TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
THE LANGUAGE OF Norman Manea’s Captives can’t be discussed without an excursion into history. History animates Captives’ unhinged voices. Time after time, we hear the untrustworthy speech of people cut lose from their moorings, who try to make “anything” of themselves, anything at all demanded by the moment, just to stay afloat. Having come through the Second World War and living through its communist aftermath, many speak in hypocritical or self-serving terms.
Captives is tacitly Stalinist Romania (1947–1965), and accommodate or flounder is the unspoken motto. Party membership is the key to success, and many are ready to hide or lie about “class enemy” antecedents.
Those unable to join the Party seek to be on good terms with it: in the novel, two high school teachers — a fascist ex-legionnaire and a former priest (e.g. a representative of the old order) — grovelingly hide their true natures in order to blend into the new order. Those in relative favor with the Party rationalize their attempts to take advantage of their position. And those who fail to adapt end up drifting: the narrator’s sister, born as a replacement for the children lost during the Holocaust, emblematically changes her appearance and goals at the drop of a hat and feverishly quotes Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat.” Her identification with the poem tags her as an unmoored vessel, a person born in denial of her family’s natural identity or trajectory. Like Captives’ narrator, she is unsettling, not out of malice but as a result of her own instability.
The characters’ chameleon-like self-invention and apparent lack of inner solidity comes of their having lived through the novel’s implicit backstory. Like Captives’ first readers, the people in this novel live in the knowledge that having been scorned by the Allies, Romania joined the Axis Powers and fought on the fascist side until August 23, 1944, when Romania’s young King Michael staged a coup that overthrew Marshal Antonescu, the fascist-allied leader. Disaster (and, for some, opportunity) came on the heels of heroism. The communists quickly ousted King Michael.
Long before the endgame politics of the mid-forties, though, in alliance with Hitler, the Antonescu regime deported Jews and Romani from the northeast of the country to concentration camps in Transnistria, which stretches from the Dniester River in Moldavia to Moldavia’s border with present day Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people died there, most of them Jews. While the (better known) captives in the Nazi camps ultimately fell victim to the Final Solution, those in Transnistria were left to perish of hunger, disease, and the random brutality of the guards. The survivors were liberated by the Red Army, Captives’ author and his parents among them.
The unmoored mentality of Manea’s literary captives is partly self-willed. One sees it in the language they use to think about the past. A quick trip through the text turns up many statements like these, each from a different character:
“It was necessary to gather memories, to rummage through them, to understand them so they could be forgotten, and then the amnesia would have to be checked again and again, for it would have to cover everything so there’d be no need to cheat or engage in the farce of little, passing deceptions.”
“We have to forget in order to start anew.”
“Forget it, banish it, erase it all. .”
Thinking about the past leads to self-induced amnesia, which is comparable to coma, as we are repeatedly reminded. Here’s a key passage from a philosophy book to which the narrator frequently recurs:
Time has an objective reality, even when objective sensation is weakened or eradicated because time “presses on,” because it “flows.” It remains a problem for professional logicians to know if a hermetically sealed can sitting on a shelf is outside time or not. But we know too well that time accomplishes its work even on one who sleeps. A certain doctor mentions the case of a little girl, aged twelve, who fell asleep one day and continued to sleep for thirteen years. In this interval, though, she did not remain a little girl but rather woke up a young woman, for she had grown in the meantime.
The narrator/protagonist considers that he himself has spent a large portion of his late adolescent and adult life in a hermetically sealed coma. He describes the effect of hermetically sealed reading:
I used to gather the paperback, clothbound, and hardcover books. The stacks would grow taller than my head. . I needed to conserve myself, hermetically sealed on my shelf. Lacking air, the books rotted inside me. With all its games and noises, summer wasn’t getting close to the shelf where I’d perched. Everything stood stock still around me. There was no movement and therefore no time.
The narrator’s preoccupation with hermetic sealing derives explicitly from a passage in The Magic Mountain, and expresses a deep concern with the relationship between trauma and forgetting, which have severed these characters from what would have been their normal course of development. What results both in their direct and in their reported inner speech is a trajectory toward stasis: the denial or refusal of personal growth. Communist Romania, Captives implies, isn’t just a hermetically sealed can inhabited by the comatose because of its citizens’ inability to leave the country. It is a self-made psychological vacuum.
Operating in this psychological vacuum, Captives itself exhibits a mentality that is unstabilized, unmoored. The book is ostensibly the semi-therapeutic writing of a madman who suffers from attempts to disconnect himself from his past. The result is language that continuously tries to make “anything” — to use the narrator’s word — of the world around the narrator/protagonist in his doomed effort to keep psychologically afloat. Consider the following passage, which spans two subsections of Captives’ final chapter:
A day has gone by, a week. Am still a somnolent high-school student. No, only a day, a week, a Saturday has gone by, and talk of confusion would be justified. Machines for typing and checking and intercepting and photographing and following and reproducing: their monotonous patter is here, and myself. . fugitive, lost, stalked from every corner, unable to sleep.
“You walk, you walk forever, you have lost time and it has lost you. . a terrain, sprinkled with seaweed and tiny shells; hearing thrilled by that unbridled wind that freely roves. . we
watch the tongues of sea foam stretch to lick our feet.”
Under the waves, under the stroking foam, the sea roars in the great castle of water.
• • •
The sea boomed. The thick castle walls kept out the noise of waves, but other sounds collided and crossed paths in the great halclass="underline" the release of bolts, metallic clanks, keys turning in locks, latches, heavy springs. Between them, odd, erratic breaks. One, pause. Two-three, pause. Four-five-six, pause. One, pause, two-three, then four-five-six, pause. Over and again, perpetual clanking, a continuous murmur from the right. To the left, short breaks; to the right, the crowded taps of many fingers, hammering.