NORMAN MANEA
51
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 ex–
tended the limits of the experience of
educational formation through diforma–
tion.
For a boy in love with books, such as myself, the difficult years of
Stalinism brought not only a mind-numbing avalanche of shoddy, sub–
standard "socialist realist" tracts, but also the discovery of the great
Russian classics, which had been translated as part of the ideological pro–
gram to cement the friendship "with our great neighbor to the east." As is
all great literature, 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 led also, 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
ofjormation through diformation,
on the conflict
between the individual's struggle toward openness and infinity 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 rela–
tively open systems meet with pragmatic strategies and democratic com–
promise. 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 con–
tent. This timid, erotic story sought to reestablish a natural subject and a
normal language. Little wonder then, that the official literary press im–
mediately tore the story to shreds and that the journal in which it ap-
