Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The wrinkled face of the old poet, saved from all illusions by medical practice, looked up at you. The potbellied, balding doctor, with his guttural r ’s, had adopted the attitude of an expert in failure.

“And what are you going to do after a year or two? The pension is small, not even half of your engineer’s salary. And for how long do you think you can extend a medical pension? Endlessly, is that what you were about to say?”

A lunatic works at engineering twelve hours a day in a huge warehouse with drawing boards, telephones, and cigarette smoke, suffocating under blueprints and dazed by interminable formulas.

Why shouldn’t the sleepwalker receive a cage of his own, for life? Would the remedy for the trauma be an even bigger trauma? Writing at least offers a quick way of exiting the penal colony, leaving the carnage behind. As Kafka said, “Outside the ranks of the assassins, you can observe the facts.”

“So, a grade-two pension, or maybe a grade three?” the poet-doctor asked. “Grade three means subject to review every six months by a panel of specialists. Grade two is reviewed on an annual basis.”

“What about grade one?” the patient asked.

“That means incurable, a serious mental condition, with no hope of recovery. I wouldn’t choose such a diagnosis. Don’t even think about it!”

“Why not?” the madman was on the point of protesting. Isn’t a true writer beyond hope of recovery? Isn’t he capable only of sitting in his cage, playing with words, like a mental patient? Reading, writing, reading, then more writing, isn’t this his life, Doctor — malady, therapy, therapy, malady, and so on, until the end of ends? You practice medicine, Doctor, so you are not incurable, but what about the engineer sitting before you? I have been practicing for too long that schizophrenia of double personality and duplicity. I have been dealing with calculations, drawing boards, invoices, almost being the person I have pretended to be, living constantly with the fear that, at any moment, the impostor would be unmasked and thrown down the stairs, a mental-hospital clown, the butt of the cheers and jeers of the audience. Only evasiveness can save us, Doctor.

Should you describe your impasse to him, or should you simply use him as a starting point for the falsifications to follow? You had to persuade him that he was, in fact, participating in a friendly cooperative venture, not in a medical consultation.

“Fine, grade two, then,” you muttered, halfheartedly.

The advantage of suddenly becoming the owner of your own time in a society where even time was state property came with a built-in trap: either you collaborate with the powers that be or else we isolate you as the irresponsible person that you pretend to be. Ready to risk the new Initiation, you had gone through the motions as required by protocol, and the doctor signed the necessary papers.

What if the symptoms described in the medical report were really the case? You refused to think of yourself as a patient, and you preferred the lesser role of falsifier. Was falsification itself a sign of the disease? You had come not for treatment but for a way outside the purgatory in which a diseased authority was chained to its diseased subjects.

You never trusted psychoanalysts. You would rather read them than consult with them. When Dr. Sigmund Freud asked, What remains Jewish in a Jew who is neither religious nor a nationalist and who is ignorant of the Bible’s tongue, you managed to mutter the answer he had himself given: Much . You did not explain what that meant, since he had been careful enough not to offer explication.

Question and answer were shockingly joined by one single word — Jew. Nonreligious, non-nationalist, non-speaker of the sacred language, was Dr. Freud speaking about himself, without defining the term? Was the definition of a Jew to be found only in the triad of religion, nationalism, and language? Could it be that the founder of psychoanalysis, so concerned with sexuality and the Oedipus complex, ignored circumcision, the covenant carved in the flesh on the eighth day after the male infant’s birth? Inscribed in the flesh, circumcision cannot be revoked.

With Grandfather Avram’s blessing, you became, through circumcision, Noah, a biblical code name, not for public use. After all, you don’t unzip your trousers in public. Isn’t Dr. Freud interested in knowing more about the circumcised Noah, who carries on a dialogue with the “double” concealed in his trousers, with its hidden, parallel life? This double life, no less comic or revealing than the life of an individual with or without religion, ethnicity, or sacred language — should that not interest Herr Doktor Freud?

In the meantime, you had acquired quotation marks, just like Dr. Freud. Jean-François Lyotard, for instance, believes that Sigmund Freud is a “Jew” rather than a Jew, and that so are his confrères Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. As there are non-German Germans, so there are non-Jewish Jews, the Frenchman helpfully explains. They are the ones who have doubts about tradition, mimesis, immanence, but also “emigration, dispersion, and the impossibility of integration”—in other words, “the double impotence of nonchange and of change.”

At the age of five, in Transnistria, the little Jew was known as Noah, not Norman. At the age of fifty, on the eve of the new exile, the relation between self and Jew had become a complicated knot, one that could not fail to interest Dr. Freud. The psychoanalyst should be asked, finally, to answer not only the questions he himself has asked but also the questions posed by posterity: not necessarily what is left after you have lost what you did not possess, but how you become a Jew after the Holocaust, after Communism and exile. Are these, by definition, essentially Jewish traumas? Are these initiations carved in your soul, not only your body, that make you a Jew even when you are not one? A “non-people of survivors” is the name Lyotard gives the category of non-Jewish Jews, whose sense of communion depends, according to him, on “a unique profoundness of an endless anamnesis,” an endless recalling of things past.

Anamnesis in front of the mirror? Why are you frowning, Dr. Freud? Franz Kafka — not a great admirer of Freudian anamnesis — is not listed among the company in Lyotard’s quotation marks. Having asked himself, “What have I got to do with the Jews?” Kafka replied, “I have got hardly anything to do with myself.”

Kafka is, however, not a non-Jewish Jew but a genuine Jew, although he was not proficient in Hebrew — he did, however, make several attempts to learn the sacred tongue — did not practice religion, and was not a nationalist. There is a scene in which he tries to cram the whole of the Chosen People into a drawer. “Including myself to the very end,” he had added. That was an unmistakably Jewish profession of faith, replacing religion, ethnicity, and the sacred tongue.

Only a Jew could choose this way of releasing the self-loathing and hatred that had been his fate for millennia. These echoes can be heard when Kafka describes to Milena the invectives of the “dirty mob,” chanted on a street in Prague, the Jew-hatred of the street — and of the salons, too, as well as of academia. Hatred did not stop in Kafka’s Prague, or in Dr. Freud’s much-beloved Vienna, or in London, where hatred forced him to seek exile shortly before he died, or in less famous places. But can we also hear, as Kafka did, the echo of our own inner struggles? What is it we hear? Our own fatigue, as we stop defending ourselves? The perfection of others, who cannot accept our own imperfection?

“In the struggle between yourself and the world, take the side of the world,” the unvanquished Kafka advised.