious in his tirades, delivered in a state of trance for hours on end to starving audiences, about the future of the circus to be built by happy slaves whipped ever onward by stern kindergarten teachers. The clown kept in his circus troupe only the hypnotized dwarves whose job it was to applaud him, and the brawny armored giants who made up his national security system.

Even back then, I was cautiously preparing my departure from the “labor zone,” as it was called in the language of the menagerie, a zone that was to become, in less than a decade, a swamp for rhinos to wallow in, those who like to bathe in ordure and denounce others.

One needn’t exert one’s imagination too much to visualize the state of revulsion and fear, exhaustion and depression, that drives a person to the psychiatrist. The latter knows, of course, that the illness in question is affecting all of society, but each patient is an individual case whose “self-denunciation” has to be taken seriously and treated.