Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The fatigue of belonging could be excused, Dr. Freud whispers, in our own continuing dialogue. Nobody could accuse you of trying to ignore adversity, he adds. One minute you defend your destiny; another minute, forget it, then defend it again, until you tire of all the futility. So give up taking the daily farce too seriously, stop honoring it with questions, be gracefully absentminded, bewildered, in accordance with the simplicity and absurdity of indifference — this should be your therapy, to become deaf, dumb, naïve, absentminded, inattentive.

What — after the Holocaust and after Communism — has the exile to do with the Jews, when he is no longer certain he has anything to do with himself? Much, the Viennese doctor claims; whether you like it or not, you have a lot in common both with them and with yourself. When, at the age of five, you were joined to a collective destiny, Dr. Freud pronounces, you were given an accreditation which is more important than the covenant carved in the flesh.

“We Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust,” a German Jewish writer wrote in the days when you took refuge, not from the Holocaust, but from Communism, and in Berlin of all places. Yes, there was too much evidence for the Holocaust to be denied, and that impertinence could not be forgiven. But it was not just the Holocaust, and not just Communism; it was Jewish guilt. There were plenty of other minor, more ambiguous guilts that could not be forgiven. Dr. Freud, guilty of founding psychoanalysis, the “Jewish science,” knew this only too well.

However, even if it were possible, one cannot simply renounce the honor of being suspect, outcast, decried as the embodiment of evil, from the beginning of time to its end — this is some glory! We cannot simply reject such privilege, not even when the stereotypes themselves are not easy to bear — victim, avenger, conspirator, to which the latter-day Elders of Zion have added a new protocol: “the Jewish monopoly on suffering.”

The trivialization of suffering … mankind’s endless enterprise. Only when it becomes a cliché does tragedy find a home in the collective memory. Memory must keep watch so that the horror is not repeated, we have been told over and over. We must hold on to identity, shared memory, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology. Having finally landed on the planet of pragmatism, you thought you might escape your past and your identity and become just a simple entity, as Gertrude Stein, the American in Paris, dreamed — only to find that Thursday’s atrocities have become grist for the mottoes on Friday’s T-shirts, an instantly marketable product for the collective memory.

Sigmund Freud would have understood the confusions of exile and its dispossessions, its discontents, you might say, as well as its freedoms. He would know the significance of an impersonal home in some anonymous hotel room, the exile’s ultimate refuge, his democratic homeland for-rent-by-the-day, hospitable and indifferent, as a homeland should be.

You are looking at a small photograph, wrinkled and yellowed with time, now serving as a mirror. It is June 1945, in the pastoral town of Fălticeni, in northern Romania, two months after the initiate’s return from the Transnistria expedition and two hours after the close of the end-of-year school festivities.

The adorable little boy, in white trousers and shirt, is standing a quarter of a step ahead of the other prize winners, three little boys and three little girls. The only thing that distinguishes him from the other prize winners, who have not benefited from the privileges of the Initiation, seems to be his victorious bearing, his status as survivor now validated by his winner’s laurels. Immaculately groomed, left foot forward, hand on hip, a wide smile on his face, he is every inch a star, performing knowingly before the camera.

The boy seems to have forgotten everything of the apprenticeship he has served among the thousands of starving and ragged people, the playthings of death’s producers and directors. Little Augustus the Fool has instantly turned into his opposite, the White Clown, the knight crowned with laurels and applauded by the melodrama’s players. The years of absence from the world have been annulled. He has recrossed the Styx and finds himself back on the original shore, alive, certifiably alive, back in the Eden that was his and is now regained.

The Eden finally turned into a penal colony. You crossed the Styx again, this time across an ocean. Now you are on a different shore, your hair is gray and receding, your appearance less immaculate. Lost is the juvenile candor. The aura of survival that surrounds you is now a prop in the more recent dramas staged by memory.

Would the process of anamnesis — this endless probing with the scalpel, this fencing match with yourself — be accelerated by pondering the photograph of the little boy at age nine? Even then, you felt like withdrawing and busying yourself in a corner of the room, forever forgotten by everyone — the vast solitude of the entity , Gertrude Stein would say, the exalted joy of finding yourself as you lose yourself in the endless flow of that confusing I.

Over your father’s immobile, abstracted face there would sometimes pass an expression of sudden aging, the paralysis of solitude. You would watch in terror but quickly resume your place on the stage of the living, where there were teachers, parents, schoolmates, friends. The end of childhood did not signal an end to these alternations of ecstasy and terror, always pondering the same questions: What if you suddenly stopped functioning and crumbled into remote unconnectedness? Still, you maintained the illusion of escape, the possibility of last-minute rescue from the danger lurking everywhere in the dark.

The unknown could at any moment become hostile. It did yesterday, on October 9, 1941, when the appearances collapsed one by one, shattering the masks of daily life. On the platform of the Burdujeni railway station, the drama could not be stopped. Often, in your sleep, you would continue to see the great cast of hungry, shivering, and frightened prisoners, entertaining their executioners sitting in their boxes. Caution was the watchword of those days. Afterward, you feared chaos, hesitant to challenge the unknown. You nestled, finally, in the fluid shelter of language, the ultimate, essential refuge. But was this all you were looking for, a refuge?

Dr. Freud could not fail but be interested in such exercises of recall. Be yourself, said Pindar, echoed by Nietzsche, and by the Viennese doctor himself. But what is this, Dr. Freud: the anamnesis of the collective tragedy or the inability of this solitary individual to don the uniform of tragedy, for sale one every street corner? And what would Dr. Freud say about those who negate the horrors that happened, who routinely ridicule them in their boredom? Could trivialization, in the final analysis, be a necessary function, like digestion and excretion, the only way of keeping the human comedy alive? Otherwise, how could the poor actors still enjoy the fruits of the earth? Bear in mind the case of Primo Levi, who became a writer because of Auschwitz and was subsequently unable to write a simple love story as serene as the Italian skies.

The humiliation of being defined by a collective act of negation and by a collective catastrophe is not negligible, Dr. Freud. However, we are not simply the sum of collective catastrophes, whatever they may be. We are more than that, and each of us is also different. Yes, different, we should be shouting, in all the languages of the earth, shouting endlessly, like a record that cannot be turned off.

Suffering does not make us better people or heroes. Suffering, like all things human, corrupts, and suffering peddled publicly corrupts absolutely.