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PARTISAN REVIEW
novels often allows for reading these as
Bildungsromane.
In
the 1970s, he
him–
self called many of his short stories and novels "variants to a self-portrait."
In
his essays as well, Manea plays on his experience of totalitarianism as
literary theme: as symbol and distortion of reality, the relationship between
artist and dictator which, in his recent work, has ever more sharply broken
former taboos.
"Are tyrants and the suppressed masses truly irreconcilable in every
respect, or is it a matter of unconscious reciprocal stimulation?" This is a
central question for Manea, one that is valid with respect to artists and
authors. Norman Manea belongs to those writers of the former East who
had to pay a double price, first by holding out against tyranny and later by
discovering the conflicts, contradictions and frustrations of freedom, the
meaning of controversy and separation after exile in democratic society. In
gripping images, he portrays the most sensitive aspect of the exile's self–
understanding, his creativity. In one of his first texts written in exile,
"Training for Paradise," he states: "To impose silence, layer upon layer.
Thin, as thin as glass and heavy as granite...The darkness grows, soft and
heavy, layer upon layer...Foreign word. A lost language." A draft of the
new futUl;e.
Manea describes the early days of his American exile with its loss of
everyday language and all its consequences as a second holocaust, feelings of
forced deracination and intensified risk and insecurity. The writer's block in
the foreign country seemed insurmountable. But Manea soon learned to use
the clarifying and cathartic functions of writing again in his latest essayistic
work. He experiences writing as "sickness and therapy at once;' as "fortune
within misfortune," as "a felicitous misery."
Norman Manea is one of the most stimulating thinkers and debaters of
the meaning and existence of the exiled. His intellectual responsibility and
curiosity, his powerful ability to generalize, his literary talent and his inalien–
able humanistic ethos are his tools. In a sense he has been and remains an
unimpeachable moralist, whose intellectual control of an extremely sensitive
and strong emotionality keeps
him
from moralizing. Despite his many bio–
graphical encounters with irrationality and the dark absurd, he seems ready
to recognize and describe it but not to accept it as an unavoidable moral
emptiness.
When asked for the basis of his continuing "search for coherence," he
answered that it stands as the sign for the unacceptability of the absurd, of
"absurdity as such," the oppressive and ubiquitous absurdity which he recog–
nizes and still is not entirely ready to accept.
Translated from the Gennan
by
Edith Kurzweil
