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

As we can see, unlike the Russian reaction to Sinyavsky’s book on Pushkin, the Romanian response to my essay on Eliade is better exemplified by the democratic and cultural press than by the much too crude and foul-mouthed nationalist press. The reason for the different reactions may be that Russian culture is traditionally obsessed with ethical and social questions, whereas Romanian culture often seems to be seduced by the delights of ambiguity, of a subtle and coded aesthetic game.

In this connection it is (probably) worth mentioning an original last-minute intervention in the debate, serialized in 1994 under the title “Mircea Eliade and his Detractors,” in the Bucharest cultural review Luceafárul. The Romanian literary critic who wrote this piece located Eliade’s “detractors” among leftists of every stripe, homosexuals, Jews, and exiles. He believed that “Happy Guilt” was part of a huge American conspiracy to obscure the guilt of the United States for its treatment of Native Americans, blacks, and the Vietnamese by focusing attention on Europe and its great cause for guilt, the Holocaust.

This broad and ever-shifting diversion required the constant discovery or invention of celebrated anti-Semites for the new Holocaust archives and museums springing up all over America. “Happy Guilt” was thus seen as part of an active worldwide plot, and the exile, N. M., had simply proved his loyalty to his adopted country.

The name Salman Rushdie was mentioned but once in the long press campaign in Romania against the essay on Eliade. Again, there was a striking difference from the aggressively moral and Slavophile slogans in Russia equating Rushdie’s novel with Sinyavsky’s literary study of Pushkin. The “essentially moralistic themes” in my article were said to have been stimulated by censorship and “fundamentalism, which corrodes the foundation of culture.” 15So, it is not Mircea Eliade’s tiresome pro-fascist propaganda of the 1930s that is inquisitorial, but rather attempts to discuss his case against the background of nationalist revival in the Eastern Europe of the 1990s.

This carnivalization reached its peak in an absolutely original idea: the twinning of Rushdie and Eliade, in a staggering operation of twofold distortion, as jointly sacred. Salman Rushdie, who aroused the dogmatic fury of Islamic fundamentalists against the blasphemy of his anticanonical The Satanic Verses, and Mircea Eliade, whose dogmatic political texts fit perfectly into the fundamentalist canon of an extremist, totalitarian movement claiming to be essentially Orthodox Christian!

For all the wild manipulation, however, the invocation of Rushdie’s name was not altogether inappropriate: neither in the case of the outrage at Sinyavsky’s study of Pushkin, nor in the reaction to my essay on Eliade’s political and autobiographical writings. For in the end, the great Rushdie scandal also began as a “literary affair” associated with an émigré—as did the incomparably smaller and more “local” scandals discussed here. And like these, it facilitated a significant comparison between how “blasphemy” is defined and perceived in societies that have been closed and in those that have long been open.

On its first publication, the novel The Satanic Verses did not shock the West. When its author was sentenced to death by the Iranian dictator Khomeini, he was, of course, fervently defended in the West, in the name of basic human rights and democratic principles. Sinyavsky’s study of Pushkin was appreciated in the Western press as a solid and interesting piece of research, perfectly legitimate and of real use. My essay on Eliade’s political commitment in the 1930s and his ambiguous memoirs about that period was regarded by Western readers, amid the present political confusion in the world, as a revealing critical reflection on the guilt of an intellectual led astray by suspect extremist affiliations.

The authors of these texts — writers exiled in the West, and thus hybrids of belonging and estrangement — had the poignant opportunity to feel in their own skin the moral, historical, psychological, cultural, and religious conflicts that their homelands were experiencing.

“Happy Guilt,” instead of stimulating analysis of the responsibility of intellectuals who aid and abet political extremism, was rejected as an insult to the Romanian nation. Sinyavsky’s book on Pushkin was received as an act of spiritual vandalism designed to separate the masses from their sacred national poet, an outrage to the messianic mission of Russia’s great literature, its very pride and soul. Rushdie’s novel, though a work of fiction, was not accepted as such even by Western clerics, and became the pretext for a fanatical instigation to crime on the part of the fundamentalist militants of Islam. The demonic “disorder” of democracy, the freedom to doubt and debate, pragmatism and diversity, appear to the theocrats as mortal dangers to Islam and the Koran — just as provocations to undermine ethnic cohesion appear intolerable to those who believe in the paternalistic authority of the Nation.

Demonizing Difference

In all these cases, the natural exercise of the intellect — whether focusing on moral interrogation, aesthetic research, or epic creation — was elevated to the rank of blasphemy simply because it challenged the comforts of spiritual routine and convention. In the end, as the Australian scholar David Lawton points out, “blasphemy is an orthodox way of demonizing difference, in order to perpetuate violence against it.” If blasphemy can be seen as “a discourse that includes those who purport to be offended by it,” then it is no wonder that “literature, representation and reading is [ sic ] potentially blasphemous.” 16

The demonization of difference is actually quite common. Its dark, blind, fanatical carnivalization may even reach the point of crime (as in the Rushdie case). PEN figures show that in 1993, 89 writers were murdered around the world, 150 were in prison, and 216 were under investigation.

Where there is no possibility of dialogue, blasphemy is simplification. The impact of blasphemy is all the greater, of course, in closed, authoritarian societies. In the silence of submission and the cold of dogma, the void is suddenly filled with panicky alarm. Anything that conflicts with the communitarian canon becomes blasphemy. Through careful manipulation and surveillance, the authorities maintain at any cost the narcissistic illusion of homogeneity and cohesiveness. Everything foreign or unusual becomes a source of danger to be negated and shut away — in the name of the ideal of perfect cohesion.

One might repeat Cioran’s “without hell, no illusions” for too many of the characteristically closed, authoritarian social-political systems — even for countries suffering the painful transition from a closed to an open society. It may be that suffering strengthens belief but, at the same time, lends power to illusions. As has often been pointed out, however, the effect of illusions is so painful that it seems an involuntary homage to skepticism.

In closed, authoritarian societies, there is an obsession with blasphemy which assists the artificial cohesion imposed by the system, while carnivalization is the acting out of its dark, oppressive, fanatical consequences. In pluralistic democracies, on the other hand, blasphemy is rapidly diluted, whereas carnivalization becomes more widespread in the frivolous forms of entertainment imposed by mass consumption.

The existence of ever broader individual liberties, combined with an acceptance of diversity, effectively cancels out the risks of blasphemy in the society as a whole (“people like to demolish all reputations, even legitimate, even justified”). It is hard to imagine, in the varied cultural market of the West, that something like the Rushdie affair could be triggered by even the most unconventional, iconoclastic, heretical, indecent, or provocative book — or painting, sculpture, music, ballet, photography, or film. The emancipation of thought and taste goes together with increased tolerance, but also with ever more widespread indifference.