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

Frightened, repelled by so nightmarish an Apocalypse in the name of happiness, should we perhaps give up forever on our need for transcendence? Should we resign ourselves to the narrow pragmatism of our domestic, limited, and trivial happiness and unhappiness, to our modest, ephemeral struggle to just go on, from one day to the next? All historical periods have faced similar unsolvable questions, paying the heavy price of hope without hope.

Modernity has accelerated, more than any other human epoch, history’s centrifugal dynamics. Yet, even modernity, perhaps more than the traditional past, left the individual alone, robbed of any other center than his own self. This clouded, convoluted, and pulsating SELF has proved to be insufficient and frustrating for too many people.

Does anyone seriously believe that mankind is prepared to renounce the great enterprise of crime and killing? A deep skepticism, if not bitterness and despair, seems unavoidable.

Some ten years ago I proposed something very much non-utopian, and I would like to revisit that proposal today. It was in an intervention I made in the famous Walser Debate of 1998 in Germany (see above, pp. 193–201). As some of you may recall, the esteemed German writer Martin Walser, in his acceptance speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association at the Frankfurt Book Fair warned against the “permanent representation” and the “monumentalizing of German shame.”

My response was to suggest that every country — and I emphasize again every country and every people —should complement its monuments of heroism with monuments of shame. This would mean recalling a nation’s wrongdoings towards other countries, other people and also to its own people. To love our neighbors as ourselves may imply scrutinizing ourselves with the same objectivity as our neighbor; and not doing to others what we don’t like to suffer ourselves. It is probably good therapy to look at ourselves with the same exigency as we look at others, to put ourselves in the shoes of others in order to understand their otherness. Aren’t modesty and humility and self-questioning a desirable and sound exercise for being truly human?

But if we really want to return to a more hopeful perspective, we need to return to the individual, the frail, sinful, and heroic conqueror of nature and sometimes of his own nature, to his rich and resourceful imperfection, to his struggle to be more than he succeeded to be, to find a meaning in his often meaningless environment, to be a creator who adds to what is already spread around him.

Despite the great scientific and technical achievements of modernity, despite prosperity and the visible improvement in human rights, the loneliness and estrangement of the individual has not disappeared. Indeed, the opposite is true. The multi-colored and noisy void around us has not made life more meaningful. The modern world is a centrifugal world, and few people can live without a center, whatever that center may be. The lonely wanderer encompasses all of us, he remains our lonely, fraternal companion, torn between solitude and solidarity, a lucid, compassionate, independent, and selfless fellow who deserves our confidence. A lot of people have today a kind of mystical belief in identity —as a magical potion for curing any illness. Identity is what connects us to others: gender, language, wealth, habits, convictions, and aspirations, even physical or psychological features. Identity has, undoubtedly, its place and its importance in social and private life. But the core of humanness is, in the end, the individual entity: what remains when we are alone in an empty room before or after we connect to a collective identity. Without such a lucid, soulful, conscientious entity, identity remains an empty association of empty terms.

Montaigne says in a kind of avalanche of aphorisms: “A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself. Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” And he never forgets to warn us: “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own ass.” Something we should not forget when we stand up, ready to meet our peers.

In the sound and fury unleashed worldwide by the Rushdie affair, we might take note of a significant silence from the Socialist East. I do not refer only to the authorities’ “tactical” silence, to those always in search of advantage in the game of power, I refer also to the silence of the organized groups of artists, writers, and intellectuals, and, above all, to the absent voices of individuals, for whom it is impossible to speak out.

I am saddened but not surprised by this silence. I know the complexities of the process of regeneration and social normalization now under way there and I know, too, the attitudes that not only writers but ordinary citizens have to an event with so many implications for their own historical predicament.

I myself still remember vividly the agitation and dark premonitions I felt when Khrushchev stipulated that Pasternak could travel to Stockholm for his Nobel Prize only if he did not return, or when Brezhnev exiled Solzhenitsyn. At such moments, one feels acutely the danger to one’s position as a citizen and, more simply, as a human being. I have endured more than once, in my turbulent past, the violent impact of this kind of danger: as a child in a Nazi concentration camp, as an adolescent in the Stalinist regime of postwar Romania, as a writer in the bankrupt, ambiguous socialism of recent decades.

The burning of The Satanic Verses in public squares reminds us of those who, when they heard the word culture, put their hands on their guns. Yet, however fragile books may be, they nonetheless endure and are reprinted, and the important ones have their posterity assured; the life of a man, however, is unrecoverable. The death of Salman Rushdie has not just been publicly demanded (and we know of enough authors who have been killed in secret, because of their books or political convictions) but is to be rewarded by a huge sum of money, in the style of the tempting bounties once placed on the heads of notorious malefactors.

The Rushdie case is, thus, entirely different from that of Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. Even in the worst crimes of Stalinism, in the demonic assassination of so many artists and thinkers (always performed in the dark and camouflaged by the authorities) there was generally a certain prudence exhibited, a hint of embarrassment displayed; in short, a fear of publicity. The order to assassinate Rushdie was public, repeated, relentless, addressed to thousands of potential avengers, and, despite its obvious political motivation, it was decreed in the name of religion.

The threat against the life of Salman Rushdie, proclaimed openly, unequivocally, awakens memories of Nazi rites but it is also reminiscent of Stalinist justice; the accusation cannot be scrutinized, the faithful millions called on to repudiate the book are also forbidden to read it. As under Nazism or Stalinism, what is asked of the followers is blind obedience to a decision taken by the leaders on their behalf.

We need not necessarily admire The Satanic Verses or subscribe to its author’s polemic in order to support his right to create and to express his opinion. (This statement may sound pedestrian to Western readers; in great parts of the socialist East, however, readers and writers are still longing for this simple, banal reality.) This is imperative, especially for those who have not been seduced by the novelist’s art, or who reject his ideas. To side with Salman Rushdie despite the feeling of irritation that his work may have aroused in us is an elementary obligation, just as it is an elementary obligation not to escape into puerile comparisons or frivolous relativism when a life is at stake.