A discussion of three essays by Hungarian essayist/novelist/Nobelist-in-waiting Peter Nadas, dealing with the executions of the Ceaucescu’s, the depths of Hamlet (another killer of tyrants) and the knotty language distortions of Soviet Bloc Hungary, plus some related observations.
I picked up Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas based on what short story writer Deborah Eisenberg wrote about it in the New York Review of Books. I’m usually not THAT suggestible, but Eisenberg is obviously passionate about Nadas. Here’s what she said about his novel A Book of Memories in that same review: “After finishing the book, I… felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”
I pictured nanobots, each armed with a multi-tool (including a wrench), scurrying about inside my own skull, opening up some gates to allow more neuronal “flow” and shutting down others. (Until this, I had no idea my mind was like an irrigation project.) Would the sensation be “pleasant”? Or is it simply necessary to experience “what it is to feel or think two mutually exclusive things at once,” which is what Eisenberg says Nadas enables us to do. That doesn’t sound SO impressive, as Eisenberg admits, but frankly we don’t expect it in literature, just our confusing lives, and we certainly don’t expect it to be revelatory in the way Nadas is for Eisenberg.
So, I randomly plucked three essays from the set of 9 short stories and 14 essays and sat down to read. I didn’t hear the clanging of nanobots up there, but I think I understand what Eisenberg has on her mind. Nadas possesses a sharp, insistent intellect that he uses to complicate our thinking, to blur our distinctions, to clog our mental templates. He manages the sweet double of demonstrating the muddiness of our intellectual apparatus in a precise and powerful way: He’s clear about the complexity. More important for my humble purposes, though, these three essays, written in 1977, 1986 and 1998, seemed immediately applicable on all sorts of levels, some of which we’ll get into shortly.
Random. No, I suppose they weren’t random. I chose the first essay in the book, “The Great Christmas Killing,” which reflects on the deaths of Elena and Nicolae Ceauscescu, because Eisenberg recommended it; “Hamlet Is Free” because I wanted to see how he would approach theater and a play I know something about; and “A Tale of Fire and Knowledge” only because it lends its title to the entire collection, which I took as a sign from Nadas (though it’s likely a clever editor liked the combination of opposites — just like Eisenberg did). I read them quickly, and they seemed to build on each other: The deaths of the Ceauscescus and the open grave in the production of “Hamlet” that Nadas describes leading to the death of language itself in “Fire and Knowledge.” What do we lose when we are reduced to “nothing”? How does it happen? What do we gain by considering it? Perhaps not so oddly in this political year, the essays led me to thoughts of more recent American history — the deaths of dictators at the hands of puppets, the exploration of nothingness, the diminution of language and meaning.
Rather than subject the essays to a close critical reading (which they can withstand, by the way), let’s simply look at some of the more striking elements. In the case of “The Great Christmas Killing” that’s not so easy, because the essay is short and vigorous and of a piece. Ten years after the event, Nadas has watched two different documentaries about the last days of the Ceaucescus, both of which use the same film footage of their “trial” and execution. He spends time describing the qualities of the footage:
“You can cut it, edit this way or that, nothing changes; its harmony remains perfect. None of its subjects, light effects, participants, sounds, or means of filming is anything but amateurish. In this film the windows are blacked out, and no door is seen. There is no exit from this dictatorship.”
And then the last minutes of the Ceaucescus alive and the terror of those about to kill them. The essay begins with Nadas confessing that despite his nobler beliefs, he watched the documentaries without mercy for the end of the Ceaucescus, in fact with real enjoyment at their fate. He then goes into the physiology of revenge before heading back to the trial and punishment. This reads as a powerful argument against himself, against his pleasure, against the relative weakness of his principles. And maybe later we ask ourselves, why does he maintain these two opposites, live with both a highly articulated sense of justice and the enjoyment of revenge? The answer comes at the end. The cameraman asks the doctor present to certify the deaths of the dictator by holding up Nicolae’s head. “If he obeys and does as he is told, he’ll be carrying out the most terrible sentence of all dictatorships: nothing is sacred. And then he does obey.” The last line is chilling: “With this devastating sensory experience we carry the logic of dictatorships into the next millennium.”
In her review, Eisenberg makes the jump to the execution of Saddam Hussain and our embrace, as a matter of national policy, of torture and detention without trial. We can parse the differences, I suppose. The deeper point goes to the species itself, its wolfishness and what becomes of our best efforts to protect ourselves from ourselves.
And suddenly we are in the middle of “Hamlet Is Free.”
“… in the interest of tracking down the world’s basically immoral nature, he (Hamlet) must relinquish all social agreement and custom, refuse all cooperation, must expose, tear out, and stifle his own feelings, and perhaps these are the reasons that compel him to carry out his actions in the antisocial mode about whose sense and legitimacy he himself has grave doubts.”
Did the killers of the Ceaucescus harbor grave doubts? Those who conducted the Saddam trial? How about those who initiated Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, to use the shorthand for cruel and unusual punishment and the destruction of the right to a speedy trial? Grave doubts? Or the logic of the dictator. Of course, there is a big difference between Saddam and a tribesman picked up more or less randomly on the “battlefield” of Afghanistan, but by our “social agreement and custom” we are supposed to treat them the same, and the same as we would treat you for running a stop sign on your bike in Portland. Hamlet has the decency to have doubts about his course, at least.
This Hamlet is the one generated by Russian director Yuri Lyubimov and richly described by Nadas in 1977. His reading of the production as a whole is dense — the setting, the costumes, the acting and especially the light — dense enough so that the reader can picture it, place Hamlet and Ophelia in it. Because Lyubimov’s Hamlet restores the relationship of the would-be lovers to the center of the production, as it should. The only thing that might derail him from this revenge business is his love of Ophelia, who both loves him and informs on him (Hamlet is a great play for the Eastern Bloc). Otherwise, Hamlet “thinks of life from the standpoint of death,” Nadas says, citing this moment in the play:
“Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.”
I go back to the death of the sacred. In the doctor’s case, the sacred meant the traditions of his profession going back to Hippocrates. What about Hamlet? The search for truth, perhaps. Hamlet wants to know, and knowing, wants revenge: Nadas sketches another embrace of the mutually exclusive. The trial in Hamlet is in the play-within-a-play and inside Hamlet’s own head; the punishment is psychological (in the case of Ophelia) and at the point of Hamlet’s blade for everyone else. Operating from the standpoint of death, there is no repair possible; the stage will be littered with bodies at the end.
Repair. What is sacred for a democracy? Perhaps the belief in repair, in the possible reconciliation of the mutually exclusive, in the power of Reason (the 18th century would have capitalized it) to lead us to a mutual understanding of the “larger good.” If we ALL have a stake in government, then it is in our interest to stay at the table until we work it out. Our disenchantment with our democracy had to do with the disappearance of that table, with our distrust of Reason, with the observation that ALL of us don’t have a stake in our government. At which point, it is every wolf for itself.
Or maybe not. Something in a primate loves society, even society gone horribly wrong, gone famously “rotten.” How else do we explain our ability to endure what seems unendurable for so long? We learn to deal with extremes. Which takes us to the final essay, “A Tale of Fire and Knowledge.”
The table. The monkey tree. The nesting ground of penguins. I remember a story that Ursula LeGuin read at the old ArtQuake (an art fair of the early ’80s intended to bring Portlanders downtown), a story that hadn’t been published at the time she read it. It’s situated in Antarctica, dead of winter, the long night. The penguins stand together against the cold and they lay their eggs. And they communicate — by shivering. They redeploy against the wind based on the shivering of those facing it, say, but they also convey “finer” points of penguin life. At least that’s how I remember it.
The penguins can’t talk, and neither can the citizens of Hungary in the time of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, according to Nadas. They endanger themselves by revealing their inner states, so anything anyone says is either empty, nothing, or vague or in some way the opposite of what he or she really means.The newscasters are the masters of this complex not-saying. And yet together they sit at the table, hang from the tree. They share something, even though they can share nothing directly. A consensus of “meaning” emerges, even if it can’t be voiced or tested. In a way, it’s a testament to Reason — Hungarians assume other Hungarians are interpreting the data as they do.
The essay reads like a Borges story. Here is Nadas describing one of the newscasters, whose personality had split into three parts, instead of the usual two:
“As a result, she not only could present, with full conviction and complete identification, a text of which she apparently understood not a word but with her well-placed accents was able to signal to her listeners, on the one hand, what they should understand, from their collective not-knowing position, by all those meaningless words, and, on the other hand, from the point of view of their individual knowledge, what they should not understand by thngs that, no matter how they looked at them, made no sense. This woman was a fountain of information, a soothsayer, an oracle.”
The essay ends with a gaffe on this newscaster’s part, a misspeaking that results in silence among the listening audience, a silence that sweeps the populace, a collective silence, a complete silence around the table. “No word is more powerful than collective silence.”
For the past 50 years or so, the philosophical apparatus of the West has made the point that our representations of reality are incomplete, determined (in part, mostly or completely) by our culture and so, “false”, to one degree or another. This Hungary avoids that critique by stopping the representation game altogether, and this oddly enough almost erases reality itself. In Nadas’s prose we can sense the lives shrinking to the vanishing point as “knowledge” of reality becomes more abstract, more opaque.
And so we write, we talk, we feverishly attempt to persuade you that our representation is the best one, and then we become cynical about all those representations, all that selling, all those obvious lies, all that noise. The silence Nadas describes seems almost preferable. Nadas makes me wonder: two dishes, one table?
Some links:
Last I checked Powell’s Books online had one copy of Fire and Knowledge available. You could also go through the publisher, Picador/Macmillan.
A Michael Kimmelman profile of Nadas in the New York Times: “Americans tend to be amnesiacs. Europeans, however, worry history, and no writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas.”
An account of a reading by Nadas in November 2007 on the blog DebThink: “Nadas described his way of writing as seeking to “stay on the path between experience and imagination.” His narrative structure is very intentional and assymetrical. “It can have certain stages of harmony but the entire structure is not symmetrical.” That would be very hard for me.”