NORMAN MANEA
33
and then, newly animated fables still spring up in the press.
PR:
You spoke of the "brave new world" having still much to learn
from the "life story" of the struggle against totalitarianism. Could you
elaborate on this?
NM:
There are, of course huge differences between a closed society,
distorted by terror, fear, and misery, and an open society, distorted by
selfish competition and trivial publicity; between a manipulated,
hypocritical collectivism and a well-trained individualism. But it is
sometimes amazing how resentment and the thirst for power drive
people no matter where, in a society obsessed with lies as well as in a
society obsessed with money. What we saw as a disastrous replacement of
professional criterias with Party criterias is called here "political
correctness." Demagogy, cynicism, censorship, bigotism survive, under
different labels, even in a free society. After the defeat of fascism and the
collapse of Communism, the open society itself is undergoing a very deep
crisis, I think, a loss of coherence , of decency, of its generosity and
grandeur. The need for an enemy (ethnic enemy, ideological enemy,
gender enemy, religious enemy) drives and confuses people also in the
brave new world . In trying to understand the dangers facing democracy,
it may be useful to look to the "life history" of the fight against
totalitarianism,
to
what it meant to oppose political pressure even when
it implied taking risks.
PR:
Could you tell us something about what you hope to be working
on in "the book about becoming aware of the inevitable"?
NM:
It should be about being an inevitable alien, the conclusive out–
sider. When you discover your "foreignness" at five years of age, in a
concentration camp, you are instantly connected to an ancient collective
tragedy that annihilates your options. Later, Communist totalitarianism
meant not just prohibition and destruction of tradition, but also a com–
plicated education in being marginal and suspect. Finally, exile returned
me, at the threshold of the age of white hair, to the condition of alien
and nomad, to which I had thought I had found a solution - by
immersing myself in the language and culture in which I was born. This
encompass1l1g condition is about what I hope to write in my next
book.
PR:
The theme of being fated to be alien, of the inevitable outsider, as
you say, is detectable in
October, Eight O'Clock
and
Compulsory
