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

I thought it necessary to remind those who did not know, or who wanted to forget, about the tragedy to which the nationalist option once led. The differences, as well as the similarities, needed to be brought out between nationalism and the more recent communist catastrophe, which, not surprisingly, was uppermost in everyone’s mind.

Arousing Passions

The essay, “Happy Guilt,” discusses Eliade’s persistent “amnesia” about his political commitment in the interwar years, and the strange, vaguely nostalgic way in which his last writings before his death evoked the “happy guilt” of his youth. The text, as I have said before, deals only with the autobiographical writings. But these are far from insignificant, given that Eliade himself considered not only his work but also his life to be important, devoting to it successive volumes of memoirs and journals. My own memories of the time in “socialist” Romania when everything was “politicized” probably explain, at least in part, why I limited myself in this way and avoided analysis of Eliade’s scientific or literary work.

The arguments of those who appreciated my essay were not very different in the East and the West. It was the arguments of those who objected to it that differed so much, and it may be of interest to compare them. In America, many readers considered the text too restrained, too subtle, too qualified. Such comments, however, remain a long way from the stupefying interpretation of the Los Angeles Times: “In an ambivalence that reveals Manea’s determination not to overlook political complexities, he is hesitant to embrace popular democracy as the clear alternative to totalitarianism … and even sympathetically presents the philosophy of Romanian writer Mircea Eliade that democracy has been unable to inspire in the people a spirit of fervent nationalism.” 13

Publication of “Happy Guilt” in Romania, in 1992, however, aroused militant passions. Although the essay is focused on established facts and testimony, it met an audience that seemed quite unwilling to accept this. The legacy of the nationalist tradition had been obscured and manipulated by the communists for more than forty years, and today nationalism presents itself with an aura of legitimacy, mystery and martyrdom to a public in the throes of an identity crisis and thirsting for a new communitarian mythology.

Some felt it was a “luxury of remembrance” to call into question the values and excesses of nationalism. It seemed to them preferable to idolize great thinkers who had at some time been affiliated with the extreme right, but who could become spotless new parents for the masses orphaned by the collapse of a paternalistically socialist society. To express doubts about their immaculate spiritual biography became a kind of outrage, a hostile and offensive provocation.

Exposure of the horrors of communism was, to be sure, an urgent task but it also evidently fulfilled a complex role of exorcism. In 1945, the Romanian Communist Party had only a thousand or so members. By 1989, it was, in percentage terms, the largest in the entire Eastern bloc, with a membership close to four million, among whom it would have been difficult to find a thousand true believers. A broad, comprehensive debate about left and right totalitarianism — that is, a simultaneous exposure of the horrors of nationalism and native communism — seemed too much for people recently freed from oppression and yet so eager for new protective illusions. ( Without hell, no illusions. )

“Blaspheming” the Idols

“Happy Guilt” was immediately seen in 1992 as a blasphemy directed against the great national values. In a chain reaction of indignation, with predictable anti-Semitic spurts, the few voices that dared challenge the general hysteria found themselves overwhelmed. And today, more than three years later, the uproar is revived from time to time by fresh distortions, in an inventive and inexhaustible carnivalizing of blasphemy.

In the ranks of the nationalist-communist press, where the author has been variously described as a “traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” or “common trash,” a paper such as România Mare owned by the nationalist parliamentary star C. V. Tudor, ex-bard of the Ceau sescu couple, has published an explicit declaration of faith: “Yes, indeed, we are fighting to make Mircea Eliade sacred. We are fighting to rehabilitate Marshal Antonescu, President Ceau sescu.” 14

It would be wrong to think, however, that cheap nationalist-communist speechifiers were the only ones to take offense. Judging by reactions in the press, “Happy Guilt” also incensed quite a few intellectuals, even those professionally trained in critical reading and interpretation. Nor was there any lack of invective in papers of a more “democratic” character. Certainly more elaborate, perhaps even more subtle, they depicted the author of the scandalous essay now as a “detractor,” now as an “American propping himself up against the White House wall,” now as a “follower of Ceau sescu,” and now quite simply as a “policeman of the mind.”

The Group for Social Dialogue, an intellectual nucleus of the opposition, prefaced its three-part publication of “Happy Guilt” in spring 1992 in its journal, 22, with a foreword by the deputy editor. Just back from the United States, he described the text as “tolerant and full of nuances and subtleties.”

But once the last part had appeared, just three weeks later, he found himself compelled to explain that the Eliade essay had mostly aroused “reactions of disapproval and indignation.” There had been hysterical anonymous phone calls, in which patriotic voices warned that those guilty of publishing such blasphemy would account for it “when the time came for judgment.”

But 22 also made it clear that there had been a reaction from well-known cultural dignitaries, “people with some weight in our public life” who, without being named, were identified as “Romanian intellectuals who think in terms of a Judeao-Masonic world conspiracy.” They did not merely express indignation or disapproval, but, according to 22, claimed that the publication of the essay on Eliade actually “served the dark purpose of demonstrating to certain circles abroad that Romanians are racist, anti-Semitic, and chauvinist.”

It is hardly cause for astonishment that the extremist publications saw in “Happy Guilt” a confirmation of what they expected from international circles hostile to Romania. The true surprise was the general reaction of the Romanian press, including opposition magazines, strictly cultural publications, and so on. “Extremist” echoes in the left/right press (it is hard to distinguish between the two in the current political landscape in Romania) differed only in tone and style from the reaction of supposedly democratic individuals and publications “with some weight in public life.” Those “circles abroad” that are said to decide Romania’s unjust fate would, I believe, have been able to make equally good use of many of the reactions in the country’s “democratic” press in their sinister attempts to promote an unfavorable image of Romanians as intolerant.

Faced with public indignation and assorted threats, the editor of 22 now hastened to explain that the text praised to the skies three weeks earlier “does not by a long shot represent the point of view of the magazine 22 ” or of its staff. Barely two weeks later, this revelation was followed by a fresh piece in 22 under the same signature, “Mircea Eliade — A Hero of Our Time,” which clarified a few more things. The new article adopted Eliade’s view that the rightist Iron Guard movement had been “essentially ethical and religious,” preoccupied with services, requiems, mourning fasts, and prayers, guided by “blind faith in God’s omnipotence,” and obsessed “only with love.” In this context, of course, it was not surprising that for the Bucharest journalist, the essay he had so recently considered “tolerant and full of nuances and subtleties” now “tended to drive Mircea Eliade away from sympathetic understanding in Romania, instead of bringing him closer to it.”