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

The extensive pathology of the system, expanded and refined over four decades, both supported and gradually undermined it. The unfathomable extent of the system’s structural decay became apparent only after the edifice collapsed, exposing the rubble behind its façade of jargon and freeing the prisoners held captive by its duplicity. The chronic deformation of existence requires a meticulous diagnosis. If those who observed this process firsthand have truly seen through it, seen how it insinuates itself within one and takes root, they should be the first to reject the cheap, shabby rhetoric of oversimplified verdicts with which totalitarianism has indoctrinated its subordinates and often its opponents. Yet as Nietzsche said, those who look too long into the abyss are themselves invaded by it.

Unfortunately, polarities often prove complementary. Intellectuals know this as well as, if not better than, anyone. Many anti-fascists were communists, and not a few opponents of totalitarianism are conscious or unconscious pioneers of another form of despotism. It would be tragic if the collapse of “real socialism” were to inflame fanaticism of an opposite extreme and reinforce the proponents of an antiquated conservatism or even kindle an outbreak of religious, nationalist, or political extremism.

The liberal spirit of democracy, discussed today in an atmosphere of growing conservatism as if one were discussing the dernier cri, is not merely opposed to totalitarianism but is completely foreign to it, beyond any polarities. Many can justify from personal experience their fierce skepticism of contemporary political kitsch and their distrust of its many forms of manipulation — even now that the so-called communist mask has fallen from the tired, disfigured faces of millions of captives in the East. The narcissistic celebration of the free-market, consumer society on the other shore, which now claims divine legitimation as well as victory, does not lack in unintended irony.

With the Holocaust, totalitarianism, and exile, our century has extended the limits of formation through deformation. For a boy in love with books, such as myself, the difficult years of Stalinism brought not only a mind-numbing avalanche of shoddy, substandard “socialist realist” tracts, but also the discovery of the great Russian classics, which had been translated as part of the ideological program to cement the friendship with our “great neighbor to the east.” It was a superb schooling in the transcendent and the critical spirit that examines such ideals. Yet it was also a therapeutic schooling in beauty, goodness, and truth, and in their subversive force, which those in power could not begin to understand.

Indispensable for prolonged inner exile, my education surely also led, in the end, to actual exile. The long, harrowing years as an engineer, during which I had hoped to evade more easily the pressure of indoctrination, were only the first stage of this unfinished adventure in alienation, in foreignness. I had many opportunities in adolescence and in later years — and still have today — to reflect on the process of formation through deformation, on the conflict between the individual’s struggle toward openness and freedom and the oppressive, restrictive pressure of the Great Beast, as Simone Weil called society.

The repressive function of restricting and reducing individuality in a totalitarian regime equates not only with prison — the regime’s symbol and quintessence — but also with its countless intrigues, ruses, and tricks of control, by spreading distrust and denunciation through the fear of one’s neighbors, colleagues, or family — that hysterical mixture of complicity, guilty conscience, and disgust through which tyranny functions without functioning. A worldwide dungeon, divided up into numerous private and state cages watched over by both the penal colony’s inmates and its guards. A fierce, progressive poisoning of the social conflicts which relatively open systems meet with pragmatic strategies and democratic compromise.

I began publishing during the period of so-called “liberalization,” when the dogmatists were searching for alibis, but the Party still demanded a steadfast “engagement” from its artists. “Pressing Love,” my first story published in an avant-garde journal in 1966, tried to oppose the prevailing canon precisely through its lack of political content. This timid, erotic story sought to re-establish a natural subject and a normal language. Little wonder, then, that the official literary press immediately tore the story to shreds and that the journal in which it appeared was suspended a few issues later. It is no less significant that when my novel, The Black Envelope, my last book published in Romania — a description of the everyday hell of the Ceau escu regime — appeared in 1986, it was mutilated beyond recognition by the censor’s interventions, at a time when writers interested in “aesthetic” rather than political questions were given preference.

“Censorship is the mother of metaphor,” wrote Borges. One of the communist censor’s most perplexing taboos was the Holocaust. I was, because of personal experience, preoccupied with this topic. Skeptical of melodramatic public displays of suffering, mortified at the ease with which the Holocaust is trivialized through the cheap marketing of extreme suffering in other parts of the world, and outraged by the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and cynicism with which it was made suspect, manipulated, and avoided in my own country, I have always been interested in the literary potential of this topic — a topic that ought to have caused an overpowering, traumatic, and crippling silence. Horror refuses to aestheticize, drastically restricting creative freedom. The greater the difficulties, the more I felt they deserved to be mastered. Faced with painful and dangerous consequences, encoding this tragic subject seemed both unavoidable and one way to “protect” it from the grip of manipulation. My story, “Weddings,” sought to transfigure such a dilemma. I thought the image of a boy who, after his return from a concentration camp, was trained to give anti-fascist speeches at assemblies and family celebrations such as weddings, birthdays, and christenings, summed up both the situation of a persecuted minority and the general state of postwar Eastern Europe: the perversion of truth in the realm of the official lie and in the herdlike world of private life.

The illusion that censorship inspires creativity, as is sometimes claimed in the West and as many writers and readers in the East resignedly believe, may sometimes seem a frivolous sophistry. When describing firsthand experiences of reality, erotic life, religious feeling, and especially concrete political problems, Aesopian language doesn’t always work to aesthetic advantage and often results in a lack of honesty. Truth seeks to preserve itself in obscurity and ingenious artifice and survives only in fragments, in ambiguous, often cryptic, forms. Readers in Eastern Europe looked to literature for what they could not find in the newspaper or in history and sociology textbooks. They chased truth between the lines, while the author accepted the distortion of his artistic work as the necessary price of solidarity with his audience.

In those difficult times, culture stimulated underground life and exerted a counter-force to state power by restoring trust in creativity, ideas, beauty, and intellectual dialogue, at a time when actual dialogue was strangled and corrupted. But culture did not destroy the totalitarian system; the system collapsed under its own weight because of the lack of breathing space and freedom, and because of catastrophic economic bankruptcy. Today, art’s balance sheet is disheartening. Mountains of discarded texts are the era’s sad remains. The entire epoch’s devaluation includes the books it gave birth to: those that served the system but also many that sought to resist it or appeased its arrogance in order to avoid being devoured completely.