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

In fact, identity is too profound a topic to be transformed into a simple pretext for slogans, however justified they may be. It deserves a scrutiny of our history and the history of “others” in the realm of the national and international past and present. The much-dreamt-of “melting pot” of global, modern society is often confronted by an obsessive, nostalgic need for tribal togetherness, where communal memories and impulses gain a combative, sometimes vehement, nature. What we should never forget is that the “other” isn’t evil because he might be from another party or race or faith; evil is the “man in uniform”, among the others and among ourselves, the fierce believer in unanimity, homogeneity, uniformity and uniform obedience.

The most recent example of the unsolvable conflict between “politicians in uniform” in a free, democratic country was, unfortunately, the deplorable show in the American Congress about the late 2000s financial default.

It seems the right moment to remember how the American writer Gertrude Stein referred to the difference between identity and entity. She saw identity as connecting us to a certain social group. This means by gender, ethnicity, race, language, sexual orientation — as well as perhaps by some specific physical or psychological features, trivial preferences, etc. In a more frivolous way, the social group with whom we identify can even be the fat and / or myopic people, baseball lovers, handicapped people, stamp collectors, followers of a certain diet, etc.

By contrast, entity is what is left when we are alone. Even in such a solitary situation the connection to other people isn’t totally annulled, of course; it only becomes implicit rather than explicit.

In any case, with both identity and entity, the particular premise or the main imprint of our biography (family, religion, persecution, victimhood, professional distinction, etc.) plays an important role. For we are not only the product of a family, religion, country, community, school, profession, etc. Are we not, in the end, the result of our readings, the product of our bibliography as well as our biography? I don’t necessarily mean political-ideological books such as the Little Red Book of Mao or the green one by Gaddafi or Bin Laden’s terrorist commandments or even Hitler’s Mein Kampf —although they undeniably have their readers and even followers. Rather I have in mind books rightly considered the canon of our Western culture, from the Bible to Aristotle, from Cervantes to Darwin, from Einstein to Shakespeare, from Spinoza to Whitman. It’s an artificial but important genealogy that competes as well as cooperates with the natural one in structuring our personality, in shaping our options, our beliefs and projects. It expresses our need for something beyond our too-human limitations, our family, religion, territorial, linguistical narrowness, something that exposes us to the vast uncertainties and togetherness of the world.

It’s odd to speak about such “esoteric” questions in a time of increased mass-media dominance, and instant communication through Facebook, mobile phones, Twitter, etc., with its cheap oversimplifications, replacement of readers with TV fans, of the word with the image, of increasing illiteracy and lowering of standards of education among young people. But just because of such an acute and worsening situation it may be worth reminding people that the consequences of a too “pragmatic”, simplified, and speedy approach to life may have significant consequences in the choices people make for their own lives and for the lives of their communities, what principles they respect, what kind of representatives they select, what type of coexistence they wish to have with their close neighbours and with far-away neighbours on our endangered planet.

Books and art and culture provide a necessary and instructive break from our daily rush, from the tyranny of excessively trivial details in the daily odyssey we embody. Books often play a second, intimate yet essential role in our being. Our “bookish genealogy” might sometimes be even more important than the one found in the archives of heredity. In the adventure through the printed page we may find relatives who are closer and who go even further back than those in the family lineage, however extensive it may be. The appealing companions we discover in the library shelves in fact form another kind of world population. As interlocutors, models, advisors, friends, challengers, these fictitious individuals tell us about the mind and soul of the planet’s real population, things that are more important than the daily news and scandals. They are for some of us the real formative and trustworthy comrades with whom we share the hopes and disappointments of our spiritual selves, of our “thinking” biography, with its solitude and inner landscapes and intensity.

Phylon of Alexandria dared to say that the Word ( Logos ) was the very first image of Divinity, the first representation of God, that the intellect conveys, in fact, His and man’s real image. He argued that the spiritual connection is the real human factor of cohesion, not the genetic or ritualistic one. The intellectual nature of Logos means, Phylon said, the spiritual affinity amongst us, and it represents “the image of the divine.”

In the difficult years of Eastern Europe’s socialist dictatorship, under the ubiquitous eye of the censor and of police informers, my generation persisted in a dangerous hunt for banned and “illegal” books; despite the great risk, it fueled our survival, our fight for freedom, our hopes and our revival. Not only Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago but books of “decadent” poetry and prose, prison diaries, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the American and French Constitution, books on the Inquisition and religious reformers and martyrs, books by Erasmus and St Augustine, books by Raymond Aron and Koestler, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Pasternak and Nietsche and many others.

When I returned, after the war, from the concentration camps, I read whatever I could lay my hands on. In my student years in Bucharest I took advantage of the great public libraries to discover the banned Romanian modern literature, and in the following years, during the so-called “liberalization” period, I finally had access to Proust and Kafka, Joyce and Babel, Sabato and Virginia Woolf.

When I eventually put my own library together, I had to leave the country, due to the hysterical evolution of our harsh political system. Expelled again, at fifty, as I had been at five, this time by another dictator and another ideology, I gradually came to consider it a great honor, not a repeated misfortune.

In the first tough years of displacement and dispossession that accompanied my forced exile, I tried to regain, step by step, the familiar companionship of my author-friends, still alive on the library shelves, even if dressed now in other languages. I recalled again, as I did in many other difficult moments, that during the terrible blockade of Leningrad in World War II when its citizens were dying of hunger and cold, the survivors were stubborn readers of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who had been provided with spiritual food and warmth of another sort.

Old and new books formed again, in my intense effort of adjustment, a protective “lair” where I could hide from the unknown, from outside chaos, so different in its shape and dynamics from that in my previous life.

The word is replaced more and more today by image; literacy is diminishing although printed matter can be accessed rapidly and multiplied, with no risk, and the huge amount of the human mind’s achievement is available instantly to anybody who is interested. The speedy and practical approach to life make the intellectual endeavor appear less “divine” than before; also less appealing and praiseworthy.