The Passport, by Herta Müller

  

Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, is Romanian but has lived in Germany since 1987 and writes in German (her first language).  The title of her novel translated as The Passport is a Romanian saying, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (Man is a Great Pheasant in the World) and we know what happens to pheasants.  It was published in 1986, while Müller was still living in Romania, and writing it in those circumstances dictated its allusiveness.

Windisch, a miller, is an ethnic German living in Romania some time after the Second World War.  Life in the Banat, where Müller herself is from, is hard, with a sense that in Romania the Germans’ lives are not unique in their drabness.  He and his family face poverty and corruption, with little hope of improvement in their circumstances.  It is an unsophisticated rural community ruled by custom and superstition, where you can tell if a girl is no longer a virgin by her toes pointing outwards.  Windisch consequently wishes to emigrate to the land of his ancestors in the West for a better life.

As if rural poverty and political repression are not enough to contend with, this is a generation that had lived through the Second World War.  Afterwards, many of the Germans, who had been settled in Romania for generations, had been deported to Russia for forced labour.  Windisch’s wife Katharina had been sent to work in a mine and had had to first swap clothes, and then sex, for food in order to sate the spiny ‘hedgehog’ in her stomach and survive, a fact with which her unsympathetic husband reproaches her.

It requires great persistence to obtain the necessary paperwork to be able to move to West Germany.  To oil the wheels, Windisch bribes those in authority with bags of flour, but having an attractive daughter means flour is not enough.  He is obliged to use his daughter Amélie as a bargaining chip, hinting at a country that despite its avowed communism still runs on cynical self-interest, with no one in authority immune.

One might expect poor behaviour from low-level bureaucrats, but far from providing spiritual consolation, the local priest lasciviously seduces any woman he can, and Amélie has to provide him with certain services in exchange for the baptismal certificates that are part of the emigration application.  Afterwards, Windisch notices her toes now point outwards.

Eventually Windisch achieves his aim, and even fulfils his fantasy of his family returning for a visit, driving a Mercedes which, as it enters the village, passes scrawny horses pulling a cart: modernity and the past juxtaposed.  The ill-fitting suit he was wearing when he left has been replaced by one the right size, cut from the same cloth as his wife’s.  ‘It’s as if we never lived here,’ Katharina says as she looks round.  The sacrifices and accommodations have, one presumes, been worth it.

The story is told in an elliptical style, with no obvious narrative direction.  It consists of short sentences in a series of brief chapters depicting the lives of the villagers, the dour fractured prose reflecting a time out of joint.  While not explicity critical of the Ceaușescu regime, the cumulative impression is negative at a time the Romanian government was attempting to display the country as a success, and the mere fact of wanting to emigrate from the workers’ paradise would have been controversial.  The novel works on a metaphorical level as well, because if one cannot protect one’s child, and Ceaușescu is supposedly the father of the nation, what does that say about him?

The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, by Matei Călinescu

It is remarkable to think that Matei Călinescu’s The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter (Viata si opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter, translated by Adriana Călinescu and Breon Mitchell) was published in 1969, during the Ceaușescu regime.  Appearing in a brief period of thaw in Romania, it was nodded through by the authorities on the grounds there was nothing overtly hostile to the government.  However, it is a long way from espousing socialist principles; in fact the titular Zacharias Lichter does not conform to the norms of society of any kind.  Insofar as there is a message it is a plea for individualism during a period when life was regimented, and Lichter is the supreme petit-bourgeois asocial element.  That publication did Călinescu’s career no good in the long run is indicated by his move to the United States in 1973.

The title hints that the book will follow the picaresque style of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.  It is presented in short sections, a mix of brief essays, reflections and poems, depicting a fictional biography and the milieu in which Lichter moves.  Norman Manea in his introduction notes Călinescu set it in the 1930s (to avoid the imputation it was a critique of the current situation), but while the style has a ‘60s counter-culture ambience hinting at influences from Nietzsche, Herman Hesse and existential meaninglessness – all modish at the time – there is a lack of specificity which gives the setting a weightless feel.

From a Jewish petit-bourgeois family, Lichter had been a brilliant student, but he rejected a conventional path of family and career along with the normal comforts most people demand.  He had had a divine experience in which he considered he had been struck by God’s flame when he collapsed in a public park and experienced visions (so perhaps is epileptic).  He is highly intelligent but has chosen to tread his own path as a beggar in Bucharest, though he gives away anything he earns to other beggars he considers more in need.  He rejects the idea of work as it constrains the spirit, considering modern existence to be inauthentic and full of trivialities.  He lives in a disused garage, his only possession a bible.

Uninterested in opposing social conventions, he merely ignores them.  When arrested by accident for a crime he did not commit he disdains to protest his innocence, and is only released when the actual criminal is caught.  Having acquired a mystic bent, he ignores the minutiae of everyday living and politics but has plenty to say about the things he is interested in to a demi-monde band of acquaintances, to whom he is ever-ready to present his general philosophy.  His best friend is Leopold Nacht, though Poldy is not much of a conversationalist as he is generally drunk, despite which Lichter considers him a significant philosopher.  As in much of life, appearances can be deceptive and bear an arbitrary relationship to underlying reality.

Street philosopher Lister’s stock-in-trade is the absurd.  He incorporates the figure of the clown, displaying both laughter and tears at life’s ridiculousness, but able to see more clearly than those who cannot move beyond surface impressions, which they assume to be coherent.  Adrian Leonescu, a professor of English phonetics (not literature, phonetics) is a foolish character who is obsessed with the pronunciation of words, but not their meaning or the ideas they represent.  He symbolises a fetishisation of phenomena rather than the search for an understanding of noumena.  Lichter sees people as belonging to the realm of ‘the stupid’ because of their attachment to possessions and narrowly superficial view of the world.

Lichter prefers speech (Thus spake Zacharias, as it were) to writing because it is impermanent, his sole literary activity being the creation of terrible verses he immediately discards, only for them to be frequently retrieved by his ‘biographer’.  Unlike most philosophers, he considers his life, not a literary output, to be his work, in which he celebrates contradiction and unpredictability: his most notable achievements are his suffering and poverty.  He attacks writing because it corrupts memory and ossifies experience, and prevents the creative process of forgetting.

Ironically Lichter’s biographer, by writing about him, has subverted the essence of Lichter’s view of life.  In an epilogue Lichter attacks the project despite not having read it, claiming the biographer is actually writing about himself.  Given what Lichter has said about writing, he sees the effort as a betrayal, so that God’s flame, which initially inspired him, will freeze instead of burn.  The biographer is filled with shame and considers burning the manuscript, but Lichter remarks that the sin was in writing it.  Yet without the book, Lichter and all he represents will vanish in time.  His is a philosophy that eats itself, in danger of disappearing down an epistemological rabbit hole.  However, for the first readers, stifled by political orthodoxy, one can imagine that the individualism it represented was refreshing.

Călinescu’s own attitude to Lichter is hard to fathom, but presumably it is one of admiration for standing outside the mainstream while, as an author, disagreeing with the notion that producing a book is sinful or that all writing is a form of autobiography.  Of course Lichter’s sense of freedom is only possible in a society kept going by the efforts of others.  This is not a programme for universal living, fortunately.  Lichter’s unprepossessing appearance, which is oft-remarked, hints at a degree of anti-Semitism (he possesses a ‘peerless Semitic nose’), but in the end he is merely a mouthpiece for a rather turgid philosophy Călinescu surely did not endorse but probably hoped would irritate the authorities, an endeavour which was ultimately successful.