Ana Pauker
The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist
de Robert Levy, doctor in istorie UCLA 1998
"Of interest to students of the history of communism in Eastern Europe and of one of its most important figures."--George Cohen, Booklist
"Though Pauker the person remains enigmatic, the political figure's complexities and contradictions, as portrayed by Levy, belie the caricature her homeland clings to, and challenge simplistic notions of the Cold War's darkest hours."--Publishers Weekly
"In private as in public respects, [Pauker's] life was indeed destructive and sad, adding more than fair share to the sum of human misery. Robert Levy's achievement is to bring out the terror and the pity of it."--Times Literary Supplement
"Ana Pauker is a rip-roaring story . . . a whiz of a read. . . . I am personally grateful to Robert Levy for writing a thoughtful, meticulous biography . . . that fills the gaps in a mystery that haunted my early radical journey. More important, he reassesses her role in Eastern block history and provides answers to many questions about Romania's special conditions in the immediate aftermath of World War II that I had never thought to frame. Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist explores the impossible contradictions inherent in being an urbane atheistic assimilationist, and a woman, in a fiercely nationalistic, predominantly peasant, deeply paranoid satellite state. Without gliding over Pauker's serious delusions, desperate compromises and calculating moves, Levy pulls off a surprising feat by offering a credible defense for many of her actions."--the Nation
"Levy's warm absorbing and well-documented political biography brings the life of this important figure to well-deserved attention. This is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of an ambitious woman."--Jerusalem Post
"A careful reexamination of the largely overlooked Ana Pauker. [Levy's] use of documents and witnesses is solid . . . and he is smart enough to paint her as an authoritarian politician torn by contradictions, rather than completely rehabilitating her."--Jerusalem Report
"A meticulously documented political biography of a powerful Jewish communist leader in Romania."--Forward
"Robert Levy's book on Ana Pauker is an exciting example of the depth of research that can be carried out in the postcommunist world. Levy uses a wide variety of documents . . . to draw one of the most detailed political biographies we have of any communist leader in the postwar period."--Norman Naimark, Slavic Review, upcoming (Summer 2002)
"Drawing extensively on never before available archival materials, Levy provides a detailed and nuanced portrait of this Romanian communist leader who played a major, international role during the early days of the Cold War."--Choice
"This is not a psychodrama. Rather, this is a sociopolitical tragedy, extremely valuable, deeply researched, and fascinating. There is very little that is as important as this book about any of the top communist leaders other than the most famous ones such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. . . .The subject is so important, the book so well done and so revealing, and the human interest so compelling, Levy's book will become one of the essential works on the history of communism in Eastern Europe."--Daniel Chirot, author of Modern Tyrants
"This outstanding, thought-provoking political biography of one of the most prominent figures of European communism offers an original and balanced approach to Pauker's contradictory role in the history of both Romanian and international communism. . . . Engagingly written and very convincingly structured, this is not a dry historical account but a vivid reconstruction of a turbulent political life."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Fantasies of Salvation
4 strofe din Tao, cu comentarii de Moss Roberts
DAO DE JING
. . .
Stanza 1
1. The Way as "way" bespeaks no common lasting Way,
2. The name as "name" no common lasting name.
3. Absent is the name for sky and land's first life,
4. Present for the mother of all ten thousand things.
5. Desire ever-absent:
6. Behold the seed germs of all things;
7. Desire ever-present:
8. Behold their every finite course.
9. Forth together come the two
10. As one and the same
11. But differ in name.
12. As one, a dark recess
13. That probed recedes
14. Past that portal whence
15. The milling seed germs teem.
Comment
Laozi opens with a creation myth. Dao, a single mother, source of all life, is juxtaposed to its creation, the ten thousand things. Measured against Dao's fecundity, what ancestor, what male dynastic founder, can compare? Sky and land (tiandi) themselves are an intermediate creation, serving the Way as a framework that imparts form and name, and thus duality, on all things as they are produced. The ten thousand move between two poles: negation and existence, unity and division, potentiality and actuality.1 The Way describes a recurring circular or continuous s-shaped process that must return to its starting point before beginning again: "[A]ll living forms . . . go round home again" (stanza 14); "the Way moves on by contra-motion" (stanza 40).
There is no human role at the level of the Way's creative power, neither for the living nor for their ancestors or the ancient god-kings. Dao is chang (everlasting, constant, common to the ten thousand): it is now as it ever has been, with no duality in itself, no historical aspect, and no ancestor or descendant. The concept of Dao denies paternal lineage, the foundation of hereditary privilege. The Way's ten thousand progeny—human beings among them—share a common birth mother and a common, humble, and anonymous status. They are nonentities produced of negation (stanza 40). By contrast, consider the classic Confucian formula: "Heaven gives birth to the hundred phenomena; among them humankind is noblest."2
Transcendent and also immanent, Dao resembles time or nature and is thus different from but not superior to its creation. In some contexts the Way seems indistinguishable from the ten thousand. The commentary by Heshang gong explains "common lasting Way" as nature (ziran), and its negation, "no common lasting way" (fei chang Dao) as the political rule of one era or another, that is, social constructs that time will alter. This reading is confirmed by a line in the Guodian text titled Xing zi ming chu (Human nature proceeds from the mandate), which says that only the "human Way" is definable.
The contemporary scholar Zhang Songru sees in this stanza a possible analogy to the atomic theories of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.3 Laozi's imagery, however, belongs more to the realm of biology than to physics. The "seed germs" (miao) are fertile germ cells, not Lucretius's genderless atoms streaming slantwise through space. Nonetheless, since the antecedents of Laozi's vision are not easily found in other Chinese writings, a remote and indirect influence from the Greeks should not be absolutely excluded, especially since a possible transliteration of a-mbrotos, meaning immortal, appears in stanza 32.4
This stanza introduces most of the key terms that recur throughout the work: you (what is present, manifest, becoming; as a verb: to have), wu (what is absent, unmanifest, negation; as a verb: to not have), tong (as one, unity), liang (two, dual), Dao (Way, driving force, common path), ming (name, definition), xuan (mysterious, unseen, withdrawn, deep and dark as heaven at night, sublime; as a verb: to explore a recess), wanwu (wan, ten thousand, myriad; wu, figured things, visibilium omnium); and chang (common, lasting, regularly recurring, ever-present). Judging from both the text found at Mawangdui (the earliest complete text of the Laozi found so far) and the partial Guodian text, the term chang in this stanza was originally heng, a synonym of chang. Heng is also the name of a hexagram in the Yijing, or Book of Changes, where it stands for renewal after return to the origin, hence, circular movement.5
The term tong (one and the same) has implications often passed over, namely, that there is an underlying identity among all things arising from their common ancestry in Dao; furthermore, Dao itself is ultimately identical with its creation, thus denying the subordination of junior to senior, child to parent, creature to creator. As stanza 34 says, "The Way wins the name of humble and low." For further discussion of the relation of Dao to the ten thousand in terms of the tension between transcendence and immanence see stanzas 25 and 34.
In line 3 the received texts read tiandi (heaven and earth), translated here as "sky and land," but the Mawangdui texts have wanwu (the ten thousand things). "Ten thousand things" seems to resonate with the term "seed germs" (miao) in lines 6 and 15. The pairing of sky/land and absent/present also fits the theme of emerging duality in this stanza and in stanza 2.
Stanza 2
1. In every fair the world considers fair
2. There's foul;
3. In every good the world considers good
4. There's ill.
5. For what is what is not yields,
6. And the harder the easier consummates;
7. The long the short decides,
8. And higher lower measures;
9. Bronze gongs jade chimes join,
10. And former latter sequence form,
11. Ever round, and round again.1
12. This is why the man of wisdom
13. Concerns himself with under-acting
14. And applies the lesson
15. Of the word unspoken,
16. That all ten thousand may come forth
17. Without his direction,
18. Live through their lives
19. Without his possession,
20. And act of themselves
21. Unbeholden to him.2
22. To the work he completes
23. He lays down no claim.
24. And this has everything to do
25. With why his claim holds always true.
Comment
Stanza 1 sets the stage for the appearance of duality, the twins born of a prior, nameless unity. The second stanza begins with the world below (tianxia), where human beings create duality through knowledge and language: naming and judging, comparing and contrasting, the ten thousand. Another of the Guodian texts says, "There is human nature, there is knowledge; and then good and bad arise."3 The opposites interact, complementing each other as much as they conflict. Note that stanza 1 is not in the Guodian text, while stanza 2 is.
Dualism as a theme may be connected with warfare. Sunzi's Art of War (Bingfa) names some thirty pairs of warring opposites.4 In the chapter "Attack with Fire" ("Huogong") Sunzi writes, "Anger can be turned back to delight, and resentment to good feeling, but a fallen kingdom cannot be brought back into existence nor the dead brought back to life."
From the military strategist's narrow, purposive angle, opposition is to be exploited for an end. From Laozi's wider angle of time and nature, duality is a constant process that brings things round and round, as lines 5-11 suggest. The sage observes but does not intervene or try to exploit the process.5
Lines 1-2 seem to suggest that foul and fair are a twin presence, not that one resulted from or led to the other. "Forth together come the two/As one and the same/But differ in name" (stanza 1). The world of dualities is the world of forms and sounds that people sense and name, but it originates in something formless and soundless. Unlike the activist Confucian leader, who tries by his example to shape people and events within his sphere, Laozi's shengren, who is both a ruler and a sage, observes the interacting forms and then steps back to let events take their course and fulfill their hidden potential for reversal. The listener-sage is attentive, as the prominence of the ear in the graph for "sage" suggests. He makes no judgments, neither accepting the good and the beautiful nor rejecting the bad and the ugly. In the Mawangdui text Cheng (Weighing factors) speech is classified as a yang function, silence as a yin function.
Duality is the precondition for the term wuwei, a motif of the Dao De Jing. Translated as "under-acting" in line 13 of this stanza, wuwei in other stanzas is translated as "under-govern," "without leading," "not striving," "pursue no end." The negative wu (to be absent) in texts of this period sometimes interchanges with the negative imperative wu, which corresponds to "for" in the sense of "refrain from" in such words as "forbear," "forsake," and "forbid." Movement is implicit in the term wei, which means not only action and reaction but also conducting and leading forward; its earliest graph depicts a hand guiding an animal.
In the Guodian text stanza 2 follows stanza 63 and precedes stanza 32. Stanza 63 also deals with opposites. Lines 18-19 are not found in either the Guodian or the Mawangdui texts; they appear in the Wang Bi and Heshang gong texts, however. Perhaps the lines were added as a reference to stanza 1.
Stanza 3
1. Do not promote those who excel
2. And folk will have no cause to quarrel.
3. Prize not goods too hard to find
4. And people won't be turned to crime.
5. These objects of desire unviewed,
6. The people's thoughts remain subdued.
7. Thus under a wise man's rule
8. Blank are their minds
9. But full their bellies,
10. Meek their wills
11. But tough their bones.
12. He keeps the folk
13. From knowing and craving,
14. And the intellects
15. From daring to lead.
16. By acting himself without taking the lead
17. Inside his kingdom all is well ruled.
Comment
The slogan "promote those who excel" (shangxian) comes from Mozi, who urged the appointment of able commoners to government office in preference to nobles and royal kinsmen. Commoners would be rewarded for their knowledge and expertise, both technical and administrative. Laozi opposed this type of state activism (wei). In his view this recruiting policy in the service of state building would only hasten the kingdoms along the path toward modernization and war, taking the common people farther and farther away from the simple life that Laozi thinks they once enjoyed.1
An important thinker of the generation after Confucius, Mozi broke with the Confucians and formed his own school. Opposed to Confucius's more cautious inclusion of the able among the noble, Mozi advocated an aggressive plan: to empower a new class of educated elites with high salaries and thus bind their loyalty to the ruler and give him leverage over the traditional nobles. The presence of the slogan "promote those who excel" in the Laozi has long been given as a reason for dating Laozi after Mozi. However, since this stanza is not found in the Guodian set of stanzas and may therefore postdate the Guodian text, its quoting of a Mozi slogan is likely.2
From the angle of politics and economics, Laozi opposed the policy of promoting the able because he wanted to simplify government, not develop it, and because he opposed the use of wealth—and the increased consumption it implies—as an incentive. A striking development of elite recruitment in post-Laozi Daoist political thought is found in the Guanzi, a syncretic text of the fourth-to-third centuries b.c. That text recommends to the rulers of Qi:
"To put aside the self and establish the public good—can [the ruler] recruit the right men? To preside over state administration and appoint commoners to office—can [the ruler] place his own person last?" This passage from the chapter "Zheng" (Correctness in rule) shows Laozi's philosophical influence. The ruler is selfless, nonassertive, determined on strengthening the state by recruiting the able.
For Heshang gong, political order is dependent on and secondary to the ruler's personal discipline and spiritual cultivation, and his commentary on this stanza (referring to lines 1, 3, and 5) emphasizes that self-discipline: "For the sage, governing the kingdom is no different from governing the person."
The extent to which "those who excel" became an elite intellectual force is suggested by the Later Han author Wang Chong: "In the time of the six kingdoms [late fourth to mid third century b.c.] if talented ministers entered the service of Chu kingdom, its weight increased; if they departed from Qi, that kingdom's weight was reduced; if they worked for Zhao, Zhao was kept whole; if they turned against Wei, Wei suffered. . . ." So also, Mencius speaks of the renowned traveling political counselor Zhang Yi as "striking fear in the feudal lords with a single moment of rage, calming the realm when calm himself."3 These are the "intellects" whom Laozi opposes.
In the "Jiudi" (Nine terrains) chapter of Sunzi's Art of War the relationship of the commander to the troops is couched in terms similar to the description of the relationship between the wise and those they govern in this stanza: "[The commander] must be able to make stupid the eyes and ears of his troops . . . driving them like a herd of sheep, back and forth, not a one knowing where he is headed."4
Stanza 4
1. Ever void, Dao provides
2. But does not fill.
3. To a welling font akin,
4. The living myriad's sacred source
5. Is like the darkness of the deep;
6. There its living presence bides.
7. Child of whom I cannot tell,
8. Liken it to the ancestor of ancestors.
Comment
Laozi returns to the term Dao and the genesis theme of stanza 1, introducing water as a metaphor for Dao. Often associated with the yin principle, water is soft, low, useful, life-giving, ever-present, common, indefinable, and vast.1 Dao's creative power is likened to a well without limit; Dao always remains empty because it is not subject to the oscillations (between full and empty) of duality. The source of everything, Dao comes from nothing; it is an orphan. Known human ancestry is limited to a succession of likenesses, a genealogy stretching back to an named clan founder. Dao as orphan is a prime progenitor, an ancestor more ancient and venerable than any other.2 In it all hierarchies of historical time collapse.
The structural problem of this stanza is whether or not to include the four triplet phrases found after line 4 in most translations. The four phrases appear in non-Guodian stanza 56, where they seem to fit in smoothly with the context of engaging the world. In the abstract and mythical context of stanza 4, however, they seem to interrupt the logic of the stanza. Gu Li excises them; Chen Guying and Gao Heng bracket them; Zhang Songru keeps them. In the present translation the four phrases are translated only in stanza 56: "They dull their keen edge and / Resolve their differences, / Reconcile the points of view / And blend with the lowly dust."3
Stanza 4 is not in the Guodian text of the Laozi.
Pentru detalii, cartea este aici:
. . .
Stanza 1
1. The Way as "way" bespeaks no common lasting Way,
2. The name as "name" no common lasting name.
3. Absent is the name for sky and land's first life,
4. Present for the mother of all ten thousand things.
5. Desire ever-absent:
6. Behold the seed germs of all things;
7. Desire ever-present:
8. Behold their every finite course.
9. Forth together come the two
10. As one and the same
11. But differ in name.
12. As one, a dark recess
13. That probed recedes
14. Past that portal whence
15. The milling seed germs teem.
Comment
Laozi opens with a creation myth. Dao, a single mother, source of all life, is juxtaposed to its creation, the ten thousand things. Measured against Dao's fecundity, what ancestor, what male dynastic founder, can compare? Sky and land (tiandi) themselves are an intermediate creation, serving the Way as a framework that imparts form and name, and thus duality, on all things as they are produced. The ten thousand move between two poles: negation and existence, unity and division, potentiality and actuality.1 The Way describes a recurring circular or continuous s-shaped process that must return to its starting point before beginning again: "[A]ll living forms . . . go round home again" (stanza 14); "the Way moves on by contra-motion" (stanza 40).
There is no human role at the level of the Way's creative power, neither for the living nor for their ancestors or the ancient god-kings. Dao is chang (everlasting, constant, common to the ten thousand): it is now as it ever has been, with no duality in itself, no historical aspect, and no ancestor or descendant. The concept of Dao denies paternal lineage, the foundation of hereditary privilege. The Way's ten thousand progeny—human beings among them—share a common birth mother and a common, humble, and anonymous status. They are nonentities produced of negation (stanza 40). By contrast, consider the classic Confucian formula: "Heaven gives birth to the hundred phenomena; among them humankind is noblest."2
Transcendent and also immanent, Dao resembles time or nature and is thus different from but not superior to its creation. In some contexts the Way seems indistinguishable from the ten thousand. The commentary by Heshang gong explains "common lasting Way" as nature (ziran), and its negation, "no common lasting way" (fei chang Dao) as the political rule of one era or another, that is, social constructs that time will alter. This reading is confirmed by a line in the Guodian text titled Xing zi ming chu (Human nature proceeds from the mandate), which says that only the "human Way" is definable.
The contemporary scholar Zhang Songru sees in this stanza a possible analogy to the atomic theories of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.3 Laozi's imagery, however, belongs more to the realm of biology than to physics. The "seed germs" (miao) are fertile germ cells, not Lucretius's genderless atoms streaming slantwise through space. Nonetheless, since the antecedents of Laozi's vision are not easily found in other Chinese writings, a remote and indirect influence from the Greeks should not be absolutely excluded, especially since a possible transliteration of a-mbrotos, meaning immortal, appears in stanza 32.4
This stanza introduces most of the key terms that recur throughout the work: you (what is present, manifest, becoming; as a verb: to have), wu (what is absent, unmanifest, negation; as a verb: to not have), tong (as one, unity), liang (two, dual), Dao (Way, driving force, common path), ming (name, definition), xuan (mysterious, unseen, withdrawn, deep and dark as heaven at night, sublime; as a verb: to explore a recess), wanwu (wan, ten thousand, myriad; wu, figured things, visibilium omnium); and chang (common, lasting, regularly recurring, ever-present). Judging from both the text found at Mawangdui (the earliest complete text of the Laozi found so far) and the partial Guodian text, the term chang in this stanza was originally heng, a synonym of chang. Heng is also the name of a hexagram in the Yijing, or Book of Changes, where it stands for renewal after return to the origin, hence, circular movement.5
The term tong (one and the same) has implications often passed over, namely, that there is an underlying identity among all things arising from their common ancestry in Dao; furthermore, Dao itself is ultimately identical with its creation, thus denying the subordination of junior to senior, child to parent, creature to creator. As stanza 34 says, "The Way wins the name of humble and low." For further discussion of the relation of Dao to the ten thousand in terms of the tension between transcendence and immanence see stanzas 25 and 34.
In line 3 the received texts read tiandi (heaven and earth), translated here as "sky and land," but the Mawangdui texts have wanwu (the ten thousand things). "Ten thousand things" seems to resonate with the term "seed germs" (miao) in lines 6 and 15. The pairing of sky/land and absent/present also fits the theme of emerging duality in this stanza and in stanza 2.
Stanza 2
1. In every fair the world considers fair
2. There's foul;
3. In every good the world considers good
4. There's ill.
5. For what is what is not yields,
6. And the harder the easier consummates;
7. The long the short decides,
8. And higher lower measures;
9. Bronze gongs jade chimes join,
10. And former latter sequence form,
11. Ever round, and round again.1
12. This is why the man of wisdom
13. Concerns himself with under-acting
14. And applies the lesson
15. Of the word unspoken,
16. That all ten thousand may come forth
17. Without his direction,
18. Live through their lives
19. Without his possession,
20. And act of themselves
21. Unbeholden to him.2
22. To the work he completes
23. He lays down no claim.
24. And this has everything to do
25. With why his claim holds always true.
Comment
Stanza 1 sets the stage for the appearance of duality, the twins born of a prior, nameless unity. The second stanza begins with the world below (tianxia), where human beings create duality through knowledge and language: naming and judging, comparing and contrasting, the ten thousand. Another of the Guodian texts says, "There is human nature, there is knowledge; and then good and bad arise."3 The opposites interact, complementing each other as much as they conflict. Note that stanza 1 is not in the Guodian text, while stanza 2 is.
Dualism as a theme may be connected with warfare. Sunzi's Art of War (Bingfa) names some thirty pairs of warring opposites.4 In the chapter "Attack with Fire" ("Huogong") Sunzi writes, "Anger can be turned back to delight, and resentment to good feeling, but a fallen kingdom cannot be brought back into existence nor the dead brought back to life."
From the military strategist's narrow, purposive angle, opposition is to be exploited for an end. From Laozi's wider angle of time and nature, duality is a constant process that brings things round and round, as lines 5-11 suggest. The sage observes but does not intervene or try to exploit the process.5
Lines 1-2 seem to suggest that foul and fair are a twin presence, not that one resulted from or led to the other. "Forth together come the two/As one and the same/But differ in name" (stanza 1). The world of dualities is the world of forms and sounds that people sense and name, but it originates in something formless and soundless. Unlike the activist Confucian leader, who tries by his example to shape people and events within his sphere, Laozi's shengren, who is both a ruler and a sage, observes the interacting forms and then steps back to let events take their course and fulfill their hidden potential for reversal. The listener-sage is attentive, as the prominence of the ear in the graph for "sage" suggests. He makes no judgments, neither accepting the good and the beautiful nor rejecting the bad and the ugly. In the Mawangdui text Cheng (Weighing factors) speech is classified as a yang function, silence as a yin function.
Duality is the precondition for the term wuwei, a motif of the Dao De Jing. Translated as "under-acting" in line 13 of this stanza, wuwei in other stanzas is translated as "under-govern," "without leading," "not striving," "pursue no end." The negative wu (to be absent) in texts of this period sometimes interchanges with the negative imperative wu, which corresponds to "for" in the sense of "refrain from" in such words as "forbear," "forsake," and "forbid." Movement is implicit in the term wei, which means not only action and reaction but also conducting and leading forward; its earliest graph depicts a hand guiding an animal.
In the Guodian text stanza 2 follows stanza 63 and precedes stanza 32. Stanza 63 also deals with opposites. Lines 18-19 are not found in either the Guodian or the Mawangdui texts; they appear in the Wang Bi and Heshang gong texts, however. Perhaps the lines were added as a reference to stanza 1.
Stanza 3
1. Do not promote those who excel
2. And folk will have no cause to quarrel.
3. Prize not goods too hard to find
4. And people won't be turned to crime.
5. These objects of desire unviewed,
6. The people's thoughts remain subdued.
7. Thus under a wise man's rule
8. Blank are their minds
9. But full their bellies,
10. Meek their wills
11. But tough their bones.
12. He keeps the folk
13. From knowing and craving,
14. And the intellects
15. From daring to lead.
16. By acting himself without taking the lead
17. Inside his kingdom all is well ruled.
Comment
The slogan "promote those who excel" (shangxian) comes from Mozi, who urged the appointment of able commoners to government office in preference to nobles and royal kinsmen. Commoners would be rewarded for their knowledge and expertise, both technical and administrative. Laozi opposed this type of state activism (wei). In his view this recruiting policy in the service of state building would only hasten the kingdoms along the path toward modernization and war, taking the common people farther and farther away from the simple life that Laozi thinks they once enjoyed.1
An important thinker of the generation after Confucius, Mozi broke with the Confucians and formed his own school. Opposed to Confucius's more cautious inclusion of the able among the noble, Mozi advocated an aggressive plan: to empower a new class of educated elites with high salaries and thus bind their loyalty to the ruler and give him leverage over the traditional nobles. The presence of the slogan "promote those who excel" in the Laozi has long been given as a reason for dating Laozi after Mozi. However, since this stanza is not found in the Guodian set of stanzas and may therefore postdate the Guodian text, its quoting of a Mozi slogan is likely.2
From the angle of politics and economics, Laozi opposed the policy of promoting the able because he wanted to simplify government, not develop it, and because he opposed the use of wealth—and the increased consumption it implies—as an incentive. A striking development of elite recruitment in post-Laozi Daoist political thought is found in the Guanzi, a syncretic text of the fourth-to-third centuries b.c. That text recommends to the rulers of Qi:
"To put aside the self and establish the public good—can [the ruler] recruit the right men? To preside over state administration and appoint commoners to office—can [the ruler] place his own person last?" This passage from the chapter "Zheng" (Correctness in rule) shows Laozi's philosophical influence. The ruler is selfless, nonassertive, determined on strengthening the state by recruiting the able.
For Heshang gong, political order is dependent on and secondary to the ruler's personal discipline and spiritual cultivation, and his commentary on this stanza (referring to lines 1, 3, and 5) emphasizes that self-discipline: "For the sage, governing the kingdom is no different from governing the person."
The extent to which "those who excel" became an elite intellectual force is suggested by the Later Han author Wang Chong: "In the time of the six kingdoms [late fourth to mid third century b.c.] if talented ministers entered the service of Chu kingdom, its weight increased; if they departed from Qi, that kingdom's weight was reduced; if they worked for Zhao, Zhao was kept whole; if they turned against Wei, Wei suffered. . . ." So also, Mencius speaks of the renowned traveling political counselor Zhang Yi as "striking fear in the feudal lords with a single moment of rage, calming the realm when calm himself."3 These are the "intellects" whom Laozi opposes.
In the "Jiudi" (Nine terrains) chapter of Sunzi's Art of War the relationship of the commander to the troops is couched in terms similar to the description of the relationship between the wise and those they govern in this stanza: "[The commander] must be able to make stupid the eyes and ears of his troops . . . driving them like a herd of sheep, back and forth, not a one knowing where he is headed."4
Stanza 4
1. Ever void, Dao provides
2. But does not fill.
3. To a welling font akin,
4. The living myriad's sacred source
5. Is like the darkness of the deep;
6. There its living presence bides.
7. Child of whom I cannot tell,
8. Liken it to the ancestor of ancestors.
Comment
Laozi returns to the term Dao and the genesis theme of stanza 1, introducing water as a metaphor for Dao. Often associated with the yin principle, water is soft, low, useful, life-giving, ever-present, common, indefinable, and vast.1 Dao's creative power is likened to a well without limit; Dao always remains empty because it is not subject to the oscillations (between full and empty) of duality. The source of everything, Dao comes from nothing; it is an orphan. Known human ancestry is limited to a succession of likenesses, a genealogy stretching back to an named clan founder. Dao as orphan is a prime progenitor, an ancestor more ancient and venerable than any other.2 In it all hierarchies of historical time collapse.
The structural problem of this stanza is whether or not to include the four triplet phrases found after line 4 in most translations. The four phrases appear in non-Guodian stanza 56, where they seem to fit in smoothly with the context of engaging the world. In the abstract and mythical context of stanza 4, however, they seem to interrupt the logic of the stanza. Gu Li excises them; Chen Guying and Gao Heng bracket them; Zhang Songru keeps them. In the present translation the four phrases are translated only in stanza 56: "They dull their keen edge and / Resolve their differences, / Reconcile the points of view / And blend with the lowly dust."3
Stanza 4 is not in the Guodian text of the Laozi.
Pentru detalii, cartea este aici:
Poporul român ar fi demn de un Tarkovski
Dan PURIC, în dialog cu Dan Boicea
Dan Puric s-a născut la 12 februarie 1959, la Buzău. După ce a absolvit, în 1985, Institutul de Artă Teatrală şi Cinematografică, la clasa prof.univ.dr. Dem Rădulescu, a jucat trei ani pe scena Teatrului "Mihai Eminescu", din Botoşani. Din 1988 este actor la Teatrul Naţional "I.L.Caragiale" din Bucureşti şi societar de onoare, din 2001. A străbătut lumea cu spectacole pe care le-a regizat şi a fost răsplătit cu numeroase premii, atât în străinătate, cât şi în România: Premiul "Golden Arena", la Festivalul Internaţional de film de la Pola Iugoslavia, pentru rolul principal din "Broken Youth"; Premiul special la cel de-al doilea Festival al Pantomimei de la St.Croix – Elveţia; Premiul pe 1996 la Chicago Artists International Program; Premiul "Constantin Tănase", la Festivalul Umorului pentru rolul principal din "Omul care a văzut moartea"; Premiul pentru Teatru de Pantomimă, acordat de Secţia Română a Asociaţiei Internaţionale a Criticilor de Teatru – Fundaţia Teatrul XXI, în 1997; Premiul UNITER acordat de Secţia Română a AICT, pentru spectacolul "Toujours l'amour", în 1999; Marele Premiu al Fundaţiei "Anastasia" 2002; Marele Premiu UNESCO pentru Dezvoltare Culturală – "pentru promovarea artei scenice româneşti în străinătate"; Marele Premiu la Festivalul "One Man Show" de la Chişinău; Premiul UNITER pentru Teatru Non-verbal, în 2003. Decorat cu Ordinul Naţional Steaua României în grad de Cavaler – pentru servicii excepţionale în cultură, în anul 2000.
- Cât de mult înseamnă sacralitate în ceea ce faceţi dvs. şi cum îi antrenaţi şi pe ceilalţi să vă urmeze în acest efort de căutare a propriei umanităţi?
- Arta viitorului nu va mai putea fi de mercenar, precum este acum. Vezi filme şi le uiţi, nu când ieşi, ci când le vezi... Piesele de teatru au un text patologic, schizofrenic, au apărut textele noi, de criză şi pe scenele româneşti. şi ele intră într-un val mimetic, care arată că suntem dintr-un punct de vedere o subcultură şi că trebuie să imităm crizele lui Big Brother, care a consumat patologia de mult. Teatrul de tip patologic, de tip exhibiţionist, corespunde omului autonom, fără de Dumnezeu, al individului, nu al persoanei. Toate aceste tulburări vin şi la noi, într-un soi de contaminare. Noi suntem cu cultura tot timpul în regim de urgenţă. Dincolo de eşalonul celor loviţi de gripa asta aviară culturală, se află o Românie care-şi va găsi tot timpul resursele de refacere. Nu poţi să fii imediat performant după ce cultura a fost schilodită în comunism. Prin `91-`92 au mai fost piese cu dezbrăcaţi pe scenă şi sex, care au căzut, s-au triat, ceea ce arată că publicul român are o foarte mare pudoare şi inteligenţă; nu se lasă păcălit pe o perioadă prea lungă. Arta viitorului va fi mărturisitoare, artă în care noi, cei care am suferit, trebuie să mărturisim, să vorbim şi să învăţăm să articulăm despre noi... Nu să facem inspecţia hărţii noastre psihopatologice, cum făcea Freud, ci să ne autodescoperim, ca taină creată de Dumnezeu. Arta majoră trebuie să limpezească, nu să tulbure apele. Nu întâmplător joc acum într-o piesă de G.M. Zamfirescu, la Teatrul Naţional, "Idolul şi Ion Anapoda". Am fost întrebat de ce-mi trebuie o piesă prăfuită?... Da, dar în piesa aceasta sălăşluieşte tot spiritul României interbelice! Nu e Sofocle, nu umblă nimeni cu toporul să taie pe cineva, nu facem telenovele. Abia s-a aşezat burghezia... Am nostalgia acelor vremuri, fără să idealizez, pentru că şi atunci erau contradicţii, nedreptăţi, dar nu existau instituţionalizarea mizeriei şi promovarea imposturii la nivel de valoare. Televiziunile sunt blocate de impostori şi divertisment de tip pornografic, se face o furajare continuă cu subcultură...
- Vă simţiţi compatibil cu ceea ce înseamnă filmul românesc de acum?
- Nu, nici pe departe. Pe de altă parte, nici nu vreau să-i descurajez. E bine că unii au luat nişte premii pe la Cannes, e bine că au fost încurajaţi, dar n-au nici o legătură cu poporul român. Nu ştiu să mărturisească despre poporul român, care ar fi demn de un Tarkovski. E uluitor ce face cinematograful chinez în ultima vreme, ce mărturisiri de civilizaţie şi cultură... Am constatat, cu tristeţe, că suflul cinematografiei româneşti n-a mai mers după `89 încoace. Atunci i-am avut pe Ciulei, pe Pintilie, iar acum suntem o cinematografie rezumată la aurolaci şi curve - cazuri patologice şi sociale. Ar fi fost interesant dacă cineva ar fi reuşit să surprindă sufletul adevărat, dramele şi calităţile acestui popor. Pare că ni se dau comenzi şi bani să scriem despre noi că suntem ceea ce nu suntem. Am senzaţia că scriem extemporale date din afară. Drama este că aceşti tineri creatori sunt lipsiţi de un învăţământ temeinic. Toate depunerile, în învăţământ şi cultură, sunt la fel: se fac în timp. Dar, de 15 ani, învăţământul se conturează atrofic, iar cel superior, de artă, e terminat. E normal atunci ca tânărul să vrea să răcnească, să ţipe, să se revolte. şi primul lucru pe care îl produce este o vulgaritate, confundată cu autenticul. Primul lucru pe care îl confundă cu libertatea este înjurătura. Învăţământul se distruge şi din iresponsabilitatea guvernanţilor, care plătesc prost profesorii. La rândul lor, aceştia îşi boicotează propria meserie. De-asta spun că România este o improvizaţie. Văd în teatru o inflaţie de actori semipregătiţi, vai de capul lor!
- De ce actorul român de teatru pare condamnat să nu câştige bine?
- În perioada comunistă chiar se câştiga. Aveau nevoie de noi să-şi facă propagandă: nu făceau decât să te schilodească artistic. Apoi, puterea a devenit plurivalent economică şi n-a mai avut nevoie de propagandă. A zis: mori liniştit! Atunci, cârnăţarii ajunşi la putere au spus: ne creăm noi distracţii. şi distracţia la nivelul lor cortical este telenovela şi maneaua. De revelion, 90% au fost manele, lucru care arată cât de subestimaţi sunt românii, ca public. Telenovelele care se fac sunt la un nivel suprarealist! Dacă Salvador Dali ar mai trăi, i-ar picta pe toţi! şi faptul că actorii profesionişti joacă mai prost decât amatorii e grav. Sunt mulţi colegi valoroşi care nu pot fi opriţi să nu se ducă, pentru că n-au ce mânca. Fac acest compromis, dar se deprofesionalizează. Exemplul cel mai potrivit mi se pare următorul: iei un medic chirurg şi îi spui: Nu mai am nevoie de tine, poţi să cari morţi? Brancardierul e plătit mult mai bine decât medicul chirurg. Performanţa nu este bine remunerată.
- Este cumva România doar un spectacol tragic pentru dumneavoastră?
- Dacă priveşti România prin ochii lui Sancho Panza, un ţăran plin de vitalitate, cu simţul realităţii, vezi un ghetou neocomunist, fără perspectivă politică, fără viitor, trăind o confuzie şi o improvizaţie totală. Un destin aproape tragic. Dacă priveşti prin ochii lui Don Quijote, vezi o ţară cu o taină imensă, capabilă să dăruiască şi celorlalţi. Depinde prin ce ochi o priveşti. El s-a îndrăgostit de Dulcineea nu din văzute, ci din auzite. Eu, la fel, m-am îndrăgostit de România, nu din văzute, pentru că îţi vine să te sinucizi dacă ieşi acum pe stradă, ci din ce-am citit şi din ce mi-au povestit alţii despre ea. De ce a scris Gheorghe Brătianu că poporul român e un miracol? De ce nu a spus că e un gunoi, cum fac cei de acum, care l-au decapitat şi pe Eminescu? Scormonesc vulgaritatea în operele lui ca să-l desacralizeze, să-l biologizeze pe scriitorul despre care Cioran spunea că şi Buddha ar fi gelos pe biografia lui.
- În ce moment al culturii române v-aţi simţi împăcat cu propriile aşteptări?
- Ceea ce se întâmplă acum în cultura română mă face să mă simt destul de singur. Cultura şi intelectualitatea românească le văd oportuniste, închinate mimetismului, slăbite, cu garda jos. Nu mă simt singur dacă mă bagi în cultura interbelică. Când citesc o carte de Mircea Vulcănescu parcă începe să-mi circule sângele în vene. Când îl citesc pe Nae Ionescu sau pe Petre Tuţea, intru şi eu în normalitate şi regret că am început să mă simt mai bine la Bellu, între morţi, decât între viii morţi de acum, fără vlagă, care sunt capabili să argumenteze orice, numai să le fie bine. Prin comparaţie, putem să ne dăm seama că Eminescu a fost o conştiinţă, a strigat "Pe aici nu se trece!"... A făcut un fel de Mărăşeşti în cultură. Eminescu este ca zidul chinezesc. Au venit nişte demenţi comunişti şi i-au dat cu var şi vin alţii acum şi-l mâzgălesc cu graffiti. Dar este singura construcţie umană care se vede de pe Lună.
- Se poate transmite la fel de uşor sacralitatea, doar prin gest, prin pantomimă?
- Cineva mi-a spus: "Eu vin la spectacolele dumneavoastră ori de câte ori mă simt rău". Am jucat odată "Visul" în faţa unei delegaţii de la Vatican şi un mare părinte catolic mi-a zis, după ce a ascultat Addagio de Albinoni: Ceea ce faci tu este Logos! Un părinte de la Cluj mi-a spus – este un spectacol creştin!, iar un monah mi-a mărturisit că nu doar Addagio este creştin, ci tot ceea ce fac... până şi divertismentul este creştin. Cel mai frumos lucru mi l-a spus Majestatea Sa, Regina Ana a României, care a fost la "Visul": Domnule, dumneavoastră începeţi cu Chaplin şi ne duceţi, uşor, uşor, către Dumnezeu. Este cuvânt regal. Cronică regală de teatru. Poţi s-o pui îngropată, ca inima Reginei Maria. Iată ce înseamnă monarhia în România, nevoia de înalt... Nu mi-a spus niciun om politic din România lucrul ăsta. Părintele Stăniloaie spunea că arta trezeşte omul din fiară, nu fiara din om. şi că discursul cel mai bun către poporul român este umorul. Nu băşcălia, care este desacralizantă. Umorul te trezeşte din rutină şi din imbecilitatea vieţii, iar acum, arta trezeşte fiara din om, nu omul din fiară.
- Aţi spus că vreţi să plecaţi în Occident cu spectacolul "Don Quijote", din nevoia de a arăta lumii contribuţia României la taina culturii universale. Ce/cine vă opreşte?
- Ar fi bine să se facă un turneu cu acest spectacol sensibil şi plin de vitalitate, care arată o nouă concepţie teatrală care vine din România. "Don Quijote" este un spectacol exponenţial, în contextul în care România este într-un deficit de imagine sau are o imagine pervertită. Marile state ale lumii au folosit de mult această metodă de a trimite arta înaintea politicului. Îţi trebuie sensibilitate politică pentru a înţelege că un popor trebuie reprezentat printr-o artă care nu trebuie să fie de propagandă. Până acum, imaginea României a fost un haos de propagandă. Ca să parcurgi drumul până la identitatea autentică a ţării trebuie să descoperi un produs care vorbeşte. M-am gândit la "Don Quijote" pentru că este un libret internaţional, cartea cea mai citită de pe glob şi, paradoxal, cel mai puţin înţeleasă... un subiect atât de cunoscut – un adevărat mit european. În spatele unui mit european, România îşi expune vitalitatea, inteligenţa şi talentul. Aş vrea să sensibilizez instituţiile, Ministerul de Externe, Ministerul Culturii, guvernul, să realizeze un lucru de normalitate, care poate părea excepţional. Nu este! Orice stat alocă nişte bani când are o trupă performantă, care aparţine de patrimoniu. Ar fi un act de deşteptare, pentru că nu mă ajută pe mine, ci ajută ţara prin aşa ceva. După acest turneu european eu n-o să-mi cumpăr o vilă, o maşină sau măcar o pereche de tenişi, ci mă pun responsabil şi conştient pentru ţară. Acest turneu nu va fi o afacere, ci un pas pentru ca România să intre în istorie, pentru că noi oricum suntem în afara istoriei.
- Cum este percepută cultura română pe marile scene ale lumii?
- Dacă până acum 15 ani am fost targetoizaţi, acum suntem marginalizaţi. Încă nu ni s-a spus ce rol să jucăm în Europa, suntem la rezerve. E important să plece de la noi o imagine autentică. Lumea toată, transformată într-un imens market, normal că are brand. Toată lumea caută acum brandul României. Eu nu-l caut, pentru că nu acesta ne va salva pe noi, şi nici o imagine de tip propagandistic, ci o dimensiune autentică. Întotdeauna ne căutăm identitatea după lecţiile străine. Mircea Eliade a fost aproape profetic în 1951, când a spus "Pe viitor, cultura lumii nu se mai poate declina între Thales din Millet şi Heidegger". Sunt încă alte culturi, el nedesconsiderând cultura europeană, şi, din contră, văzând cum se va respira în viitor...
- Cum vă plasaţi ca artist şi cetăţean al lumii în acest conflict al civilizaţiilor: cea occidentală versus cea musulmană?
- Suntem totuşi o planetă care a ajuns la dimensiunea unui mare sat şi e bine să ne cunoaştem unii pe alţii mai profund. Iată ce catastrofe se întâmplă... dovadă scandalul acesta cu lumea islamică. Se vorbeşte de primitivismul lumii islamice, dar nimeni nu percepe infirmitatea lumii occidentale, care are dificultăţi în a respecta credinţa altuia. Categoric, drepturile omului nu sunt mai presus decât drepturile Lui Dumnezeu. Iată ce handicap al civilizaţiei, ce lipsă, ce spectacol al falimentului societăţii occidentale. O altă ipocrizie: se trâmbiţează multiculturalitatea, pluralismul, dar, culmea, s-a ajuns până acolo unde se eludează până şi achiziţiile marii culturi occidentale. Immanuel Kant a spus că "libertatea unui om are drept limită libertatea celuilalt". La noi, un sociolog, cred că D.D. Roşca a spus, parafrazând, că "libertatea unui stat, a unui popor, are drept limită libertatea celuilalt". E un lucru flagrant. Suntem în 2006 şi nu poţi să te joci cu nişte lucruri de genul ăsta. Sigur, nu poate fi condamnată civilizaţia occidentală generic, Doamne fereşte! Este o mare civilizaţie. Necesară mi se pare o conştiinţă spirituală de tip nou, care să responsabilizeze la nivel planetar toată lumea. Artistul este o fărâmă din această conştiinţă, pentru că această conştiinţă se poate naşte în domeniul artistic, în domeniul politic. Trebuie un creier mai dezinhibat, nu ţâfnele astea civilizatoare, de genul "noi suntem buricul Pământului". Iată ce catastrofe trăim...
- Pare că românii pot da o lecţie de toleranţă în aceste clipe care îşi consumă energia pe muchie de cuţit...
- Nu este nici măcar un conflict al civilizaţiilor, ci falimentul civilizaţiei politice de tip contractualist occidental, este o infirmitate a lor faţă de lumea musulmană. Vorbim de coexistenţă, în care îl respecţi pe celălalt aşa cum este el. Immanuel Kant a mai spus un lucru: "La nivel de opinie putem discuta orice, dar la nivel de religie, nu!". Eu cred că poporul român are o atitudine tămăduitoare. Mă refer la poporul român profund, care, de sute de ani, se înţelege foarte bine cu cei care au alte religii, în ciuda unei istorii dure, presărată cu adversităţi puternice. Am reuşit să asimilăm multe populaţii străine, într-o învecinare normală. Mi se pare lăudabilă atitudinea poporului irakian în perioada răpirii jurnaliştilor. N-am văzut să vorbească înţelepţii Irakului atât de frumos despre un popor, aşa cum au vorbit despre cel român. Au fost atenţi la relaţiile noastre seculare, la această relaţie atât de specială în care respectul religiilor n-avea nimic ofensiv şi de misionarism sau prozelitism. Au fost conflicte sângeroase între noi şi turci, de exemplu, dar istoria a trecut, şi, ceea ce este interesant după această istorie este soluţia care s-a găsit – noi n-am rămas ca popor resentimentar. Este o minune! Nu ştim să urâm "à la long", ci am mers spre normalitate. Consider că putem da cu împrumut lucrul acesta, la export. Dacă au nevoie, ne pot suna... Aici se confundă spiritul cu civilizaţia. Nu-i de ajuns să ai un mobil şi să mergi cu avionul foarte rapid pe când celălalt merge desculţ. S-ar putea ca cel care umblă desculţ să fie într-un dialog cu Absolutul, şi din punct de vedere spiritual, mult mai mult decât cel "civilizat". Trebuie să fim atenţi şi să schimbăm paradigma asta orgolioasă. Reacţiile jurnaliştilor din România au fost foarte bune, de bun simţ, elementare şi creştine. Prin refuzul de a publica aceste caricaturi, ne-am circumscris la taina poporului român. Este o lecţie din partea jurnaliştilor, ca deontologie şi conştiinţă, că n-au făcut aşa ceva, alegând să vândă ziarul mai mult pentru o curiozitate bârfitoare de scară de bloc, pe sufletul rănit, vexat, al unor naţiuni care chiar cred în ceva. Unul dintre înţelesurile cuvântului "islam" înseamnă "pace". Trebuie să învăţăm să le respectăm credinţa. O comunitate europeană care nu are piatră creştină la fundament nu este decât o organizaţie sindicală. Din nefericire, lumea evoluează către o criză îngrozitoare, tocmai pentru că nu are urechi să-l asculte şi pe celălalt. Nu vorbesc de un ecumenism politic sau de hora unirii, ci de resorturile de bun simţ pe care le încalcă umanitatea. Omul politic devine din ce în ce mai inutil, din câte îmi dau seama, dacă nu, mai dezastruos în destinele omenirii. Consider că este o subspecie care trebuie să dispară.
- Totuşi, sunt şi exemple de creatori români care iau distanţă faţă de credinţa creştină, unul dintre ele fiind piesa "Evangheliştii", care se joacă la Iaşi şi care are o mare audienţă. Pe de altă parte, Dan Brown face bani cu un scenariu despre care s-a spus că ar fi otrăvitor pentru umanitate, "Codul lui Da Vinci"...
- Într-un fel, iată că musulmanii ne-au dat o lecţie de minimă toaletă religioasă. Acum, dacă unul dintre ei îţi intră în familie, îţi atinge copilul şi tu îl pocneşti, te acuză imediat de fanatism. Dar cât de aproape sunt ei de Dumnezeu dacă au reacţionat atât de dur... Noi ne-am lăsat călcaţi în picioare, deci suntem mult în spate din acest punct de vedere. Nu vreau să duc lumea pe baricade, pe stradă, mă gândesc, doar... Sau poate că românii sunt mai concesivi şi spun "lasă, că eu în inima mea tot cred". Cine ştie... Piesa "Evangheliştii" n-am văzut-o, dar pot să vorbesc de cartea lui Brown, din care am citit vreo trei rânduri şi am lăsat-o în părăsire. Este o carte scrisă la derută. Tendinţa asta de anatomizare a lui Christos, de biologizare, de coborâre spre uman face parte dintr-o imposibilitate de percepţie a omului divin, transcendental. Într-un fel, mi-e milă de neputinţa unui segment al civilizaţiei occidentale de a percepe transcendenţa întrupării. Noi o percepem, pentru că pe noi această credinţă ne-a salvat de la o moarte clinică instaurată 50 de ani. şi dacă am ajuns, încă, să mai mergem pe două picioare, asta e datorită credinţei, nu datorită unui joc politic. Am fost o naţiune total părăsită, iar acum ne trăim deşteptarea din anestezie. Prin comparaţie cu Dan Brown, Don Quijote reprezintă ultimul suspin creştin al Occidentului. Europa de la 1605 seamănă foarte mult cu Europa anului 2005. Atunci, societatea politică se machiavelizase. Europa în 2005 este totalmente laicizată. Vorba lui Mircea Vulcănescu: "Europa a stat cu ceasul în mână şi când a văzut că în anul 1100 n-a venit Christos a spus: Ne mântuim singuri, prin fapte". Asistăm la această automântuire, şi în acest proces este normal să se biologizeze, să se antropomorfizeze. Faptul că Dan Brown este atât de gustat arată că se derulează un fenomen de subcultură şi infantilism în societatea noastră. Cum ar fi să m-apuc eu să scriu acum o carte de aventuri despre Buddha sau Mahomed, făcând pe detectivul? Eu nici în tren nu pot să citesc aşa ceva. şi nu trebuie să fii habotnic, bigot, taliban... pur şi simplu nu citeşti o carte care nu respectă fiziologia bunului simţ. Trăim o eră fără precedent, în care văd cu mirare că omul a devenit fiară. Scientismul şi orgoliul tehnologizării au rafinat foarte bine bestia din om. Forţa de a supravieţui mi-o dă altceva. Mă uit la oamenii mai amărâţi, care şi-au păstrat echilibrul în credinţă, în acest context. Petre Tuţea avea mare dreptate când spunea că baba aia care se închină la biserică valorează mai mult decât unul care a luat premiul Nobel şi nu ştie pentru ce a făcut bomba atomică. Ea comunică deplin cu Absolutul, pe când celălalt e în dialog cu uzina de armament.
peromaneste: Este aproape induiosator maestrul Puric atunci cand se exprima prin cuvant si nu prin gest. Supararea sa pe modernitatea contemporana este de inteles daca nu intocmai de aprobat. De ce oare omului nu i-ar fi permis sa-i fie mai bine pe lumea asta? Lasa-l domnule Puric pe oricare sa-si caute un loc in cacofonia generala caci, cu repetitia, poate va veni si noima. In alte cuvinte, nu exista cale spre absolut, cel putin in cuvinte...
Dan Puric s-a născut la 12 februarie 1959, la Buzău. După ce a absolvit, în 1985, Institutul de Artă Teatrală şi Cinematografică, la clasa prof.univ.dr. Dem Rădulescu, a jucat trei ani pe scena Teatrului "Mihai Eminescu", din Botoşani. Din 1988 este actor la Teatrul Naţional "I.L.Caragiale" din Bucureşti şi societar de onoare, din 2001. A străbătut lumea cu spectacole pe care le-a regizat şi a fost răsplătit cu numeroase premii, atât în străinătate, cât şi în România: Premiul "Golden Arena", la Festivalul Internaţional de film de la Pola Iugoslavia, pentru rolul principal din "Broken Youth"; Premiul special la cel de-al doilea Festival al Pantomimei de la St.Croix – Elveţia; Premiul pe 1996 la Chicago Artists International Program; Premiul "Constantin Tănase", la Festivalul Umorului pentru rolul principal din "Omul care a văzut moartea"; Premiul pentru Teatru de Pantomimă, acordat de Secţia Română a Asociaţiei Internaţionale a Criticilor de Teatru – Fundaţia Teatrul XXI, în 1997; Premiul UNITER acordat de Secţia Română a AICT, pentru spectacolul "Toujours l'amour", în 1999; Marele Premiu al Fundaţiei "Anastasia" 2002; Marele Premiu UNESCO pentru Dezvoltare Culturală – "pentru promovarea artei scenice româneşti în străinătate"; Marele Premiu la Festivalul "One Man Show" de la Chişinău; Premiul UNITER pentru Teatru Non-verbal, în 2003. Decorat cu Ordinul Naţional Steaua României în grad de Cavaler – pentru servicii excepţionale în cultură, în anul 2000.
- Cât de mult înseamnă sacralitate în ceea ce faceţi dvs. şi cum îi antrenaţi şi pe ceilalţi să vă urmeze în acest efort de căutare a propriei umanităţi?
- Arta viitorului nu va mai putea fi de mercenar, precum este acum. Vezi filme şi le uiţi, nu când ieşi, ci când le vezi... Piesele de teatru au un text patologic, schizofrenic, au apărut textele noi, de criză şi pe scenele româneşti. şi ele intră într-un val mimetic, care arată că suntem dintr-un punct de vedere o subcultură şi că trebuie să imităm crizele lui Big Brother, care a consumat patologia de mult. Teatrul de tip patologic, de tip exhibiţionist, corespunde omului autonom, fără de Dumnezeu, al individului, nu al persoanei. Toate aceste tulburări vin şi la noi, într-un soi de contaminare. Noi suntem cu cultura tot timpul în regim de urgenţă. Dincolo de eşalonul celor loviţi de gripa asta aviară culturală, se află o Românie care-şi va găsi tot timpul resursele de refacere. Nu poţi să fii imediat performant după ce cultura a fost schilodită în comunism. Prin `91-`92 au mai fost piese cu dezbrăcaţi pe scenă şi sex, care au căzut, s-au triat, ceea ce arată că publicul român are o foarte mare pudoare şi inteligenţă; nu se lasă păcălit pe o perioadă prea lungă. Arta viitorului va fi mărturisitoare, artă în care noi, cei care am suferit, trebuie să mărturisim, să vorbim şi să învăţăm să articulăm despre noi... Nu să facem inspecţia hărţii noastre psihopatologice, cum făcea Freud, ci să ne autodescoperim, ca taină creată de Dumnezeu. Arta majoră trebuie să limpezească, nu să tulbure apele. Nu întâmplător joc acum într-o piesă de G.M. Zamfirescu, la Teatrul Naţional, "Idolul şi Ion Anapoda". Am fost întrebat de ce-mi trebuie o piesă prăfuită?... Da, dar în piesa aceasta sălăşluieşte tot spiritul României interbelice! Nu e Sofocle, nu umblă nimeni cu toporul să taie pe cineva, nu facem telenovele. Abia s-a aşezat burghezia... Am nostalgia acelor vremuri, fără să idealizez, pentru că şi atunci erau contradicţii, nedreptăţi, dar nu existau instituţionalizarea mizeriei şi promovarea imposturii la nivel de valoare. Televiziunile sunt blocate de impostori şi divertisment de tip pornografic, se face o furajare continuă cu subcultură...
- Vă simţiţi compatibil cu ceea ce înseamnă filmul românesc de acum?
- Nu, nici pe departe. Pe de altă parte, nici nu vreau să-i descurajez. E bine că unii au luat nişte premii pe la Cannes, e bine că au fost încurajaţi, dar n-au nici o legătură cu poporul român. Nu ştiu să mărturisească despre poporul român, care ar fi demn de un Tarkovski. E uluitor ce face cinematograful chinez în ultima vreme, ce mărturisiri de civilizaţie şi cultură... Am constatat, cu tristeţe, că suflul cinematografiei româneşti n-a mai mers după `89 încoace. Atunci i-am avut pe Ciulei, pe Pintilie, iar acum suntem o cinematografie rezumată la aurolaci şi curve - cazuri patologice şi sociale. Ar fi fost interesant dacă cineva ar fi reuşit să surprindă sufletul adevărat, dramele şi calităţile acestui popor. Pare că ni se dau comenzi şi bani să scriem despre noi că suntem ceea ce nu suntem. Am senzaţia că scriem extemporale date din afară. Drama este că aceşti tineri creatori sunt lipsiţi de un învăţământ temeinic. Toate depunerile, în învăţământ şi cultură, sunt la fel: se fac în timp. Dar, de 15 ani, învăţământul se conturează atrofic, iar cel superior, de artă, e terminat. E normal atunci ca tânărul să vrea să răcnească, să ţipe, să se revolte. şi primul lucru pe care îl produce este o vulgaritate, confundată cu autenticul. Primul lucru pe care îl confundă cu libertatea este înjurătura. Învăţământul se distruge şi din iresponsabilitatea guvernanţilor, care plătesc prost profesorii. La rândul lor, aceştia îşi boicotează propria meserie. De-asta spun că România este o improvizaţie. Văd în teatru o inflaţie de actori semipregătiţi, vai de capul lor!
- De ce actorul român de teatru pare condamnat să nu câştige bine?
- În perioada comunistă chiar se câştiga. Aveau nevoie de noi să-şi facă propagandă: nu făceau decât să te schilodească artistic. Apoi, puterea a devenit plurivalent economică şi n-a mai avut nevoie de propagandă. A zis: mori liniştit! Atunci, cârnăţarii ajunşi la putere au spus: ne creăm noi distracţii. şi distracţia la nivelul lor cortical este telenovela şi maneaua. De revelion, 90% au fost manele, lucru care arată cât de subestimaţi sunt românii, ca public. Telenovelele care se fac sunt la un nivel suprarealist! Dacă Salvador Dali ar mai trăi, i-ar picta pe toţi! şi faptul că actorii profesionişti joacă mai prost decât amatorii e grav. Sunt mulţi colegi valoroşi care nu pot fi opriţi să nu se ducă, pentru că n-au ce mânca. Fac acest compromis, dar se deprofesionalizează. Exemplul cel mai potrivit mi se pare următorul: iei un medic chirurg şi îi spui: Nu mai am nevoie de tine, poţi să cari morţi? Brancardierul e plătit mult mai bine decât medicul chirurg. Performanţa nu este bine remunerată.
- Este cumva România doar un spectacol tragic pentru dumneavoastră?
- Dacă priveşti România prin ochii lui Sancho Panza, un ţăran plin de vitalitate, cu simţul realităţii, vezi un ghetou neocomunist, fără perspectivă politică, fără viitor, trăind o confuzie şi o improvizaţie totală. Un destin aproape tragic. Dacă priveşti prin ochii lui Don Quijote, vezi o ţară cu o taină imensă, capabilă să dăruiască şi celorlalţi. Depinde prin ce ochi o priveşti. El s-a îndrăgostit de Dulcineea nu din văzute, ci din auzite. Eu, la fel, m-am îndrăgostit de România, nu din văzute, pentru că îţi vine să te sinucizi dacă ieşi acum pe stradă, ci din ce-am citit şi din ce mi-au povestit alţii despre ea. De ce a scris Gheorghe Brătianu că poporul român e un miracol? De ce nu a spus că e un gunoi, cum fac cei de acum, care l-au decapitat şi pe Eminescu? Scormonesc vulgaritatea în operele lui ca să-l desacralizeze, să-l biologizeze pe scriitorul despre care Cioran spunea că şi Buddha ar fi gelos pe biografia lui.
- În ce moment al culturii române v-aţi simţi împăcat cu propriile aşteptări?
- Ceea ce se întâmplă acum în cultura română mă face să mă simt destul de singur. Cultura şi intelectualitatea românească le văd oportuniste, închinate mimetismului, slăbite, cu garda jos. Nu mă simt singur dacă mă bagi în cultura interbelică. Când citesc o carte de Mircea Vulcănescu parcă începe să-mi circule sângele în vene. Când îl citesc pe Nae Ionescu sau pe Petre Tuţea, intru şi eu în normalitate şi regret că am început să mă simt mai bine la Bellu, între morţi, decât între viii morţi de acum, fără vlagă, care sunt capabili să argumenteze orice, numai să le fie bine. Prin comparaţie, putem să ne dăm seama că Eminescu a fost o conştiinţă, a strigat "Pe aici nu se trece!"... A făcut un fel de Mărăşeşti în cultură. Eminescu este ca zidul chinezesc. Au venit nişte demenţi comunişti şi i-au dat cu var şi vin alţii acum şi-l mâzgălesc cu graffiti. Dar este singura construcţie umană care se vede de pe Lună.
- Se poate transmite la fel de uşor sacralitatea, doar prin gest, prin pantomimă?
- Cineva mi-a spus: "Eu vin la spectacolele dumneavoastră ori de câte ori mă simt rău". Am jucat odată "Visul" în faţa unei delegaţii de la Vatican şi un mare părinte catolic mi-a zis, după ce a ascultat Addagio de Albinoni: Ceea ce faci tu este Logos! Un părinte de la Cluj mi-a spus – este un spectacol creştin!, iar un monah mi-a mărturisit că nu doar Addagio este creştin, ci tot ceea ce fac... până şi divertismentul este creştin. Cel mai frumos lucru mi l-a spus Majestatea Sa, Regina Ana a României, care a fost la "Visul": Domnule, dumneavoastră începeţi cu Chaplin şi ne duceţi, uşor, uşor, către Dumnezeu. Este cuvânt regal. Cronică regală de teatru. Poţi s-o pui îngropată, ca inima Reginei Maria. Iată ce înseamnă monarhia în România, nevoia de înalt... Nu mi-a spus niciun om politic din România lucrul ăsta. Părintele Stăniloaie spunea că arta trezeşte omul din fiară, nu fiara din om. şi că discursul cel mai bun către poporul român este umorul. Nu băşcălia, care este desacralizantă. Umorul te trezeşte din rutină şi din imbecilitatea vieţii, iar acum, arta trezeşte fiara din om, nu omul din fiară.
- Aţi spus că vreţi să plecaţi în Occident cu spectacolul "Don Quijote", din nevoia de a arăta lumii contribuţia României la taina culturii universale. Ce/cine vă opreşte?
- Ar fi bine să se facă un turneu cu acest spectacol sensibil şi plin de vitalitate, care arată o nouă concepţie teatrală care vine din România. "Don Quijote" este un spectacol exponenţial, în contextul în care România este într-un deficit de imagine sau are o imagine pervertită. Marile state ale lumii au folosit de mult această metodă de a trimite arta înaintea politicului. Îţi trebuie sensibilitate politică pentru a înţelege că un popor trebuie reprezentat printr-o artă care nu trebuie să fie de propagandă. Până acum, imaginea României a fost un haos de propagandă. Ca să parcurgi drumul până la identitatea autentică a ţării trebuie să descoperi un produs care vorbeşte. M-am gândit la "Don Quijote" pentru că este un libret internaţional, cartea cea mai citită de pe glob şi, paradoxal, cel mai puţin înţeleasă... un subiect atât de cunoscut – un adevărat mit european. În spatele unui mit european, România îşi expune vitalitatea, inteligenţa şi talentul. Aş vrea să sensibilizez instituţiile, Ministerul de Externe, Ministerul Culturii, guvernul, să realizeze un lucru de normalitate, care poate părea excepţional. Nu este! Orice stat alocă nişte bani când are o trupă performantă, care aparţine de patrimoniu. Ar fi un act de deşteptare, pentru că nu mă ajută pe mine, ci ajută ţara prin aşa ceva. După acest turneu european eu n-o să-mi cumpăr o vilă, o maşină sau măcar o pereche de tenişi, ci mă pun responsabil şi conştient pentru ţară. Acest turneu nu va fi o afacere, ci un pas pentru ca România să intre în istorie, pentru că noi oricum suntem în afara istoriei.
- Cum este percepută cultura română pe marile scene ale lumii?
- Dacă până acum 15 ani am fost targetoizaţi, acum suntem marginalizaţi. Încă nu ni s-a spus ce rol să jucăm în Europa, suntem la rezerve. E important să plece de la noi o imagine autentică. Lumea toată, transformată într-un imens market, normal că are brand. Toată lumea caută acum brandul României. Eu nu-l caut, pentru că nu acesta ne va salva pe noi, şi nici o imagine de tip propagandistic, ci o dimensiune autentică. Întotdeauna ne căutăm identitatea după lecţiile străine. Mircea Eliade a fost aproape profetic în 1951, când a spus "Pe viitor, cultura lumii nu se mai poate declina între Thales din Millet şi Heidegger". Sunt încă alte culturi, el nedesconsiderând cultura europeană, şi, din contră, văzând cum se va respira în viitor...
- Cum vă plasaţi ca artist şi cetăţean al lumii în acest conflict al civilizaţiilor: cea occidentală versus cea musulmană?
- Suntem totuşi o planetă care a ajuns la dimensiunea unui mare sat şi e bine să ne cunoaştem unii pe alţii mai profund. Iată ce catastrofe se întâmplă... dovadă scandalul acesta cu lumea islamică. Se vorbeşte de primitivismul lumii islamice, dar nimeni nu percepe infirmitatea lumii occidentale, care are dificultăţi în a respecta credinţa altuia. Categoric, drepturile omului nu sunt mai presus decât drepturile Lui Dumnezeu. Iată ce handicap al civilizaţiei, ce lipsă, ce spectacol al falimentului societăţii occidentale. O altă ipocrizie: se trâmbiţează multiculturalitatea, pluralismul, dar, culmea, s-a ajuns până acolo unde se eludează până şi achiziţiile marii culturi occidentale. Immanuel Kant a spus că "libertatea unui om are drept limită libertatea celuilalt". La noi, un sociolog, cred că D.D. Roşca a spus, parafrazând, că "libertatea unui stat, a unui popor, are drept limită libertatea celuilalt". E un lucru flagrant. Suntem în 2006 şi nu poţi să te joci cu nişte lucruri de genul ăsta. Sigur, nu poate fi condamnată civilizaţia occidentală generic, Doamne fereşte! Este o mare civilizaţie. Necesară mi se pare o conştiinţă spirituală de tip nou, care să responsabilizeze la nivel planetar toată lumea. Artistul este o fărâmă din această conştiinţă, pentru că această conştiinţă se poate naşte în domeniul artistic, în domeniul politic. Trebuie un creier mai dezinhibat, nu ţâfnele astea civilizatoare, de genul "noi suntem buricul Pământului". Iată ce catastrofe trăim...
- Pare că românii pot da o lecţie de toleranţă în aceste clipe care îşi consumă energia pe muchie de cuţit...
- Nu este nici măcar un conflict al civilizaţiilor, ci falimentul civilizaţiei politice de tip contractualist occidental, este o infirmitate a lor faţă de lumea musulmană. Vorbim de coexistenţă, în care îl respecţi pe celălalt aşa cum este el. Immanuel Kant a mai spus un lucru: "La nivel de opinie putem discuta orice, dar la nivel de religie, nu!". Eu cred că poporul român are o atitudine tămăduitoare. Mă refer la poporul român profund, care, de sute de ani, se înţelege foarte bine cu cei care au alte religii, în ciuda unei istorii dure, presărată cu adversităţi puternice. Am reuşit să asimilăm multe populaţii străine, într-o învecinare normală. Mi se pare lăudabilă atitudinea poporului irakian în perioada răpirii jurnaliştilor. N-am văzut să vorbească înţelepţii Irakului atât de frumos despre un popor, aşa cum au vorbit despre cel român. Au fost atenţi la relaţiile noastre seculare, la această relaţie atât de specială în care respectul religiilor n-avea nimic ofensiv şi de misionarism sau prozelitism. Au fost conflicte sângeroase între noi şi turci, de exemplu, dar istoria a trecut, şi, ceea ce este interesant după această istorie este soluţia care s-a găsit – noi n-am rămas ca popor resentimentar. Este o minune! Nu ştim să urâm "à la long", ci am mers spre normalitate. Consider că putem da cu împrumut lucrul acesta, la export. Dacă au nevoie, ne pot suna... Aici se confundă spiritul cu civilizaţia. Nu-i de ajuns să ai un mobil şi să mergi cu avionul foarte rapid pe când celălalt merge desculţ. S-ar putea ca cel care umblă desculţ să fie într-un dialog cu Absolutul, şi din punct de vedere spiritual, mult mai mult decât cel "civilizat". Trebuie să fim atenţi şi să schimbăm paradigma asta orgolioasă. Reacţiile jurnaliştilor din România au fost foarte bune, de bun simţ, elementare şi creştine. Prin refuzul de a publica aceste caricaturi, ne-am circumscris la taina poporului român. Este o lecţie din partea jurnaliştilor, ca deontologie şi conştiinţă, că n-au făcut aşa ceva, alegând să vândă ziarul mai mult pentru o curiozitate bârfitoare de scară de bloc, pe sufletul rănit, vexat, al unor naţiuni care chiar cred în ceva. Unul dintre înţelesurile cuvântului "islam" înseamnă "pace". Trebuie să învăţăm să le respectăm credinţa. O comunitate europeană care nu are piatră creştină la fundament nu este decât o organizaţie sindicală. Din nefericire, lumea evoluează către o criză îngrozitoare, tocmai pentru că nu are urechi să-l asculte şi pe celălalt. Nu vorbesc de un ecumenism politic sau de hora unirii, ci de resorturile de bun simţ pe care le încalcă umanitatea. Omul politic devine din ce în ce mai inutil, din câte îmi dau seama, dacă nu, mai dezastruos în destinele omenirii. Consider că este o subspecie care trebuie să dispară.
- Totuşi, sunt şi exemple de creatori români care iau distanţă faţă de credinţa creştină, unul dintre ele fiind piesa "Evangheliştii", care se joacă la Iaşi şi care are o mare audienţă. Pe de altă parte, Dan Brown face bani cu un scenariu despre care s-a spus că ar fi otrăvitor pentru umanitate, "Codul lui Da Vinci"...
- Într-un fel, iată că musulmanii ne-au dat o lecţie de minimă toaletă religioasă. Acum, dacă unul dintre ei îţi intră în familie, îţi atinge copilul şi tu îl pocneşti, te acuză imediat de fanatism. Dar cât de aproape sunt ei de Dumnezeu dacă au reacţionat atât de dur... Noi ne-am lăsat călcaţi în picioare, deci suntem mult în spate din acest punct de vedere. Nu vreau să duc lumea pe baricade, pe stradă, mă gândesc, doar... Sau poate că românii sunt mai concesivi şi spun "lasă, că eu în inima mea tot cred". Cine ştie... Piesa "Evangheliştii" n-am văzut-o, dar pot să vorbesc de cartea lui Brown, din care am citit vreo trei rânduri şi am lăsat-o în părăsire. Este o carte scrisă la derută. Tendinţa asta de anatomizare a lui Christos, de biologizare, de coborâre spre uman face parte dintr-o imposibilitate de percepţie a omului divin, transcendental. Într-un fel, mi-e milă de neputinţa unui segment al civilizaţiei occidentale de a percepe transcendenţa întrupării. Noi o percepem, pentru că pe noi această credinţă ne-a salvat de la o moarte clinică instaurată 50 de ani. şi dacă am ajuns, încă, să mai mergem pe două picioare, asta e datorită credinţei, nu datorită unui joc politic. Am fost o naţiune total părăsită, iar acum ne trăim deşteptarea din anestezie. Prin comparaţie cu Dan Brown, Don Quijote reprezintă ultimul suspin creştin al Occidentului. Europa de la 1605 seamănă foarte mult cu Europa anului 2005. Atunci, societatea politică se machiavelizase. Europa în 2005 este totalmente laicizată. Vorba lui Mircea Vulcănescu: "Europa a stat cu ceasul în mână şi când a văzut că în anul 1100 n-a venit Christos a spus: Ne mântuim singuri, prin fapte". Asistăm la această automântuire, şi în acest proces este normal să se biologizeze, să se antropomorfizeze. Faptul că Dan Brown este atât de gustat arată că se derulează un fenomen de subcultură şi infantilism în societatea noastră. Cum ar fi să m-apuc eu să scriu acum o carte de aventuri despre Buddha sau Mahomed, făcând pe detectivul? Eu nici în tren nu pot să citesc aşa ceva. şi nu trebuie să fii habotnic, bigot, taliban... pur şi simplu nu citeşti o carte care nu respectă fiziologia bunului simţ. Trăim o eră fără precedent, în care văd cu mirare că omul a devenit fiară. Scientismul şi orgoliul tehnologizării au rafinat foarte bine bestia din om. Forţa de a supravieţui mi-o dă altceva. Mă uit la oamenii mai amărâţi, care şi-au păstrat echilibrul în credinţă, în acest context. Petre Tuţea avea mare dreptate când spunea că baba aia care se închină la biserică valorează mai mult decât unul care a luat premiul Nobel şi nu ştie pentru ce a făcut bomba atomică. Ea comunică deplin cu Absolutul, pe când celălalt e în dialog cu uzina de armament.
peromaneste: Este aproape induiosator maestrul Puric atunci cand se exprima prin cuvant si nu prin gest. Supararea sa pe modernitatea contemporana este de inteles daca nu intocmai de aprobat. De ce oare omului nu i-ar fi permis sa-i fie mai bine pe lumea asta? Lasa-l domnule Puric pe oricare sa-si caute un loc in cacofonia generala caci, cu repetitia, poate va veni si noima. In alte cuvinte, nu exista cale spre absolut, cel putin in cuvinte...
In praise of the novel
Author Carlos Fuentes on Cervantes, Kafka, and the saving grace of literature.
Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: Name the novel that you consider the best ever written.
Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered: "Don Quixote de la Mancha" by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, in that order. The results of this consultation pose the interesting question of the long-seller versus the best-seller. There is, of course, no answer that fits all cases: Why does a bestseller sell, why does a long-seller last?
Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since, whereas William Faulkner was definitively a bad seller if you compare the meager sales of "Absalom, Absalom" (1936) to those of the really big-seller of the year, Hervey Allen's "Anthoy Adverse", a Napoleonic saga of love, war and trade.
Which means that here is no actual thermometer in these matters, even if time will not only tell: Time will sell. One might think that Cervantes was in tune with his times whereas Stendhal consciously wrote for "the happy few" and sold poorly in his own life, was given the reward of Balzac's praise before he died and only came into his own thanks to the efforts of the critic Henri Martineau in the 20th Century.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality. Plato puts immortality in perspective when he states that eternity, when it moves, becomes time, eternity being a kind of frozen time. And William Blake certainly brings things down to earth: Eternity is in love with the works of time.
The works of time. We could take each one of the writers I have quoted so far and undertake a fruitful excursion into their relationship with the times they lived. Fascinating as this can and should be, I wonder how much it tells us about the books that they wrote, the imagination that moved them to write, their use of language, their critical approach to the art of literature, their awareness of belonging to the larger tradition that Milan Kundera invokes in his recent book "The Curtain": the fact that a novelist belongs, more than to his country or even to his native tongue, to a tradition in which Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot are a part of the same family and that family, as desired by Goethe, lives in the house of world literature, the Weltliteratur which each writer, Goethe suggests, fosters independently of national literatures that - he goes on - "have ceased to represent anything of importance".
If this be true, then all great works of literature contain both the tradition they spring from and add to and the new creation that depends as much on preceding tradition as tradition, if it is to remain in good health, depends upon the new creations that nourish it. Since this is the year of the fourth centennial of Don Quixote and since I consider Cervantes' book to be the founding cornerstone of the novel as it has evolved since the 17th Century, permit me to root in it the vocabulary I have been employing.
Cervantes belongs to a tradition he cannot speak of. This is the tradition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the guiding light of the early Spanish Renaissance in the court of the young Charles V, a candle soon extinguished by the cold dogmatic winds of the Counter Reformation. After the Council of Trent, Erasmus and his works are banned by the Inquisition, his legacy a secret.
Cervantes was steeped in this forbidden philosophy. Erasmus searched for reconciliation between Faith and Reason, refusing not only the dogmas of Faith, but the dogmas of Reason as well. Thus, Cervantes, who was a disciple of the Spanish Erasmists, had to disguise his intellectual allegiance. The "Praise of Folly" is the praise of Don Quixote as he wanders through an Erasmian universe in which all truths are suspect, everything is bathed in incertitude and the modern novel thus acquires its birth-right.
Since Cervantes cannot admit the liberating influence of Erasmian thought, he goes Erasmus one better: the wisdom of Rotterdam becomes the folly of La Mancha and the marriage of "la sagesse" and "l'incertitude" brings forth the novel as we understand it. A privileged space, indeed, of incertitude.
An uncertain place: a forgotten village in an insolated province of Spain. An un-namable place: "En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme". An uncertain author: Who wrote this book? Cervantes? De Saavedra? Cide Hamete Benengeli? An anonymous Moorish scribe? The masked funambulist Ginés de Pasamonte disguised as the puppeteer Master Pedro? The lack of author barely disguises the refusal of authority. Uncertain names: Don Quixote is really an impoverished hidalgo named Alonso Quijano - or is it Quijada? - or perhaps, Quezada? Or is it the other way around: Is the impoverished squire truly the brave knight errant, a Cid brought low, a diminished Cortez?
So, what's in a name? The onomastic instability of the novel Don Quixote undermines all certainty of a linear reading. Dulcinea is Aldonza, damsels in distress become queens and princesses, broken down nags are deemed heroic steeds, illiterate squires become governors. Don Quixote's imaginary foes have extravagant names – for example, the giant Pentapolpin of the Rolled up Sleeve - so his real foes must also have them: the Bachelor Sanson Carrasco has to be named the Knight of the Mirrors in order to enter Quixote's onomastic universe. And Quixote himself, the battle name of the country Quijada... or Quijano... or Quesada... enters in full batllegear this nominative carnival, becoming the Knight of the Sad Countenance or the Knight of the Lions, or Quijotiz, when in a pastoral mode, or the ridiculous Don Azote, that is, Mister Whip, in the wayside inn or, in the Duke's palace, the mocked don Jigote, Mr. Hamburger.
Places, names, authorship, all is uncertain in Don Quixote. And uncertainty is compounded by the great democratic revolution wrought by Cervantes and which is the creation of the novel as a common place, lieu commun, lugar común, that is, the meeting place of the city, the central plaza, the polyforum, the public square where everyone has a right to be heard but no one has the right to exclusive speech.
This guiding principle of novelistic creation is turned by Cervantes into what Claudio Guillen calls a dialogue of genres. They all meet in the open space of Don Quixote. Here the picaresque – Sancho Panza – shakes hands with the epic – Don Quixote. Lazarillo de Tormes is introduced to Amadis of Gaul. Here the linearity of narration is broken down, encircled, put on fast forward or in reverse by the tale-within-the-tale interrupted by the pastoral interlude and then by the novel of courtly love and the strands of Moorish and Byzantine tales woven into the tapestry of a novel that, finally, proposes itself as both the identity and the difference of its verbal universe.
Before Cervantes, narrative could exhaust itself in a single reading of the past: the epic, or of the present: the picaresque. Cervantes blends past and future, turning the novel into a critical process that, first, proposes that we read a book about a man who reads books and then becomes a book about a man who knows that he is being read. When Don Quixote enters the printing shop in Barcelona and discovers that what is being printed is his own book, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, we are suddenly plunged into a truly new world of readers, of readings available to all and not only to a small circle of power, religious, political or social.
By multiplying both authorship and readership, the novel, from the times of Cervantes to our own, became a democratic vehicle, a space of choice, of alternate interpretations of the self, of the world, and of the relationship between myself and others, between you and me, between we and they.
Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason must be logical. But literature has the privilege of being equivocal. The quality of doubt in a novel is perhaps a manner of telling us that since authorship (and thus authority) are uncertain and susceptible of many explanations, so it goes with the world itself.
Reality is not fixed, it is mutable. We can only approach reality if we do not pretend to define it once and for all. The partial verities proposed by a novel are a bulwark against dogmatic impositions. Considered politically feeble and unimportant, why are writers then persecuted by totalitarian regimes as if they really mattered? This contradiction reveals the deeper nature of the political in literature. The reference is to the polis, the city, the evolving but constant community of citizens, not to the autoritas, the passing powers, essentially temporary but pridefully believing themselves eternal.
Kafka's fictions describe a power that makes its own fiction powerful. Power is a representation that, like the authorities in "The Castle", gain its strength from the imagination of those outside the castle. When that imagination ceases to confer power upon power, the Emperor appears naked and the impotent writer who points this out is banned to exile, the concentration camp or the bonfire, while the Emperor's tailors stitch on his new clothes.
So, if there can be political power in writing, it is exceptional. Under so-called "normal" circumstances, the writer has scarce if any political importance. He or she can, of course, become politically relevant as citizens. Yet he or she possess the ultimate political importance of offering the city, however quietly, however postponed, however indirectly, the two indispensable values that unite the personal and the collective:
Fiction then, from Rabelais and Cervantes to Grass and Goytisolo and Gordimer, is another way of questioning truth as we strive for it through the paradox of a lie. That lie can be called the imagination. It can also be seen as a parallel reality. It can be observed as a critical mirror of what passes for the truth in the world of convention. It certainly sets up a second universe of being, where Don Quixote and Heathclif and Emma Bovary have a reality greater, though no less important, than the host of hastily met and then forgotten citizens we deal with. Indeed, Don Quixote or Emma Bovary bring into light, give weight and presence to the virtues and vices --to the fugitive personalities-- of our daily acquaintance.
Perhaps, what Ahab and Pedro Paramo and Effie Briest possess is, also, the living memory of the great, glorious and mortal subjectivities of the men and women that we forget, that our fathers knew and our grand parents foresaw. In Don Quixote, Dostoevsky wrote, truth is saved by a lie. With Cervantes, the novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth. For through the medium of fiction, the novelist puts reason to the proof. Fiction invents what the world lacks, what the world has forgotten, what it hopes to attain and perhaps can never reach. Fiction is thus a way of appropriating the world, giving the world the color, the taste, the sense, the dreams, the vigils, the perseverance and even the lazy repose that, to go on being, it claims.
Enter your own self and discover the world, the novelist tells us. But also, go out into the world and discover yourself. In the dark hours preceding World War II, Thomas Mann crossed the Atlantic with Don Quixote as his surest lifeline to a Europe in the throes of death. And even before, under the clouds of the First World War, Franz Kafka had discovered that Don Quixote was a magnificent invention of Sancho Panza, who thus became a man free to follow the adventures of the knight errant, without hurting anybody. And finally, in his "Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote", Jorge Luis Borges tells us that it suffices to re-write Cervantes' novel, word by word, but in a different time and with a different intention, in order to recreate it.
Cervantes lived his age: the decadent Spain of the last Hapsburgs, Philip III and the devaluation of money, the fall of the economy due to the successive expulsion of the industrious Jewish and Arab populations, the compulsion to disguise Hebrew or Moorish origins leading to a society of brittle masks, the lack of efficient administrators for a far-flung empire, the flight of the gold and silver of the Indies to the mercantile powerhouses of Northern Europe. A Spain of urchins and beggars, hollow gestures, cruel aristocrats, ruined roads, shabby inns and broken-down gentlemen who, in another, more vigorous age, might have conquered Mexico and sailed the Caribbean and brought the first universities and the first printing presses to the New World: the fabulous energy of Spain in the invention of America.
Cervantes and the other great writers of Spain's Golden Age truly demonstrate that literature can give the society what history has drained from the society. "Where are the birds of yesteryear?" sighs Don Quixote as he lays dying. They are dead and stuffed, which is why Don Quixote has to give his novel the renewed flight of the eagle, the wing-span of the albatross. As Cervantes responded to the degraded society of his time with the triumph of the critical imagination, we too, face a degraded society and must reflect upon it as it seeps into our lifes, surrounds us and, even, casts us upon the perennial situation of responding to the passage of history with the passion of literature.
We are aware of the danger of postponing the human agendas as the 21st Century begins. Military spending exceeds by far investment in health, education and development. The urgent demands of women, the aged, the young are left to chance. The offenses against nature multiply. In Heaven, wrote Borges, to conserve and to create are synonymous verbs. On Earth, they have become enemies. The root causes of terror are left unattended. Terror cannot be the answer to terror, but rather better intelligence, democratic governance and socio-economic development, while strengthening cultural identity, in nations long subject to authoritarian and colonial rule.
International values won with critical perseverance and sacrifice – human rights, diplomacy, multilateralism, primacy of the law - are assailed by the blind haste of unilateralism, preventive war and the blind pride that "precedes destruction" (Proverbs, 16: 18). Sometimes our answer to these realities is passive beatitude. There are those who believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds because they have been told that the indispensable is impossible. But on the other hand, we are assailed by the agitated though passive fear of latent Apocalypse when, as Goethe put it, "God ceases to love his creatures and must destroy it all and begin all over again".
Space has capitulated. Thanks to the image, we can be everywhere instantly. But time has pulverized, breaking down into images that are in danger of refusing us both the imagination of the past and the memory of the future. We can become the slaves of hypnotic images that we have not chosen. We can become cheerful robots amusing ourselves to death. I believe that these are realities that should move us to affirm that language is the foundation of culture, the door of experience, the roof of the imagination, the basement of memory, the bedchamber of love and, above all, the window open to the air of doubt, uncertainty and questioning.
I find, in all great novels, a human project, call it passion, love, liberty, justice, inviting us to actualize it to make it real, even if we know that it is doomed to fail. Quixote knows he fails, as do Pere Goriot and Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin. But only through the consciousness, implicit or explicit, of such failure, do they save, and help us save, the nature of life itself, human existence and its values as lived and proposed and remembered by all the ages, all the races, all the families of humankind, without alienating themselves to an illusion of unending, certified progress and felicity.
After the experiences of the past century, we can not ignore the tragic exceptions to happiness and progress that humankind constantly encounters. In "Light in August", William Faulkner opposes and embraces two dissimilar characters, the mature nymphomaniac Joanna Burden and her young Black lover, Joe Christmas. Christmas is an agent of freedom. But he knows that his liberty is limited, even prometehical. He feels like an eagle, hard, powerful, remorseless, sufficient. But that sensation passes and then he realizes that his skin is his prison. Joanna Burden wishes, in possession of Joe's body, to condemn herself, not forever but just a bit more: "Don't make me pray, God", she pleads. "Let me condemn myself just a bit longer".
These are but two of the Faulknerian cast that discover in love the tragic nature of both freedom and destiny. In Faulkner, knowing that we are capable of resisting means that we are also capable, in certain moments, of victory. I highlight this tragic and time-resisting truth in Faulkner because I find it essential to the very heart-beat of the novel: Freedom is tragic because it is conscious both of its necessity and of its boundaries.
"I do not hope for victory", writes Kafka. "Struggle in itself is not blissful, except in the measure that it is the only thing that I can do ... Perhaps I will finally surrender, not to the struggle, but to the joy of the struggle".
"Between pain and nothing, I choose pain", Faulkner famously said, adding: "Man will prevail". And is this not, perhaps, the truth of the novel? Humankind will prevail and it will prevail because, in spite of the accidents of history, the novel tells us that art restores the life in us that was disregarded by the haste of history. Literature makes real what history forgot. And because history is what has been, literature will offer what history has not always been. That is why we will never witness --bar universal catastrophe-- the end of history.
Compare then the words of Franz Kafka and William Faulkner to the half-baked notions of the end of history and the clash of civilizations. I speak as a writer in the Spanish language from a continent that is Iberian, Indian and Mestizo, Black and Mulatto, Atlantic and Pacific, Mediterranean and Caribbean, Christian, Arab and Jewish, Greek and Latin.
If I am faithful to the accomplishments but above all to the purposes, to the attainments as well as to the possibilities of my own culture, I can not accept that we live in a clash of civilizations because all those that I have evoked are mine, not clashing, but talking, speaking to one another, disputing in order to understand, communicating in my very soul the relativity of both triumphalism and dejection, the need to venture what will never perish even if it has fallen back – my ancient Indian and Islamic cultures – and to earn what thinks of itself as permanent – the Western, Christian strains of my being beyond their present sufficiency – and to celebrate the meeting place of all of them, the place of speech and thought and memory and imagination that each one of us carries with him and her, asking us to participate in a dialogue of civilizations and to deny the end of history.
For how can history end as long as we have not said our last word?
*
The speech was delivered in English on the opening of the Fifth International Literature Festival Berlin, on September 6, 2005.
Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: Name the novel that you consider the best ever written.
Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered: "Don Quixote de la Mancha" by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, in that order. The results of this consultation pose the interesting question of the long-seller versus the best-seller. There is, of course, no answer that fits all cases: Why does a bestseller sell, why does a long-seller last?
Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since, whereas William Faulkner was definitively a bad seller if you compare the meager sales of "Absalom, Absalom" (1936) to those of the really big-seller of the year, Hervey Allen's "Anthoy Adverse", a Napoleonic saga of love, war and trade.
Which means that here is no actual thermometer in these matters, even if time will not only tell: Time will sell. One might think that Cervantes was in tune with his times whereas Stendhal consciously wrote for "the happy few" and sold poorly in his own life, was given the reward of Balzac's praise before he died and only came into his own thanks to the efforts of the critic Henri Martineau in the 20th Century.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality. Plato puts immortality in perspective when he states that eternity, when it moves, becomes time, eternity being a kind of frozen time. And William Blake certainly brings things down to earth: Eternity is in love with the works of time.
The works of time. We could take each one of the writers I have quoted so far and undertake a fruitful excursion into their relationship with the times they lived. Fascinating as this can and should be, I wonder how much it tells us about the books that they wrote, the imagination that moved them to write, their use of language, their critical approach to the art of literature, their awareness of belonging to the larger tradition that Milan Kundera invokes in his recent book "The Curtain": the fact that a novelist belongs, more than to his country or even to his native tongue, to a tradition in which Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot are a part of the same family and that family, as desired by Goethe, lives in the house of world literature, the Weltliteratur which each writer, Goethe suggests, fosters independently of national literatures that - he goes on - "have ceased to represent anything of importance".
If this be true, then all great works of literature contain both the tradition they spring from and add to and the new creation that depends as much on preceding tradition as tradition, if it is to remain in good health, depends upon the new creations that nourish it. Since this is the year of the fourth centennial of Don Quixote and since I consider Cervantes' book to be the founding cornerstone of the novel as it has evolved since the 17th Century, permit me to root in it the vocabulary I have been employing.
Cervantes belongs to a tradition he cannot speak of. This is the tradition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the guiding light of the early Spanish Renaissance in the court of the young Charles V, a candle soon extinguished by the cold dogmatic winds of the Counter Reformation. After the Council of Trent, Erasmus and his works are banned by the Inquisition, his legacy a secret.
Cervantes was steeped in this forbidden philosophy. Erasmus searched for reconciliation between Faith and Reason, refusing not only the dogmas of Faith, but the dogmas of Reason as well. Thus, Cervantes, who was a disciple of the Spanish Erasmists, had to disguise his intellectual allegiance. The "Praise of Folly" is the praise of Don Quixote as he wanders through an Erasmian universe in which all truths are suspect, everything is bathed in incertitude and the modern novel thus acquires its birth-right.
Since Cervantes cannot admit the liberating influence of Erasmian thought, he goes Erasmus one better: the wisdom of Rotterdam becomes the folly of La Mancha and the marriage of "la sagesse" and "l'incertitude" brings forth the novel as we understand it. A privileged space, indeed, of incertitude.
An uncertain place: a forgotten village in an insolated province of Spain. An un-namable place: "En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme". An uncertain author: Who wrote this book? Cervantes? De Saavedra? Cide Hamete Benengeli? An anonymous Moorish scribe? The masked funambulist Ginés de Pasamonte disguised as the puppeteer Master Pedro? The lack of author barely disguises the refusal of authority. Uncertain names: Don Quixote is really an impoverished hidalgo named Alonso Quijano - or is it Quijada? - or perhaps, Quezada? Or is it the other way around: Is the impoverished squire truly the brave knight errant, a Cid brought low, a diminished Cortez?
So, what's in a name? The onomastic instability of the novel Don Quixote undermines all certainty of a linear reading. Dulcinea is Aldonza, damsels in distress become queens and princesses, broken down nags are deemed heroic steeds, illiterate squires become governors. Don Quixote's imaginary foes have extravagant names – for example, the giant Pentapolpin of the Rolled up Sleeve - so his real foes must also have them: the Bachelor Sanson Carrasco has to be named the Knight of the Mirrors in order to enter Quixote's onomastic universe. And Quixote himself, the battle name of the country Quijada... or Quijano... or Quesada... enters in full batllegear this nominative carnival, becoming the Knight of the Sad Countenance or the Knight of the Lions, or Quijotiz, when in a pastoral mode, or the ridiculous Don Azote, that is, Mister Whip, in the wayside inn or, in the Duke's palace, the mocked don Jigote, Mr. Hamburger.
Places, names, authorship, all is uncertain in Don Quixote. And uncertainty is compounded by the great democratic revolution wrought by Cervantes and which is the creation of the novel as a common place, lieu commun, lugar común, that is, the meeting place of the city, the central plaza, the polyforum, the public square where everyone has a right to be heard but no one has the right to exclusive speech.
This guiding principle of novelistic creation is turned by Cervantes into what Claudio Guillen calls a dialogue of genres. They all meet in the open space of Don Quixote. Here the picaresque – Sancho Panza – shakes hands with the epic – Don Quixote. Lazarillo de Tormes is introduced to Amadis of Gaul. Here the linearity of narration is broken down, encircled, put on fast forward or in reverse by the tale-within-the-tale interrupted by the pastoral interlude and then by the novel of courtly love and the strands of Moorish and Byzantine tales woven into the tapestry of a novel that, finally, proposes itself as both the identity and the difference of its verbal universe.
Before Cervantes, narrative could exhaust itself in a single reading of the past: the epic, or of the present: the picaresque. Cervantes blends past and future, turning the novel into a critical process that, first, proposes that we read a book about a man who reads books and then becomes a book about a man who knows that he is being read. When Don Quixote enters the printing shop in Barcelona and discovers that what is being printed is his own book, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, we are suddenly plunged into a truly new world of readers, of readings available to all and not only to a small circle of power, religious, political or social.
By multiplying both authorship and readership, the novel, from the times of Cervantes to our own, became a democratic vehicle, a space of choice, of alternate interpretations of the self, of the world, and of the relationship between myself and others, between you and me, between we and they.
Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason must be logical. But literature has the privilege of being equivocal. The quality of doubt in a novel is perhaps a manner of telling us that since authorship (and thus authority) are uncertain and susceptible of many explanations, so it goes with the world itself.
Reality is not fixed, it is mutable. We can only approach reality if we do not pretend to define it once and for all. The partial verities proposed by a novel are a bulwark against dogmatic impositions. Considered politically feeble and unimportant, why are writers then persecuted by totalitarian regimes as if they really mattered? This contradiction reveals the deeper nature of the political in literature. The reference is to the polis, the city, the evolving but constant community of citizens, not to the autoritas, the passing powers, essentially temporary but pridefully believing themselves eternal.
Kafka's fictions describe a power that makes its own fiction powerful. Power is a representation that, like the authorities in "The Castle", gain its strength from the imagination of those outside the castle. When that imagination ceases to confer power upon power, the Emperor appears naked and the impotent writer who points this out is banned to exile, the concentration camp or the bonfire, while the Emperor's tailors stitch on his new clothes.
So, if there can be political power in writing, it is exceptional. Under so-called "normal" circumstances, the writer has scarce if any political importance. He or she can, of course, become politically relevant as citizens. Yet he or she possess the ultimate political importance of offering the city, however quietly, however postponed, however indirectly, the two indispensable values that unite the personal and the collective:
Fiction then, from Rabelais and Cervantes to Grass and Goytisolo and Gordimer, is another way of questioning truth as we strive for it through the paradox of a lie. That lie can be called the imagination. It can also be seen as a parallel reality. It can be observed as a critical mirror of what passes for the truth in the world of convention. It certainly sets up a second universe of being, where Don Quixote and Heathclif and Emma Bovary have a reality greater, though no less important, than the host of hastily met and then forgotten citizens we deal with. Indeed, Don Quixote or Emma Bovary bring into light, give weight and presence to the virtues and vices --to the fugitive personalities-- of our daily acquaintance.
Perhaps, what Ahab and Pedro Paramo and Effie Briest possess is, also, the living memory of the great, glorious and mortal subjectivities of the men and women that we forget, that our fathers knew and our grand parents foresaw. In Don Quixote, Dostoevsky wrote, truth is saved by a lie. With Cervantes, the novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth. For through the medium of fiction, the novelist puts reason to the proof. Fiction invents what the world lacks, what the world has forgotten, what it hopes to attain and perhaps can never reach. Fiction is thus a way of appropriating the world, giving the world the color, the taste, the sense, the dreams, the vigils, the perseverance and even the lazy repose that, to go on being, it claims.
Enter your own self and discover the world, the novelist tells us. But also, go out into the world and discover yourself. In the dark hours preceding World War II, Thomas Mann crossed the Atlantic with Don Quixote as his surest lifeline to a Europe in the throes of death. And even before, under the clouds of the First World War, Franz Kafka had discovered that Don Quixote was a magnificent invention of Sancho Panza, who thus became a man free to follow the adventures of the knight errant, without hurting anybody. And finally, in his "Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote", Jorge Luis Borges tells us that it suffices to re-write Cervantes' novel, word by word, but in a different time and with a different intention, in order to recreate it.
Cervantes lived his age: the decadent Spain of the last Hapsburgs, Philip III and the devaluation of money, the fall of the economy due to the successive expulsion of the industrious Jewish and Arab populations, the compulsion to disguise Hebrew or Moorish origins leading to a society of brittle masks, the lack of efficient administrators for a far-flung empire, the flight of the gold and silver of the Indies to the mercantile powerhouses of Northern Europe. A Spain of urchins and beggars, hollow gestures, cruel aristocrats, ruined roads, shabby inns and broken-down gentlemen who, in another, more vigorous age, might have conquered Mexico and sailed the Caribbean and brought the first universities and the first printing presses to the New World: the fabulous energy of Spain in the invention of America.
Cervantes and the other great writers of Spain's Golden Age truly demonstrate that literature can give the society what history has drained from the society. "Where are the birds of yesteryear?" sighs Don Quixote as he lays dying. They are dead and stuffed, which is why Don Quixote has to give his novel the renewed flight of the eagle, the wing-span of the albatross. As Cervantes responded to the degraded society of his time with the triumph of the critical imagination, we too, face a degraded society and must reflect upon it as it seeps into our lifes, surrounds us and, even, casts us upon the perennial situation of responding to the passage of history with the passion of literature.
We are aware of the danger of postponing the human agendas as the 21st Century begins. Military spending exceeds by far investment in health, education and development. The urgent demands of women, the aged, the young are left to chance. The offenses against nature multiply. In Heaven, wrote Borges, to conserve and to create are synonymous verbs. On Earth, they have become enemies. The root causes of terror are left unattended. Terror cannot be the answer to terror, but rather better intelligence, democratic governance and socio-economic development, while strengthening cultural identity, in nations long subject to authoritarian and colonial rule.
International values won with critical perseverance and sacrifice – human rights, diplomacy, multilateralism, primacy of the law - are assailed by the blind haste of unilateralism, preventive war and the blind pride that "precedes destruction" (Proverbs, 16: 18). Sometimes our answer to these realities is passive beatitude. There are those who believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds because they have been told that the indispensable is impossible. But on the other hand, we are assailed by the agitated though passive fear of latent Apocalypse when, as Goethe put it, "God ceases to love his creatures and must destroy it all and begin all over again".
Space has capitulated. Thanks to the image, we can be everywhere instantly. But time has pulverized, breaking down into images that are in danger of refusing us both the imagination of the past and the memory of the future. We can become the slaves of hypnotic images that we have not chosen. We can become cheerful robots amusing ourselves to death. I believe that these are realities that should move us to affirm that language is the foundation of culture, the door of experience, the roof of the imagination, the basement of memory, the bedchamber of love and, above all, the window open to the air of doubt, uncertainty and questioning.
I find, in all great novels, a human project, call it passion, love, liberty, justice, inviting us to actualize it to make it real, even if we know that it is doomed to fail. Quixote knows he fails, as do Pere Goriot and Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin. But only through the consciousness, implicit or explicit, of such failure, do they save, and help us save, the nature of life itself, human existence and its values as lived and proposed and remembered by all the ages, all the races, all the families of humankind, without alienating themselves to an illusion of unending, certified progress and felicity.
After the experiences of the past century, we can not ignore the tragic exceptions to happiness and progress that humankind constantly encounters. In "Light in August", William Faulkner opposes and embraces two dissimilar characters, the mature nymphomaniac Joanna Burden and her young Black lover, Joe Christmas. Christmas is an agent of freedom. But he knows that his liberty is limited, even prometehical. He feels like an eagle, hard, powerful, remorseless, sufficient. But that sensation passes and then he realizes that his skin is his prison. Joanna Burden wishes, in possession of Joe's body, to condemn herself, not forever but just a bit more: "Don't make me pray, God", she pleads. "Let me condemn myself just a bit longer".
These are but two of the Faulknerian cast that discover in love the tragic nature of both freedom and destiny. In Faulkner, knowing that we are capable of resisting means that we are also capable, in certain moments, of victory. I highlight this tragic and time-resisting truth in Faulkner because I find it essential to the very heart-beat of the novel: Freedom is tragic because it is conscious both of its necessity and of its boundaries.
"I do not hope for victory", writes Kafka. "Struggle in itself is not blissful, except in the measure that it is the only thing that I can do ... Perhaps I will finally surrender, not to the struggle, but to the joy of the struggle".
"Between pain and nothing, I choose pain", Faulkner famously said, adding: "Man will prevail". And is this not, perhaps, the truth of the novel? Humankind will prevail and it will prevail because, in spite of the accidents of history, the novel tells us that art restores the life in us that was disregarded by the haste of history. Literature makes real what history forgot. And because history is what has been, literature will offer what history has not always been. That is why we will never witness --bar universal catastrophe-- the end of history.
Compare then the words of Franz Kafka and William Faulkner to the half-baked notions of the end of history and the clash of civilizations. I speak as a writer in the Spanish language from a continent that is Iberian, Indian and Mestizo, Black and Mulatto, Atlantic and Pacific, Mediterranean and Caribbean, Christian, Arab and Jewish, Greek and Latin.
If I am faithful to the accomplishments but above all to the purposes, to the attainments as well as to the possibilities of my own culture, I can not accept that we live in a clash of civilizations because all those that I have evoked are mine, not clashing, but talking, speaking to one another, disputing in order to understand, communicating in my very soul the relativity of both triumphalism and dejection, the need to venture what will never perish even if it has fallen back – my ancient Indian and Islamic cultures – and to earn what thinks of itself as permanent – the Western, Christian strains of my being beyond their present sufficiency – and to celebrate the meeting place of all of them, the place of speech and thought and memory and imagination that each one of us carries with him and her, asking us to participate in a dialogue of civilizations and to deny the end of history.
For how can history end as long as we have not said our last word?
*
The speech was delivered in English on the opening of the Fifth International Literature Festival Berlin, on September 6, 2005.
Abonați-vă la:
Postări (Atom)