NORMAN MANEA
53
strangled and corrupted. But culture did not destroy the totalitarian sys–
tem; 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, and not only those that served the
system but also many that sought to resist it or appeased its arrogance in
order to avoid being completely devoured.
I can picture everyone's social apprenticeship as the adventures of an
"August the Fool," stumbling from one false trophy to another- and all
the more so for the artists, those ambitious creators of chimeras. And yet,
the totalitarian experience remains unique because it reflects in an ex–
treme situation not only the sinister potential of the mundane, but also
the social pathology totalitarianism cultivated in such absurd contortions.
This was not a monolithic society, as communists hoped and many anti–
communists claimed. Instead, it distinguished itself through equivocation,
deception, ceaseless hypocrisy, and mystification. Only the ChiefBuffoon
and his retinue of animal trainers still believed, in the last years of the cir–
cus, in the absolute magic of terror and the hynotic power of empty
promises. If the tragedy of totalitarianism is unforgettable, its grotesque
comedy also cannot be forgotten. Like so many extremes throughout his–
tory, they are inseparable. In this context of society's dead ends, the place
of the artist - an extreme protagonist in extreme circumstances - acquires
great importance.
The honest survivor cannot indulge in frivolous illusions or exagger–
ated lamentations about the fate of mankind. Paradoxically, the writer
who has had to defend his integrity (with that ambitious and vulnerable
mix of ethics and aesthetics I once called
estetica
in a Romanian pun for
"East-ethics") understands that the game of art will always defy but can
never tame the Great Beast. This applies even more to exiles, outsiders of
all systems, if not of the whole world. A writer who has undergone the
most extreme experiences does not consider Haubert's vision of himself as
a
saltimbanque
extravagant. Parodic fiction's ironic revenge against the
Great Beast, despite its limitations, does not necessarily exclude greatness.
More than ever, we desperately need a "transcendent ideal" in our
centrifugal, materialistic, artificial world, from which the concept of the
ideal seems to have been banished - a world in which atomic, ecological,
and demographic dangers exacerbate a general·sense of panic and confu–
sion. On the other hand, in the disastrous aftermath of totalitarian systems
of all persuasions, a clearsighted approach to the manipulations unleashed
by every ideal is all the more essential.
We cannot afford to neglect any element of this dilemma - especially
