“Who am I?” is also a prerequisite to understanding what has happened in this diseased century, threatened on the one hand by totalitarianism and on the other by the growing violence of alienation; threatened by the sharp conflicts between the traditional need to belong and the estrangement of our modern world. This is a question we need to ask in order to understand both the world of lies that “true socialism” turned out to be and the world of money (as consumption-oriented capitalism, in its present, late phase, has often been defined).
This question “Who am I?” is inevitably linked to the question “Who are we?” What is this New World toward which the eyes of those liberated from the oppression of utopia turn, a utopia that kept promising them a New World again and again? The Western world is not the paradise imagined by those who understand democracy only as well-being, comfort, and free will; it is a human world, both imperfect and perfectible, much as the inferno of tyranny was just another human product, imagined, built, endured, and challenged by human beings. The benefits and dangers, the chances and deprivations of our fast-changing world cannot be understood without observing those human beings who populate it with their wishes, myths, and confusion. And maybe there is no one who knows the differences between those two worlds better than the exile. In this respect, the exile from the East is a precursor in the experiment in which the countries in that part of Europe are just now embarking upon.
Like Adam, the exile has gone through the exhilaration and anxiety of liberation, the nostalgia of belonging, and the shock of estrangement. He has been reborn, by the “sweat of his brow,” from anonymity and the trauma of the unknown. Step by step, neurosis after neurosis, he has regained a broader meaning of the world and of otherness, a stricter sense of responsibility, a more acute awareness of death, hence of reality. He has gained a more active and lucid understanding of the ephemeral, of limitation and unlimited aspirations. He is the risk being par excellence, who has finally accepted the suffering, honor, and privileges of exile. Exile permanently instructs one in change, in transition. The exile becomes, one might say, a kind of expert in transition.
Taking the Risk
Not so long ago, I was asked what is the most important theme for the East European writer today. I responded by saying that the most challenging literary task seems to be scrutinizing the distance between the core of the victim and the core of the oppressor. The essential theme, not only for art at the end of this century, but also for understanding a present that defines its uncertainties by recycling the past, could be the study of this distance. More precisely, the study of the dynamic, and frequently ambiguous, relationship between the center of the victim, if such a center does exist, and the center of the oppressor.
This is a burning topic for the East European writer now, when, burdened by unhappy decades of illusions, suffering, and frustration, East Europe seeks to revive its withered hopes. It is a pressing topic for the Western writer as well, in a time when competition becomes synonymous with selfishness, computerization with depersonalization, profit with idealism, vulgarity with power, and oppression with success. This is a theme that especially appeals to the exiled writer, who has broken connections with both worlds and is aware of the differences and similarities between them, the tension of their dialogue, the dangers that threaten them both.
The risk-being was expelled from the inertia of Paradise because of his knowledge and conscience. A human being defined by the risk of individualization — and art is the very exponential function of risk, of creative freedom — remains essentially vulnerable. Vulnerable and contradictory, the human being is, however, defined by an ever-present instinct for self-preservation. Self-preservation on the one hand, and the need for risk on the other, have always determined our tense existence. Pushing the artificial, the product of human creation, to its very limits, modern society has also increased to unimaginable proportions the likelihood of risk and, paradoxically, the means of self-preservation as well.
The tension between the inborn instinct for self-preservation and the irrepressible need to risk is more obvious than anywhere else in the present transition to a new millennium. The writer in exile understands these conflicts because he has experienced them. To him, the New World has become the whole world, the stage for all his fellow humans from all corners of the earth.
In this era of globalization, exile itself has become an emblem, no matter whether it is experienced by someone in his own country, his own room, and in his own language, or outside and far removed from them. The moment we are all experiencing is convulsive. The theater of the world is convulsive, as is the time in which we live, no matter where we live. We are all exiles.
Freedom and beauty are what each of us manages to draw from the vast realm of the possible and turn into a palpable accomplishment. As André Breton said, “Beauty will either be convulsive or it will not be at all.”
Spring 1993
WRITERS AND THE GREAT BEAST
As it rushes to an end, this century, more than any other, could be called the century of the intellectuals. When its beginning and end are compared, whether on a mundane or a fundamental level, pivotal developments are immediately obvious; the mind’s achievements in science and technology; the deep schism in art; and the radical upheaval that has shaken the individual and society.
Spectacular accomplishments and extreme dangers have accompanied the dramatic worldwide expansion of uncertainty in this new era. The year 2000 approaches replete with all the manmade means of planetary catastrophe. Although the macabre play of man’s imagination has anticipated this catastrophe, his conscience is inclined to relegate it to an uncomfortable side road.
The fear at the threshold of this new millennium differs from its tenth-century counterpart in which an end-of-the-world psychosis was linked to the gods and fate. In a desacralized world, as Heisenberg said, “man stands on this earth only in relation to himself.” It seems as if mankind is being herded onto an enormous ship, or, more exactly, into a large metal hull with a compass that does not point north but towards the mass of the ship itself …. And the genetic revolution could well result in a horrible apotheosis through its creative artifices and manipulations.
Given the widespread crises jeopardizing our transition to a completely different world, the “crisis of the ideal” is no longer a problem simply for intellectuals — whom dictionaries usually define as more interested in thinking and understanding than in feeling or acting. It is a problem for us all. Moreover, this crisis is not merely a question of overpopulation and the arms race, of under- and over-development, of fanaticism, environmental destruction, and the arrogance of power, but of the deep imbalance in human existence that unleashes all of those. When he suggested that the banality and chaotic absurdity of daily existence cannot be overcome without a transcendent goal, Einstein was referring to the centripetal force of the idea. The collapse of the totalitarian communist system and the threat of new forms of totalitarianism — whether of a religious nature (incited by Islamic fundamentalism, for example) or a nationalist one — again raise the question of transcendent “ideals” with heightened urgency. Without such ideals, man falls prey to emptiness or self-destructiveness. And yet, he apparently does not know how to defend himself effectively against the cynical and catastrophic manipulations of these ideals. This is not only a question for philosophers, who were once called the functionaries of mankind; it is a question for every conscious inhabitant of the present in which the past parodies its tragedies as farces.