Cristina-Eva Şandru

University of Northampton

chrisandru@gmail.com

 

 

Memorialising Totalitarian Terror:

the ‘Overcoded Fictions’ of East-Central Europe

 

 

Abstract: One of the most complex phenomena characteristic of the totalitarian age in the countries of East-Central Europe was the interpenetration of complicity and resistance that made possible the survival of critical consciousness and intellectual life in the very teeth of a fiercely inflexible ideology. This article examines the various literary responses to the widespread political and psychological terror dominating East-Central Europe in the years immediately following the imposition of communist rule in 1945. Charting a diverse intellectual territory, the essay examines the metamorphoses of terror methodologies as discussed by theorists and writers as diverse as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and Slavoj Žižek, and the mechanisms of resistance that they have engendered, particularly as documented in literary texts and testimonials. The discussions will range from the literatures of documentary realism to the distinct but interrelated types of what I have termed ‘overcoded fiction’ – i.e. writings whose gravitational centre rests on the significant silences and implicit statements that inhabit their visible textual surface. These can be dystopian or magical realist in character, or, more often than not, mock-comedic and parodic; they testify not only to the desire to memorialize, but also the need to forge meaningful connections with a ‘normality’ that had been forcibly corroded by vicious suppression and institutionalized censorship.

Keywords: Communism; East and Central Europe; ”overcoded fiction”; Raymond Aron; Hannah Arendt; Czeslaw Milosz; Slavoj Žižek.

After the Second World War communism came to rule a third of mankind and its spectre haunted world politics engendering fierce debates between those who saw in it the ultimate realisation of the utopia of social equity and those that considered it the worst form of totalitarianism that modernity engendered. With all the fierceness of the debate, however, the various Western pronouncements on the ideological and political constitution of communist regimes fall short of an adequate assessment of its long-term magnitude. They only rarely approach the communist phenomenon in terms of moral judgements, evading the question of its criminal nature and the suffering inflicted on tens of millions of people from the most varied parts of the world as a result of its socio-ideological experiment[1]. The persistent wish to cut ‘theoretical communism’ loose from its actual practice and thus ‘redeem’ its utopian potential, I deem to be a profoundly ambivalent gesture, which signals both a laudable desire for recuperation and an inexplicable moral myopia. There was no ‘innocent’, benign phase of communism, ruined then by the advent of Stalin’s personal tyranny. Civil war and the extermination of the class-enemy have been the cornerstones of Bolshevik thinking from the very inception of the Revolution, rooted in Lenin’s utopian will to remodel society in the image of an abstract theory.

The theoretical blueprint was Marxism-Leninism, with its scientific rhetoric of dialectical materialism, a simplified version of the original tenets of philosophical Marxism; in practice, the communist state functioned as an ideocracy (Aron 162), a self-contained system which required ideological orthodoxy, i.e. absolute consistency with the theory that functioned as its axiomatic premise. Such a system forces “the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority,” whereby “the centre of power [becomes] identical with the centre of truth” (Havel 39). In this equation, people impervious to the influence of dialectical materialism are the ‘enemies’ who must be ejected to the margins of society not because of what they do, but because of who they are. The classic binaries ‘friend/foe’ and ‘us/them’ thus stood at the heart of the communist version of othering as well. The Other was the Enemy, whose definition was so elastic, flexible and versatile that it potentially included anyone. It was both internal and external, the ‘bourgeois scum’ and the ‘kulaks’, as well as the ‘American spies’, dissenting intellectuals and ‘imperialist agents’. ‘Enemy’ was a category that contracted or expanded according to the momentary needs of the Party, and was a key element in communist thought and practice:

The enemy is the great justification for terror, and the totalitarian state needs enemies to survive. If it lacks them, it invents them. Once they have been identified, they are treated without mercy… Being an enemy is a hereditary stain that cannot be removed… . (Todorov in Courtois et al 247)

These ‘enemies’, too, had to be put to good ideological use. Thus the show-trials were born, out of the calculated desire to instil psychological terror into an already cowed population. Lenin had already used this strategy in 1922, but Stalin made it into the hallmark of his repressive system, widely implemented in East-Central Europe in the years immediately following the total take-over of power by communist governments. The major supporting pillars of these show-trials were the “conspiracy fictions” (Arendt xvi) entertained by political propaganda, and the necessity of “ritualised scapegoating” (Žižek 118) whereby factual truths were sacrificed to the demands of ideological consistency.

The Kafkaesque quality of the absurd inherent in these show-trials[2] is overshadowed by the graver attacks on morality and ordinary human decency that they unleashed. Fear and terror became the everyday ingredients of social psychology and informing on one’s fellow beings one of the cardinal virtues of the ‘new citizen’. Žižek calls this particular historical situation a “post-tragic” one, in which it is not merely life itself that is being sacrificed on behalf of fidelity to a utopian ideal, but the very dignity that transcends biological life. It is this “second life” (Žižek 97) that was robbed from the accused in the Stalinist show trials, as Novsky’s case in Danilo Kiš’s story The Tomb of Boris Davidovich makes it evident. Ultimate fidelity to the revolution must be paid for with the price of a more fundamental betrayal of one’s own existence. It is in this that the true horror of the logic of confession is revealed. The utter denial of all remnants of subjectivity and privacy is perhaps the greatest crime perpetrated by the communist regime.

Yet it was a crime that did not immediately register as such, couched as it was under the cloak of ideological niceties. For communism produced not only an internal binary structure of the ‘us/them’ type but also an extrasystemic one, most evidently reflected in the ambiguous position of the Western intellectual Left towards the socialist experiment going on behind the Curtain. From the niche of their well-paid academic careers, Western Marxists could afford the intellectual luxury of utopia as long as their ideological dream was enacted and performed on the ‘body’ of the Other. The “disingenuous mendacity of far-left intellectuals” and their stunning mixture of “hypocrisy, self-deception and callous disregard for the fate of millions of suffering innocents” (Chirot 666) was justified in terms of the ‘greatest happiness to the greatest number’ that communism as an ideology was preaching and as a political system was said to implement. That it was a ‘happiness’ closely resembling that of Zamyatin’s We, of numbers living behind the Green Wall on whose brain the ultimate operation of fantasiectomy had been performed, mattered little to the self-professed humanists. Zamyatin’s novel, written in the 1920s, a short while after the successful Bolshevik Revolution, had proved strangely prophetic in its dystopian vision of a future One State which takes it upon itself to realise the millennial aspiration of all people, “the ancient dream of Heaven”: “Why, to have someone tell them, once and for al, just what happiness is – and then weld them to this happiness with chains. Well, what else are we doing now if not that” (259)? The question might have resounded with dreadful irony to the people “subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason” (23) if only they had had the chance to read the book.

Yet even the thoroughly rationalised, mathematically-conditioned numbers that populate Zamyatin’s novel find this happiness excessive and long to return to the state of “savage freedom” (23) that they can only wistfully perceive to exist beyond the Wall. They enact fictionally the very reality Czeslaw Milosz describes in his dispassionate account of the totalitarian grip over mind and soul, The Captive Mind, when he says that “it is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism” (215, my emphasis). It is this myopia of the Western Left that intellectuals in East-Central Europe found hardest to penetrate, the failure to understand that the communist totalitarian system, in its stunning mixture of hyper-rationalism and Kafkaesque absurdity, is nothing but the “convex mirror of all modern civilisation, … of the inevitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies, an extremist offshoot of its development and an ominous product of its own expansion” (Havel 1986, 145).

Utopia, Schizophrenia and the Split Consciousness

Totalitarian ideologies often degenerate into artificial discursive systems in which real life is falsified to conform to an imaginary representation of what the power structure wills it to be. The ‘social engineering’ performed by the communist system on the entire body politic amplified the ever-growing rift between lived everyday reality and the constructed image officially sanctioned by the Power. The gap between words and deeds was replicated by the rift between the public and the private, the self and the social world in which it moved. The dychotomic structure of the linguistic fabric led to a schizoid split of consciousness: the individual was forced to ‘act himself out’ in all circumstances of his public life, to dramatise the split between what he felt unofficially and what he said publicly, in other words, to become the living embodiment of an ailing spiritual condition, an ideological brand of ‘mimic man’[3]. Becoming what one acts is the extreme consequence of this risky game, for

conscious acting, if one practices it long enough, develops those traits which one uses most in one’s role … . After long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. (Milosz 55, my italics)

This, Milosz shows, produces the schizophrenic as a type (22), who negotiates his own ethical crisis by erecting solid walls against his most private of selves, and trying – often unsuccessfully – to keep his despised ‘other’ (public) self beyond the bounds. It is the dramatisation of this internal split that forms the underlying thematic thread of many East-central European novels.

Withdrawal into the private world of the mind – into art, literature or religion – has therefore been seen as an ambivalent response, simultaneously a measure of survival and of silent complicity. The ‘retreat’ from the world of politics is an inherently ambiguous phenomenon: on the one hand, it testifies to a persistent refusal of ideological indoctrination, a sophisticated juggling whereby one ‘rendered onto Caesar that which was Caesar’s’, while simultaneously pursuing the small pleasures available in one’s private space and making fun of official rituals in private circles; on the other hand, this refusal to take an active ethical stand was “the very mode of reproduction of the official ideology” (Žižek 91). In the communist context, ideology is thus to be understood as “a specious way of relating to the world” (Havel 1986, 42), based on the split between inner cynicism and outer semantic conformity. In Althusserian terms, Havel’s famous example of the greengrocer in his Power of the Powerless is the supreme embodiment of ideological state apparatuses at work: the system is perpetuated and continues to exist because greengrocers, tailors, workers and artists choose to practice each his own variety of Ketman[4], scribbling on the visible window of their social façade the necessary slogans in order to secure a modicum of privacy and a relatively tranquil life.

Is there any point of contact between the logic of utopia and the logic of schizophrenia? In his study Facing the Extreme, Todorov insists on the ethical motivation of behavioural discontinuity in totalitarian universes. Social schizophrenia in such systems, i.e. the compartmentalisation of one’s life into impermeable sections, functions as a defence mechanism for those who continue to cling to a notion of minima moralia: one is only obedient and accommodating in a particular dimension of one’s existence, and free-thinking and dignified in others. This problematic behaviour has infested most citizens of real-existing socialism, who to a larger or smaller extent condoned the regime, and kept a guilty silence; yet it was a chief feature of intellectual and cultural life as well (see Haraszti 1989, Havel 1986). Much of the ethical debate in communist and post-communist East-Central Europe revolves around this ambivalence – whether one regards it as a necessary compromise that made possible subtle forms of cultural resistance, or as an abdication from the critical function of the intellectual act.

Cooptation, Censorship and Cultural Resistance

In reading, something happens over which I have no power. […] [T]his is the limit that even the most omnipotent police force cannot broach. We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will still be read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read … . (Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller)

The effort of post-totalitarian regimes to reduce private space and integrate it into the public domain was counteracted by a variety of strategies of resistance against the encroaching mechanisms of the state. In Poland, and to a certain extent in Czechoslovakia, resistance meant primarily the organisation of civil society on the fringes of and against statal authority; in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania it took the form of a “privatisation” of activities (Alexandrescu 183). Paradoxically, ‘textual’ resistance in East-Central Europe (as opposed to direct political opposition) was strongest in the two extreme poles of post-totalitarian communism: it assumed the guise of self-censorship and accommodation in the quasi ‘liberal’ regime of Hungary and that of a ‘retreat into fiction’ in the megalomaniac personal dictatorship of Romania.

The limits of cultural dissent and its ambiguous relationship with power are neatly encapsulated by Sorin Alexandrescu’s metaphoric division of intellectuals into “monks” and “tradesmen” (193-195), who both attempt a mediation between power and society, the former in spirit, the latter in practice. Having in view the particular Romanian context, Alexandrescu lucidly remarks that if an authentic culture (mainly literary) survived, this was due to the fact that writers knew how to subvert textually the influence of party scriptors; yet if Romanian civil society was well-nigh inexistent, this too was due to the writers’ impotence to challenge this influence in institutional terms (193). Often the price of a relative artistic liberty was paid by public accommodation and circumstantial compromise, as Miklós Haraszti’s influential study of totalitarian aesthetics The Velvet Prison scathingly shows. The “symbiotic relationship between artists and the modern socialist state” (6) is seen as a much subtler means of restraint than visible censorship, which ceases to be institutional and becomes, instead, internalised and reproduced by the very culture which it seeks to censure. It is the same phenomenon that the Romanian intellectual Horia Roman Patapievici describes as the dominance of “captive thought,” (1996: 135) whereby various intellectual practices were formulated from within the very rhetoric, parameters and terms of the system they purported to contest.

Nonetheless, this aspect of complicity represents only one side of a double-edged cultural reality. The practice of reading and writing, which are inherently acts performed in the privacy of one’s own space, are to be understood not only in aesthetic and intellectual terms, but as reactions against collectivistic frenzy, cherished and held onto because they offered a temporary relief from the stifling atmosphere of the ‘collective body’. Hence “a certain fetishisation of books and culture in general, an intellectual emulation provoked by the allure of clandestinity” (Alexandrescu 63). This was further enhanced by a strong tradition of orality, relevant especially to intellectual circles in South-Eastern Europe (Pleşu 69). This oral ‘agora’ of dialogue had developed well before the late 60s, ironically enough in prison, which was a dramatic space for inspiring oral exercise. In lectures and recitations, discussions and story-telling, prayers and philosophical disquisitions, intellectuals of various types and brands who filled communist prisons after 1948 practiced culture as resistance of the spirit. In gestures akin to those of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the survival of culture in a post-apocalyptic/ totalitarian society is revealed as a painful exercise of memory and story-telling.

Dissent in South-Eastern Europe thus evolves along lines of spiritual and intellectual resistance that have traditionally characterised the region, as a retreat to an interiorised space of culture, dominated by literary forms of consciousness. Protest becomes less a matter of conceptualisation and public manifestation, than a permanent drive to narrativisation or lyricisation (Alexandrescu 67). The rarefied filter is opposed to the loud proclamation, transcoding to critical discourse, ‘sacralisation’ to ‘real-isation’. The retreat into fictional worlds and the obliqueness of literary representation thus created a “culture of the interstice,” (Alexandrescu 185) based on metaphoric indirection and the relegation of protest to the narrative voice or to a literary character. Whilst historiography and socio-economic analysis were almost by default exiled into the province of literary criticism, the latter’s emphasis on a multiplicity of interpretive paradigms has managed to preserve a respect for otherness that was otherwise banished from official rhetoric and increasingly from the public imaginary.

Overcoded Fictions: Narrative Experiment and the Ironic Imagination

As argued above, the institutionalization of censorship is one fundamental aspect of literary production in East-Central Europe. For a book to see the light of print, it needed to pass through a labyrinthine process of control and purging, in which administrators of ‘cultural education’ scrutinized the political correctness of texts and made sure that nothing even remotely critical of ‘real-existing socialism’ escaped their vigilant offices. Nonetheless, quality literature continued to appear in print because it fashioned for itself a specific language and style, adapting it to the political pressures of communist bureaucratic structures, and learning to take advantage of their loopholes. It was a language of allusion and ambiguity, that could escape a censure focused on identifiable linguistic units and which most often failed to detect diffuse images in the text. Virtuosity in the literary field came to mean the capacity to use “periphrastic style[s] of diabolic circumlocution, convoluted allegory and serpentine metaphor” (Ash 59) in order to ‘camouflage’ the writing and build ingenious subtexts. This type of narrative rhetoric that “signifie[d] by elision, representational gaps and implications” (Corniş Pope 133) was always in danger of becoming mere escapism; yet in its best representatives it was a language that fostered critical awareness and opened up ideological fixities.

At the heart of this periphrastic style was an “absent cause” (Boyers 21), the intuited presence of something that was never stated textually but appealed to what Jameson calls the “political unconscious” – the repository of narrative codes which is actualised in particular novelistic discourses. Most novels produced under censorship use these variable ‘master codes’ to deliberately upset single ‘correct’ interpretations. They deploy several narrative paradigms that cancel each other out, so that no sooner does the reader settle into one set of causal explanations, that s/he is made aware of its insufficiency and poverty. Moreover, they make use of an array of narrative strategies that position them in “threshold spaces” where experimentation and raw realism, ironic play and ‘authenticism’ coexist (Oţoiu 87-88).

All texts are constituted around antinomic series, polarities of the type implicit/explicit, absent/present, spoken/unspoken, reality/fantasy, and they encode reality in an incomplete way. This is all the more valid in the case of politically-coded fictions which centre on an ‘absent cause’ that cannot be expressed in words. The gravitational centre of the writing shifts on its very discursive ruptures, on the significant silences and implicit statements that inhabit its visible textual surface. It thus becomes a type of overcoded fiction whose analytics demand a certain sharing of extratextual reality without which the text lapses into uncomprehending obscurity. The subtending incompleteness of meaning can be read as both the sign of a ‘lack’ (a hesitation of touching on politically sensitive issues) and, concomitantly, as a manifestation of that which it cannot say – a significant silence. All texts are, to varying degrees, inhabited by discontinuities and silences. Yet this type of overcoded fiction differs in that its narrative undecidability is assumed as a protective mask against an oppressive extra-textual reality and not as a law of intratextual composition. Like the mock-comedy of futility, this fiction demands a decoder adequately ‘equipped’ to penetrate behind the Aesopic understatements of the text. The “double talk, the necessary obliqueness of any persecuted speech that cannot, at the risk of it own survival, openly say what it means” (De Man in Corniş Pope 143) reveals the breakdown of social dialogism, the increasing takeover of the semiotic field by monologic ideological fictions. The voices of radical alterity can only live in fantasy or phantomatic worlds, among “borderline personalities [and] deliberate declassés self-relegated to the grey zones of society” (Oţoiu 88), social outcasts encased in a labyrinth of subjective memories (such as the heroine of Augustin Buzura’s Refugees, immobilized in a psychiatric hospital) or retreats into private worlds of the past (as in Mircea Nedelciu’s Fabling Treatment). Confession and the active exercise of memory remain the only available options to the total engulfment of the communicative field by the official Newspeak rhetoric. These, however, are rarely offered by unproblematic narrative voices; memories are often dispersed in submonologues that intersect and cancel each other out, or recorded in fragmentary texts (diaries, notebooks, journals etc.) whose very unstable existence replicates the instability of the voice behind them. They inhabit a fictional space as ambiguous and hybrid as the real political and cultural space from which they emerge, and for which they act as a magnifying glass.

One aspect that sheds a particularly interesting light on the capacity of literature to act as an effective instrument of ideological challenge is the totalitarian regimes’ heavy reliance on similar discursive weaponry. Indeed, though various coercive strategies were at the heart of the communist police-state, the everyday workings of the ideology were reinforced through an elaborate display of symbolic practices. A whole study could be dedicated to the semiotics of propaganda and thought-manipulation in totalitarian states. From pioneer shows to massive popular demonstrations and life-scale portraits of party-leaders, a well-established propagandistic arsenal consisting of socialist poems, patriotic songs, stage-managed ‘authentic’ folklore and artistic cenacles of various kinds, capitalized on easily manipulatable popular affects. Yet this heavy reliance on signifying practices also contained the seed of the regime’s downfall, for as deconstruction has wisely taught us since, all signs incorporate within their signifying fields traces of other signs, often of an immediately opposite nature. Also, and more importantly, the inflation of the symbolic in the public domain, having reached a critical limit of saturation, loses ground in favour of an increasing evasion in the realm of the private. As a result, since all public media that could potentially invade the private sphere were part and parcel of the ideological-symbolic system, the only terrain left to the thinking mind was that pre-eminently private business of reading. Hence the widespread ‘literacy’ in East-Central Europe that so often amazes the Western commentator. Naturally, the only too human lure of the forbidden or very hard to find fruit played a major part in the book-contagion that characterised most cultures of the region during the years of totalitarianism.

Yet this saturation of the public sphere with systematized codes of signification also caused what Eagleton calls the “semiological paranoia”[5] of over-reading, reflective of the schizophrenic quality of life in totalitarian societies. When associated to over-coded texts, ‘over-reading’ tends to generate a “compulsive semiosis” that “eradicates all contingency” (in Bloom 2003: 47) and sequesters the intended reader/ audience within the confines of the fictional universe that it begets. This “semiotic excess,” as Corniş Pope calls it, “colonised the political imagination of [the] people,” and very often precluded the emergence of outward forms of dissent. At the same time, however, it led to “cultural surplus, more intellectual work than the system could absorb” (9). Experimentation with literary narrative had the reinvigorating effect of challenging dogmatic modes of thinking and projecting alternative dimensions of socio-political consciousness. For instance, the alternative ontologies that many experimental texts were toying with operated subtle ruptures at the level of one’s imaginative identification with authoritarian structures and official realities. In this sense, their poetics is a specifically political one, for the oblique textualisations go against the grain of official representations, dramatising the constant penetration of ‘natural’ reality by its semioticised, ideological double. In novels such as Nedelciu’s Fabling Treatment, a subsidiary theme is the provisional and contingent nature of ‘truth’, the impossibility of arriving at an ‘original reality’ before the moment of remembering and narrative. Underneath this postmodern preoccupation, however, one can read the difficulty of sifting through the layers of ideologically fabricated fictions of reality, in which the substance of the real is constantly displaced by constructs that masquerade as ‘truths’ (Corniş-Pope 17).

Post-war East-Central European literature thus “foregrounded the subtle relation between cultural representation and control, using intricate textual filters to highlight the process that constructs symbolical systems and fantasy-worlds” (Corniş Pope 14). It developed along two parallel but often intersecting lines, one hyper-realistic, the other anti-realistic, both walking a tight-rope between surface innocuousness and underlying subversiveness. The former was ‘authenticist’ and assumed a ‘documentary’ guise that placed objectual reality in sharp focus while often displacing the present into the past; the latter was textualist in orientation, deconstructive and ironic. Often, a “prose of authenticity” coexisted with intricate and elaborate displays of “textual engineering” (Otoiu 87) in novels that were simultaneously political and metafictional, dystopian and comic-fabulatory.

Documentary Realism, ‘Authenticism’ and the Dystopian Imagination

If a student of comparative literature examines the fictional writings produced in East-Central Europe in the post-Stalinist decades, s/he might be surprised to find how unashamedly realistic many of them were. Yet their realism is of a different nature from that practiced by the fictionists of ‘socialist realism’, depicting as they were a utopian world of clicheistic, kitchified happiness that was nowhere to be found in the extratextual reality they deemed to represent. It was a particular brand of ‘documentary realism’, relying on the detached, objective presentation of ‘evidence’, on showing rather than telling, with little intervention on the part of the narrator. It wanted itself a statement on the present, but it was often displaced onto the past; if it did preserve a contemporaneous framework, it chose a minimalist, confined, essentially private space, which often elided as much as revealed the systemic illnesses of the present.

This was the case, for instance, of what Škvorecky calls “the Czech neorealism,” which successfully muckraked through a whole plethora of societal ills, from alcoholism, prostitution, vagabondage, embezzlement, privilege-seeking and bribery, never once going beyond an individual indictment of these ills. At the same time, however, it also made evident that in a society in which power is monopolised and social control ubiquitous, individual subjects can never be the ‘ultimate cause’ of societal malfunction. In order to avoid censorship, neo-naturalist literature made use of an entire series of elaborate fictional tricks, of which the most ‘popular’ was the technique of ‘zmizik’ – a term invented by the Czech intellectual Jiři Kolar whose approximate rendering would be the “disappearing act,” i.e. the ‘disappearance’ from the spotlight of the omnipotent and ubiquitous Party, and the assignment of all manner of ills (corruption, mismanagement, cruelty) to individuals alone. The ‘absent cause’ haunting the novels is a bureaucracy and an ideology that never or rarely feature as such, but which are refracted as the ultimate cause of the events described.

On the other hand, for Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš, the “literature of documentation” involved the selection and rearrangement of actual historical events with the belief that memory can preserve and recuperate, bear testimony and outweigh the officially imposed mass-scale forgetting. In ‘documentary’ novels such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for instance, the detailed presentation of concentration camp routine as if it were a permanent condition functions as a surface layer for implicit meaning. It raises troubling questions about the possibility of preserving individual morality in inimical historical circumstances, and problematises the status of fiction-writing in totalitarian states and the ultimate aim of its intervention in the public realm. His leprosy metaphor in The Cancer Ward neatly encapsulates the existential condition of the concentration camp inmates that populate his novels – both those behind the actual barbed wires, and those in the larger camp that was Soviet Russia:

Kostoglotov: ‘What’s worse than cancer? Leprosy.’

Rusanov: ‘Well, it depends. Is it really worse? Leprosy is a much slower process.’

Kostoglotov: ‘It’s worse because they banish you from the world while you are still alive. They tear you from your family and put you behind barbed wire…’ (163-164).

If ‘neonaturalist’ Czechoslovak fiction is never systemic in its approach, obscuring the absent cause of societal mismanagement and corruption, in documentary novels such as Solzhenitsyn’s the System looms large: its gruesome, mechanistic and inhuman presence inhabits the soul of every zek in the concentration camp. Moral survival is a function of mental regimentation – the degree of compromise and collusion with the apparatus that one accepts unresistingly. Those that resist are often broken; yet when, and if, they survive, they are the ones who ‘live to tell the tale’. Resistance as moral intransigence is the underlying ethos of Solzhenitsyn’s novels. In its absence, we are to understand, there can be no meaningful remembering. This might appear as a rather naïve, if heroic, vision of ethics, yet it is far from being an unproblematic one. To describe his fiction as ‘traditional’ or ‘moralistic’ is largely to miss what Solzhenitsyn has done. In many ways, his ‘flat’, colourless prose, akin to much Holocaust writing, is a testimony of what cannot be adequately represented in words, of that horror at the heart of history that can only be grotesquely carnivalised or else figured as the spectre of memory haunting the survivors.

The ambiguous nature of the documentary approach is best revealed in the bulk of Romanian novels produced in the 60s and 70s, which came to be known as the ‘novels of the obsessive decade’[6]. By displacing the present onto the immediate past, they hide behind the unmasking of the Stalinist horrors the very real process of re-Stalinisation taking place during Ceauşescu’s period. Cesereanu calls the fictionalising process at work in such novels the “procustianisation of truth” (162), which is only unveiled in glimpses and often romanticised. In contrast with the atrocious realism of post-1989[7] documentary pieces on the horrors of the communist prisons (such as Ierunca’s The Piteşti Experiment, or Paul Goma’s Quod-Gherla), the novels of the obsessive decade reflect the world of the Gulag through a veiled mirror. The writing is often allegorical, Aesopic in character, contorted; the prevailing figure is that of the seraphic investigator, intellectual, causeur – an inadequation to the much grimmer reality of the time, in which the representative member of the secret police was not a refined-decadent intellectual, but a ‘tough guy’ with no moral scruples whatsoever[8].

On the other hand, however, if the image of the repressive apparatus is somewhat edulcorated, the pyramidal system of orchestrated delation – the widespread phenomenon of informing on one’s neighbour, friend or colleague – is presented in all its abject but well-oiled functioning. The best of these novels read like obsessive and torturous investigations into the problematics of guilt and responsibility, similar in their ethical vision to the moral intransigence of Solzhenitsyn’s writings, yet often more ambiguous and stylistically more complex. It is the case of the ‘intellectual novel’ practiced by Augustin Buzura and Constantin Ţoiu, which follows the destiny of intellectuals from commitment to communism, to doubt, persecution and ultimately prison (Ion Cristian in Vanities), suicide (Chiril Merişor in The Gallery of Wild Wine) or mental asylum (Ioana Olaru in Refugees). Yet by the end of the 70s, the politically coded novel was an exhausted form; it had come to feature a certain circularity of motifs, typological Manicheism, deliberate pastiche (Corniş Pope 109), a restricted arsenal of narrative ‘recipes’ (the ‘prison confession’, moments of existentialist self-analysis, the ‘crime and punishment’ story-line etc.) masterfully deconstructed and parodied in such novels as Marin Preda’s The Most Beloved Man of Earth (1980) or Alexandru Ivasiuc’s The Crawfish (1976).

One reaction against the exhaustion of the neo-realist type was the resurrection of a specifically East-Central European dystopian imagination going back to Kafka and Stanisław Witkiewicz. In various anti-utopias, parables and allegories, often couched in religious terms, the members of the secret police, as well as the institution itself, appear as a perverse type of occult society, built on the model of the Mafia, but invested with a ‘disciplinary mission’[9] (Cesereanu 157). Thus, in A. E. Baconsky’s Black Church, the beggars who invade and conquer the city represent allegorically the new communist hierarchy; while museums and libraries are evacuated and books are burned, public trials take place in the city square and a ‘black’ dictatorship is finally installed. In another such dystopian novel, Bujor Nedelcovici’s The Second Messenger, the fictional universe is a scientifically-moulded New World, in which dreams are censored, erotic drives disciplined, feeding rationalised and collective fights on immense stadiums the only psychological outlets admitted. The inhabitant of the Island of Victory has a standardized face, mirroring the number-like quality of Zamyatin’s One State population in We. The Governor is the only free individual in a universe organised elitistically on ‘layers’, all controlled by a ubiquitous Institute functioning on the basis of self-delation and re-education. Closely resembling a psychiatric hospital, the Institute is a prophylactic ‘re-modelling’ institution, which uses no physical or moral torture, but only ideotherapy, the therapy of controlled and subtle ideological indoctrination at a subliminal level, similar to that practiced in Huxley’s Brave New World. The result of this ideotherapy is the same as that of the fantasiectomy operation that concludes Zamyatin’s We: human beings lose all sense of individuality, their minds ‘purified’ of subversive ideas, incapable of thinking or feeling otherwise than as required.

The alternative worlds that populate subversive literature are not all dystopian in character though. Much of the subversive content is subtly infiltrated in experimental linguistic games, the creation of fantastic universes in which the laws of extra-textual reality do not apply, or mock-comedic set-scenes. The ironic spirit of such texts goes all the way back to Bakhtinian concepts of carnivalesque irreverence, and in this they are part of a specifically East-Central European vision of grotesque black humour – perhaps the longest surviving literary tradition of the region.

Laughter in the Dark: Parodying Terror

In cultural spaces ideologically colonised by the “inflationary discourse of power” (Corniş Pope 10), humour often functions as an act of ‘rebellion’ against party-sanctioned values and taboos. By “turning metaphor into gloomy political banter” (Corniş-Pope 33), it undermines their rhetoric and raises scepticism of packaged truths to an almost cosmic level. Irony becomes the most potent subversive weapon against ideological indoctrination, for it submits its seemingly stable values to questioning and induces purposeful reflection on its mechanisms of subjection. Humour has always been the hallmark of subaltern, peripheral cultures, for it acts as a paradigmatic strategy designed to make frustration and long-term lack of perspectives more bearable, a “conventionally acceptable mode of structuring experience which establishes space between the individual and his sense of powerlessness” (Schöpflin 25). In East Central Europe, making jokes about the unbearable had been a national pastime for centuries; during totalitarian years, it became a technique of survival.

Often humour was couched in ‘documentary’ forms which ostensibly mirrored reality, even while the reality mirrored was incongruous and absurd. Many such works of ‘all-too-real-realism’ were banned, not because they were not describing reality, but precisely because they were. Comedy was effected by juxtaposing official discourse and rhetoric with sharply focused documentary realities that revealed the burdened, routine, materially and spiritually starved existence of the people inhabiting real-existent socialism. The retreat into ‘realistic humour’ was often the result of “a deepened sense of irony and self-irony, together with […] an intense fear of pathos and sentimentality, of overstatement and of what Kundera calls the lyric relation to the world” (Havel 1986, 180), all exhibited by utopian specimens of ‘socialist realist’ kitsch and often by self-righteous indictments of the system.

This ‘comedy of futility’[10] was not the immediate offshoot of communist totalitarianism – the sense of ridiculousness inherent in futile plans and hopes had always been an underlying streak of East-Central European literature. One of its most celebrated anti-heroes is, after all, the good soldier Švejk, the half-ridiculous, half-sublime creation of Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek; and the absurdly grotesque coupled with the grotesquely absurd are supremely embodied in the writings of Kafka or Ionesco. Irony, scepticism and a taste for paradox have been the high tonality permeating literary consciousness in the region, with its insistence on the determining role of external circumstances and the machinations of history and bureaucracy – that particular alliance of power and knowledge which constitutes the ideological apparatus at work in many an East Central European novel. Each human act is caught in the trap of a universe that pays little heed to its intended meaning, often thwarting its result; hence the inconsistencies, quirks, accidents and ‘murphiesque’ turns of events that often befall fictional characters. At best they can regard them with a detached, ironical eye, attempting to carve out a portion of privacy and individuality in the engulfing commonality of history; at worst, they fall prey to the guilt, terror and pain that History unleashes on their individual existence. Kundera’s novels are particularly subtle masterpieces of this public/private dichotomy, and the metaphysical irony that his intellectual anti-heroes exhibit is both a measure of survival and a comment on the absurdity of a public world over which they have no control.

The hypertrophy of irony and scepticism functions as a balancing antidote to much of the moralising aesthetics permeating oppositional novels in East-Central Europe. It is a particular brand of irony, devoid of the scathing bitterness of outright satire, a scepticism that

has little in common with, say, English scepticism. It is generally rather stranger, a bit mysterious, a bit nostalgic, often tragic, and at times even heroic, occasionally somewhat incomprehensible in its heavy-handed way, in its caressing cruelty and its ability to turn a provincial phenomenon into a global anticipation of things to come (Havel 1986, 175).

It projects the realisation that some things have to remain unsaid, or partly-said, or seen ‘through a glass darkly’; that should one attempt to translate their incomprehensibility into words, the resulting failure would amount to a bitter shriek of laughter. There are horrors that can never be adequately represented, the horror of Gulags and concentration camps; they can no longer be sublimated into tragic dignity and “for that reason [they] are approachable only though an eerie imitation/doubling of the parody itself,” in the “Kafkaesque quality of the eerie laughter” (Žižek 102). The only way out of this predicament is to incorporate the failure to comprehend into representation itself. This is the higher meaning of the sense of irony predominant in East-Central Europe, its particular wisdom, its “‘nonserious spirit’ that mocks grandeur and glory” (Kundera qtd. in Schöpflin& Woods 221). Comedy becomes the antidote of silence, the only way of coping with the incomprehensible.

The schizophrenic character of ‘real-existing socialism’ led to the resurrection of this particular sense of the comic in East-Central Europe and to a powerful upsurge of the absurd and the grotesque in the literatures of the region. The rhetoric of socialist realism found itself counterpoised with free imaginative combinations, surrealist games, black and nonsense humour, an entire carnivalesque arsenal of subversion and delegitimation that aimed at deconstructing the sterile logic of ideology. Nowhere is this mock-deconstruction more poignantly revealed than in the linguistic feats of Vaclav Havel’s plays, in which the ritualistic absurd forms the texture of everyday life in an equally absurd totalitarian reality. The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965) are built exclusively on the empty rhetoric of a cliché-ridden communist bureaucracy, revealing its alienating effects. The former is a debased ‘waiting for Godot’ in which an inflation of Kafkaesque bureaucracy (the Secretariat of Humour, the Ideological Regulation Commission, the Liquidation Office and its Delimitation Subcommission, the Inauguration Service) functions as a set of interchangeable signifiers in an absurd administration. The play is built on routinely repeated scenes, which give the impression of mechanised conversation; it reads like a concatenation of linguistic clichés, dead metaphors, proverbs, ‘universal’ general truths, pre-digested verities and ossified party rhetoric. While its linguistic minimalism is almost Beckettian in character, the underlying absurd is not metaphysical, but social and political. The notes of derisive parody are struck by the usage of official rhetorical paradigms to describe trivial events, or to conduct absurd ‘scientific’ debates on the imbrication of technology and art. The play is filled with ‘constructive’ and ‘destructive’ sadnesses (19-20), trivialized slogans and tautologies, all revealing the absurdity of bureaucratic procedures[11]. Clicheification is taken to absurd extremes in the invention of an entirely artificial bureaucratic Newspeak called Ptydepe in The Memorandum. Assuming the pretension of scientificity, Ptydepe functions as a metaphor for the wooden language of official ideology. Nobody truly knows it or is able to ‘learn’ it, with the exception of he who teaches it (the activist/propagandist/indoctrinator) and Peter Thumb, the diligent student; on an altogether different level, the play functions as a subtly coded parallel to the communist take-over of Czechoslovakia and those amongst the Czechs who have accepted to play the role of ‘diligent students’.

To conclude, the post-war East-Central European novel – in its mix of documentary history and fantasy, narrative and essayistic speculation, philosophical musings and intricate plot complications – combines the non-fictional qualities of much contemporary American prose with the ‘magical realist’ universe of Latin-American fiction. Its major tonality is that of doubt, a kind of extended postmodern incredulity towards overarching meta-narratives, a shedding of redeeming illusions. Yet perhaps the only illusion that writing in collectivistic post-totalitarianism refuses to shed is the illusion of individuality – the preservation of an autonomous ‘room of one’s own’ in the massified life of the communist era. While many a novel shows the space of the private invaded by the public events of History, East-Central European writers fiercely cling to the idea of individuality and the notion of the private space, both in their lives and in the ultimate values their writings uphold. It is the preservation of this unique value that made meaningful resistance possible, and it is with this awareness that one should read the variety of literary responses to ‘the colonization of the mind’ as different versions of a common assertion of inner spiritual freedom.

 

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Notes