668
PARTISAN REVIEW
Marcu's son, Tolea, the novel's most colorful character, is the only one
left to bear the family's burden. Now a receptionist in a tourist hotel that
reserves rooms by the hour for upper-level party functionaries, this former
professor has been banned from his profession for various causes, his suspect
bourgeois origins being among the most obvious. Tolea's rebellion and strat–
egy for survival is a calculated carelessness. Although every word he utters can
be used against
him,
he
talks
compulsively. "In a world where everything
seems programmed, even chaos, chance, or surprise," he reasons, "you've got
to defY logic and bewilder people. You've got to make the fools believe that
you control secret
links
to which they have no access." Out of the sheer bore–
dom of a hopeless situation, he embarks on the dangerous and futile quest of
clearing up his father's death forty years earlier.
Tolea's estranged lover, Irina, an architect who for more mysterious rea–
sons is banned from her profession, works on the staff of the Association's
newspaper. Her quiet, passive resistance to the corruption around her can
hardly be distinguished from self-destruction, and is no more or less effective
than Tolea's. Both are treated by the psychiatrist Dr. Marga who survives by
devoting himself
to
his patients, "the last knights of normality."
Norman Manea's novellas in
Compulsory Happiness
also chronicled the
macabre and sometimes surreal aspects of life under totalitarianism, but were
slightly more palatable to Western audiences because the symbols and results
of corruption were more contained: the trademark trenchcoat of the secret
police, a cynical interrogator, a political chameleon. One might suspect after
reading The
Black Envelope's
more detailed and complex treatment of the
theme that Manea has disproportionately emphasized the phantasmagoria of
this gruesome and still unconcluded chapter of the twentieth century. And
yet, even the briefest account of the
Securitate--the
most draconian and inva–
sive secret police in the Eastern Bloc-and its many "volunteer informers"
reveals how realistic a picture of this society Manea has drawn.
Take, for example, this novel's bizarre odyssey through the "Reading
Service of the Council for Socialist Culture and Education," Ceausescu's
censorship bureau whose records are stored in the Archives of Truth.
In
the
manuscript, words denoting the most basic elements of life under Ceausescu's
sadistic regiIne, such as "food lines," "informer," "cold," "dark," "coffee," and
"dictator," were deleted. Sentences, even entire paragraphs were rejected.
With no trace of irony, Manea's censor "suggested" that eighty percent of
this fictional portrait of a society eroded by duplicity and chronic substitu–
tion be, well, substituted. A substitute censor was found who could offer,
unofficially, compromises acceptable to both the author and the authorities.
Following subsequent reports, advice, and even an interview with a highly
intelligent, thoroughly cynical agent from the
Securitate's
"Writers Section;'
the novel
was
published in 1986,just as the author was preparing for exile.
