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

It is a razor-edge situation in which Augustus the Fool no longer mimes ambiguity but is possessed by it, and in which the boundary between hallucination and reality begins to dissolve. A minute dose of “simulation”—for example, the assignment of excessive importance to certain real symptoms (or others derived from one’s reading) — can ultimately lead to a genuine disturbance.

In the totalitarian circus, where faking is not immediately obvious either to the physician or to the less aware patient, the waiting rooms of psychiatrists’ offices become sanctuaries of refuge, prayer, simulation. They become “legal” hiding places where one can withdraw from the marshy arena and its lies, punishments, and daily moans.

Since psychiatric repression has been used against so many “undesirables,” it may seem unconscionable to hand the state the simplest weapon it can use to destroy you. And I didn’t belong to the “desirable” ones, then or later. And yet … My patient waiting in front of physicians’ offices did finally lead to “liberation” and “victory”: I was declared unfit to work. The annual humiliation of a medical examination protected me from a multitude of other daily humiliations. Had the truly diseased one (who’d made the entire nation ill) decided to retire, be it for obvious “reasons of health” or for reasons of age — equally obvious for a long time — I would have “recovered.” As things were, I was the afflicted one, and the portrait of the buffoon that stared at me from every street corner compelled me to increase the dosage of my medication daily. Thus, at last, a connection had been established between us. The curious role reversal was just a pale reflection of the schizophrenia the true madman had imposed on his entire domain.

In such borderline situations, what becomes quite evident is the fundamental difference between the interpretation of a role — with its subtle symptoms common to all professional diseases, including the play called life and the play called death — and the actual role a human being has been assigned on the great stage of the world.

Does the White Clown represent only ridiculous authority, and Augustus contrariness, laughter, and suffering? “The appearance of a White Clown (the Fascist) transforms us into similar clowns as soon as we surrender and return the Roman salute in a disciplined fashion,” says Fellini.

“You are much too serious. You are too ethical, and you are not playful enough. The image of Augustus the Fool doesn’t fit you at all,” said a friend years ago after I published Augustus the Fool’s Apprenticeship Years. Suffering to the point of grimaces, I was forced to accept Augustus the Fool as an autobiographical reality. This identification was not only the result of a withdrawal from my surroundings, of loneliness and its burden of vulnerability, and it was more than a simple refusal to obey; it was in fact a consequence of my deep solidarity with people’s unhappiness.

The bad actor gradually polarized the hatred of a whole shackled nation into lethargy. In this state of tragic, general despair, Augustus’s laughter and tears gain a great resonance among his fellow sufferers.

Existence under terror distorts your perceptions and frequently tempts you to make risky and far-fetched associations. No matter how far you have removed yourself from that existence in both time and space, it is impossible to rid yourself of your dark obsessions.

In the summer of 1988, in Washington, I watched the circus of the presidential elections and was reminded of the clown “back there.” The presidency of the Actor was over, and now it was time for the new actors of the new presidency. The childish and vulgar theater of competition for acclamation gave rise, in the exiled Augustus, to rather pessimistic thoughts about the human species. Anyone coming from the so-called socialist East needs some time to rid himself of illusions about the “reverse” utopia. But even if these disappointments were irritating and if the new vice president Coturnix reminded me — surprisingly enough — less of telegenic Robert Redford than of a minor Stalinist Party secretary in a provincial town of the 1950s, my terror still remained over there.

Only over there could my reading of Fellini’s essay evoke that childlike Schadenfreude in me. Even if one watches the American election circus on the tube through Fellini’s telescopic lens, one is still over there in one’s mind. This may be so because Jünger’s statement applies only to old or young democracies in which one still has the option to ignore the political brouhaha, or at least to put it in parentheses. That, however, becomes impossible when the ridiculous reigns supreme over all of human life, tortures everyone without respite, and slowly but surely cripples them: then it is not only the rest that is ridiculous, but the whole, and it can’t be ignored because it won’t ignore you, won’t let you go.

The circus of free, freely manipulated elections in a democratic society does not give cause for optimism. While watching it I was spontaneously reminded of the FBI file on Charlie Chaplin, discovered years after his death. It was 1,900 pages long, covering the period between 1922 and 1978 (thus extending one whole year beyond his demise), and contained so many absurdities that no satirical cabaret could do them justice. And yet, while witnessing all the shallow gags that accompanied the spectacle of the US presidential elections, all I could think about was the incomparable face of our tiny national clown.

Are the tyrant and the suppressed masses truly irreconcilable in every respect, or is it a matter of unconscious reciprocal stimulation? Do labor camps and totalitarianism arise only when a society’s energy is perverted and suffocated? Is the dictator only the enemy or also the creation of the masses?

“It is said that Antonet, a famous White Clown, never spoke a word to Beby, his Augustus, outside the arena,” Fellini writes. The clown takes revenge on the anonymous masses when he comes and throws tantrums when his superiority is not admired. How did our national clown react to his daughter’s love affairs? Or (how shameful!) to the marriage of his son — to a Jewish woman! No one even bothered to explain the national importance of the new divorce laws to that imprudent boy; they simply mailed the divorce decree to him.

Could it be that the dictator too is an artist, obsessed with the impossible? Could we consider the diseased, fanatical boy who called himself Caligula a poet just because he appointed his favorite horse to a ministerial post? Does the gigantically morbid ever achieve the ineffable distant horizon all poetry strives toward? Is the despot a knight of utopia?

Duality inheres in every human being, certainly in poets and also in leaders, even though the latter like to forget it. “The stationmaster in my movie was a White Clown, and thus all of us become Augustuses. When you stand in front of a White Clown, you can’t help but assume the role of Augustus,” confesses Fellini, who then adds: “But only the appearance of an even more sinister clown, the Fascist, transformed us into White Clowns when he forced us to return the Roman salute in a disciplined fashion.”

Finally, the author attempts to define his own location in the fabulous circus of the world. “If I try to imagine myself as a clown, I end up seeing myself as Augustus the Fool.” In the real world it seems risky to venture between the uncertain and diffuse boundaries that define human experience. “Yes, I consider myself an Augustus the Fool, but I am also a White Clown,” Fellini continues. Then he concludes with a meditative sentence: “But perhaps I am the director of the circus, the physician of the mad who has himself become mad.” An outsider, a pariah, a melancholy dreamer and an unwavering researcher, an undecided mime, a man obsessed by irresolvable questions.