NOR.MAN MANEA
35
gran1mar. "
At the center of the novel, you find a clownish character wh tries
to
scrutinize his own mediocrity and transcend it, to understand his own
impasse, in a society which celebrated mediocrity and denied the impasse.
Attempting to clear up the mystery of his father's death forty years after
the fact, he faces the dying environment of his daily life, with its under–
ground connections to the past. He tries to resist the external, dangerous
pressure by "walling in" of the self or by denying of the self, through a
confusing show of masks. A description from "within," with its
pantomimes, jokes, dreams, and its panting rhythms, where the grotesque,
the irony, the sarcasm seem best suited to reveal this fractured and
corrupting universe of ambiguity. The society of the deaf-mutes becomes
in
The Black Ellvelope
an emblem of a totalitarian society and therefore,
probably, the novel has been aIled a "Kafkian allegory" of daily life
under the Communist lid of terror. I hope that the American reader
discoveres in it a new vision on a not-so-new theme.
PR:
Do you recall a recent observation of yours about a writer's es–
trangement and at the same time his intimacy with his reader? It is from
the text of the talk you gave at our 1992 conference, published in the
issue of
Partisan RelJiew
on "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern
and Central Europe." You wrote, "The artist is, no matter how
paradoxical it may seem, a secret laborer of love. Is the exile a
'disappointed lover'? Against all odds, love continues to tempt the artist
in exile, no matter how sarcastic, codified, or evanescent his work. He
daily reinvents the premises of the difficult search; he honors his ideal
reader, a stranger both like and unlike himself, with the gift of an
exacting love."
NM:
The second part of the poem by Cavafy I quoted earlier reads:
"You won't find a new country, won't find another shore ... there is
no ship for you, there is no road. As you've wasted your life here, in this
small corner, you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world." These
lines, as well as my observation, suggest the meaninglessness of the burden
of exile. And yet, when the writer in exile reinvents, despite all odds, the
premises of his search, he is inventing not only his old love for his art
once again, but also inventing a new trust, a new hope, and a new love
for his new, strange reader.
