Trivializing Tragedy:
An Interview
with
Norman Manea
Edward Kanterian: "Someday something terrible might happen," you
wrote in your story "The Balls of Faded Yarn." It refers to the threat to
mankind that conjures up the ubiquity of the apocalypse, an apocalypse
that no longer allows a Kingdom of Heaven. The source of the threat,
however, is never explicit, which reminds me of Kafka's narrative.
Kafka, however, did not experience the Holocaust. What is this threat?
Is it inescapable?
Norman Manea: A sentence like "Everything could start over again,
everything could become drastically different," found in my other story,
"Tale of the Pig," is an even more exp li cit worry. Yet we are unaware of
the danger. The change is sudden and total. It simply cancels all routine;
a lurch into the abyss, without the slightest preparation.
It's about obsessive memory, a child ripped from the bosom of his
family: the moment of deportation. The "metamorphosis" begins here;
those who experienced it and survived lost their innocence and in
exchange received end less uncertainty. The worry, the suspicion of what
is real, the suddenly surfacing fear of catastrophe-they all arise from
the mistrust of reality. Everything could start over; everything could
drastically change as it did before. To restart the machinery of evil
became an express ion that refers to something that's already happened,
to the impossible that became possible.
The biographical premise a lo ne, however, is too narrow. The Roman–
ian critic Lucian Raicu co rrectly noted that for me biographical deter–
mination seems a "new constraint," even a totalitarian one, against
which I emp loy art and literature.
Kafka anticipated the "unthinkable" with uncanny precision. Gregor
Samsa suddenly becomes that which he was to begin with: a human
insect. In the end those around him dispose of him as a thing, an "it,"
since they can no longer find the former "you" in him that had just
recently acted like a person, like all those around him who consider
Editor's Note: Adapted from
Lettre Internationa l
5
I,
October
2000,
and
Neue Ziiricher Zeitul1g,
November
10-1 I , 200 I.
