The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Manea Norman

Author:Manea, Norman [Manea, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

AN EXILE ON SEPTEMBER 11 AND AFTER

That morning I was at Bard College, about one and a half hours from New York City. I was preparing my afternoon seminar, “Exile and Estrangement in Modern Fiction.” I only heard about the brutal attack on America towards noon. Most professors canceled their classes. I asked my students whether we should go ahead as planned with Nabokov’s novel Pnin, call off the class, or discuss the event rather than the book. Their presence showed that they didn’t want to be alone, and I assumed that the theme of exile would allow for a wide-ranging discussion of today’s world—a world in which estranged people, and not only they, are obsessively looking for a lost center, even reacting hysterically to their own tensions, trauma, and mystifications.

“You are sixteen students, an even number,” I said. “If half of you decide one way and the other the opposite, you may also need my vote. However I vote, some of you would not be happy. Those who are not happy can still join the discussion, accepting the dialogue as a compromise. Or they can leave the room and even blow up the building.” A prolonged, tense silence followed. The majority of the students were still in shock. Finally, they chose dialogue. For some of them, it was indeed a compromise. This seemingly trivial situation mirrored the global alternative, the essential choice: democracy or war against it.

Democracy is, in fact, an often tedious search for compromise, a complicated enterprise in domesticating aggressiveness. Compromise is not acceptable to everyone, as the nihilistic “messengers” had proved that morning. Their answer had been crime, the urge to blast the world apart.

Democracy is not a utopian project and is not Paradise; even religious fanatics locate Paradise in heaven, not on earth. It’s not at all surprising that one of the obvious results of democracy is incoherence—a form of freedom, probably. The unavoidable contradictions and conflicts, the inequalities and frustrations of democracy—of freedom—as well as the widespread resentment of the “demonic” and much-envied America may explain, at least partially, that terrible September 11 event.

Religious, as well as many non-religious, militants keep reciting America’s shortcomings and the disaster of future “globalization.” For better or for worse, globalization is already part of our everyday life, through television, computers, antibiotics, exotic travel. In many underdeveloped and poor countries, or in countries with authoritarian, oppressive rule, quite often the resentment seems not against globalization, but against the lack of it. Globalization doesn’t mean ethnic, ideological, or political unification, but a metageographical network with all its promises and risks. It would be useful and important to debate such issues, not blindly to reject the concept itself with simple-minded militancy.

In their own way, the fundamentalists are also suggesting a kind of globalization. Not a democratic one, of course, but a totalitarian one. The real question remains as to what kind of “globalization” might be offered as an alternative. Surely not the mystical, totalitarian patriarchy of the Middle Ages that negates dialogue, difference, dissidence.

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