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When
I heard about the recent raid on the editors of The
Blanket, it was a fortnight afterwards. My family
and I had come home from a visit to the Czech Republic
and Hungary. To an international conference of Irish
literature scholars, I had delivered a paper on two
plays by Irish women from the 1990s who had addressed
exile from Hungary after WWII. Despite the fact that
I teach at a university, I had to pay for the entire
trip myself—these days, I’m told I’m
lucky to simply keep my (non-tenured, full-time, year-round)
post. Still, despite the surfeit of Czech dumplings
and Hungarian gulyas, our family enjoyed the adventure.
Our sadness at learning upon our return to the realm
or regular e-mail about the events of July 4th diminished
our pleasure.
I
thought of Martin, who had driven us in his minivan—one
of three or four jobs he had—around Prague and
Bohemia. He told us how his father had refused to
support the Soviets in their liberation of his homeland
in 1968. For this protest, Martin could not attend
university, nor could he choose to follow his father
as a ceramic artist. Passports, driver’s license,
everyday choices vanished even more quickly than they
did for their fellow Czechs. The system assigned you
a job and a flat, but could not grant you what people
needed beyond sustenance. Blanca, who assisted us
as an interpreter and guide, noted that her family
was too poor even to suffer much more from the state
socialists. Her family having fled when she was 14,
her relatives endured mistreatment in their place.
Miriam, who guided us around the remains of the Jewish
ghetto of Prague, dryly reminisced of a literature
professor who, in her third year at university, whispered
in an aside that could have cost him his job to her
class that without some knowledge of a book called
the Bible, learning the humanities could be rather
daunting. Miriam had never heard of this book before.
Talking
to these victims of censorship, and mulling over the
current case in Ballymurphy, connections between the
Irish and Central European applications of governmental
oppression continue to unfold in my thoughts. For
nearly a year, in preparation for my trip and my paper,
I have been studying novels, memoirs, histories, and
journalism about an area about which—outside
of personal encounters growing up with some teachers
and neighbors who had fled Hitler or Stalin’s
minions—I knew little. One description that incisively
addresses the plight of the intellectual under silencing,
from Gyorgy Konrad’s 1980 novel A mincos,
best sums up the predicament faced by the publishers
of The Blanket today.
‘If
you extricate yourself from the state culture, writing
becomes an adventure. Pulling out your notebook from
its hiding place and making entries in it amounts
to engaging in subversive activity. The words can
be confiscated; they can be turned against you as
part of an indictment. Anarchists lug around bombs
in their briefcases—here you just slip your diary
in your bag, and presto you’ve become an outlaw.
A man can come up to you on the street, flash his
badge, and quietly ask to see what’s in briefcase.’
Certainly, we can see the parallels to harassment
of those who speak out against our system where collaboration
with the state by not only the politicians but the
police and the plainclothed widens to ensnare the
resistance.
Konrad
observes: ‘The police division in charge of intellectuals
exists to prevent the intellectuals from defining
themselves. I don’t look for hiding places for
my notes; I keep censoring them.’ Here, again,
the cost to the individual’s humanity comes at
discounting the inner value that we clutch to keep
our moral balance. We deceive ourselves on any record
kept outside of our self. ‘Facts can’t be
recorded, only opinions, and mine alone. A record
of events that included names, places and other factual
information is state security’s favourite reading
matter. To make sure I risk only my own neck, I generalize.’
As in Winston Smith’s Minitruth, the scraps are
constantly untrustworthy, always open to reshuffling,
burning, delusion, and revision. When MI5 or the PSNI
reads hard drives and scans hardcovers, what defense
can these facts have against the opinion of the state?
An opinion that makes up its own facts.
In
a purportedly open society, under which both British
and Irish claim citizenship in Western democracies,
we assume that the abuses suffered by Blanca, Martin,
Miriam, and millions of their comrades overwhelm the
petty run-ins our malcontents incite under a rather
benign state system. Can we compare Belfast now with
Budapest then? Konrad’s depiction arises from
the latter city during the 1980s. How much of the
former city can we discern? How much has the system
changed in the past two decades? Certainly, in both
cities, we see new high-rises, Tescos, cellphones,
McDonalds, increased traffic, and economic infusion.
Fewer prisons, more revitalisation downtown. But half
of those in Budapest and Prague live in the Soviet-era
projects that ring the grand historic centres
Hungarians
now earn an average monthly income of about 320 euros;
400 for their Czech neighbours. While greater Europe
enfolds both Ireland and the former Soviet bloc into
its wealthier masters, will we see in Central Europe
what the past decade has brought to the 26 Counties,
where the gap between rich and poor gapes second only
to that of the U.S.?
Have
the smaller nations given up earlier hopes of equality
to serve only the lords of Tesco and McDonalds? (Where,
in Prague I admit, the selection and quality of the
former’s wares and the reliable hours and working
conditions of the latter lure both visitors and natives
tired of older, shabbier, and surlier eateries and
emporia.) My point, then, expands: however outdated
the system Konrad criticises historically, the larger
issue of control over the choices we make as consumers
of burgers and books endures.
As
I generalise, inevitably, so does Konrad, who explains
how ‘The combined strength of the state is sustained
by the combined weight of public inertia—the
mere perception of this fact is considered a guerilla
operation. An honor guard made up of camouflaged police
cars, the excited bustle of several hundred detectives
whose only task is to prevent a single study from
seeing the light of day is the state’s tribute
to independent thought.’ Compare this vignette
to the scene described by Carrie Twomey and Anthony
McIntyre; while the languages and the actors change,
the script remains the same.
Speaking
of the state squared off against independent thought,
the samidzat nature of intellectual dissent especially
in the thaw after the Prague Spring meant that Konrad
and others under Soviet dictates had often to revert
to the practices indicative of an earlier dark age.
Books were hand-copied, then mimeographed or typed
with carbons. To counter informers, great secrecy
remained paramount in disseminating texts among the
sympathisers. Incarceration awaited violators. As
with the Internet today in its most idealised form,
so with the manuscript of three decades ago: here
lay the power of the word made print, the activist’s
chant enduring beyond ephemeral recall, the analyst’s
ruminations preserved longer than a chat over a few
pints the evening before. The Blanket and its
allied media continue this hand-to-hand, word-of-mouth
quality of reporting and studying the events of the
street, the contraband craic distilled as distributed
sceal.
At
about the same time, 1979-80, that we heard Cambridge-educated
Pink Floyd’s curiously childish rant ‘we
don’t need no education’, the phrase that
we are “just another brick in the wall”
gained more practical application in Konrad’s
voice behind the iron curtain. ‘The higher the
state rises,’ he wrote, ‘over the social
edifice, the more paradigmatic each brick becomes—and
the more each built-in being knows and likes his place
in the great wall.’ Kafka preceded Konrad in
imagining a great Chinese wall, predicting perhaps
how Mitteleuropa would mimic the attempts of other
dictators to keep barbarians at bay, with barriers
that within them gained strength from human mortar.
For
many under totalitarian rule no matter the place or
time, the wall’s durability depends upon the
sacrifice of its workers and intellectuals who must
become immured within the state structure. Konrad’s
phrase fits for so many who live outside Iron or Bamboo
Curtains, but who still depend upon fitting in beside
so many identical shapes and sizes.
‘If
his superiors like him, the brick is happy; if not,
the brick is miserable.’ And here, I must admit,
Pink Floyd and Konrad both agree with my own harried
attempts to keep building minds in the Irish style—slates
that need no mortar, stones that slide about and fit
their setting naturally rather than the manufactured
standardised brick factory product.
‘Education
is an all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave campaign to
make a brick out of everyone.’ We are given votes,
we are told that our voices matter on the Net or at
the ballot box as much as they do at the mall or when
shopping on-line. But the power we have as consumers
to boycott, to sample, to compare comes under attack
by an increasingly corporate assault that makes outer
Budapest look like outer Belfast, where in every Hungarian
market town’s historical square the golden arches
stand near the golden spires. Of course, we are told
that we choose to shop and eat at the corporate outlets
rather than the cornershops. Yet, as on the Net with
alternative media like the Blanket, how can
the democratic whispers shout out the demagogic conglomerates?
How can we target those who seek the easier selection
of goods, like Prague’s crowds eager to abandon
the Soviet-era stores for the designer brands and
the British chain store? However, when you stroll
down Narodni (“Freedom”) street, past the
site of the 1989 protests, compare the prices in the
Western franchises, and do the calculation against
a Czech native’s monthly wage. You’ll see
who frequents Prada and the Gap more often.
The
window-shopper finds plenty to delight while walking
through Narodni street or the York Street mall in
central Belfast. Again, who can afford the goods?
As with the glossy media, full of text crawls, visual
come-ons, and relentless updates, how can a simple
website endure? How can it meet the rent and survive
in a gentrifying city that aims to please more a tourist
like me than its underpaid natives? Belfast or Prague,
the big media, the mega-mall, and the central location
pull in the traffic. Konrad’s scenes, therefore,
apply not only to the plight of the intellectual,
but as I have tried to suggest, to the plight two
decades later of the everyday consumer/citizen against
the power structure that supplants the Soviet state
and the Western democracy.
Konrad
concludes his section from the novel: ‘There
are no grey areas; the state culture has a ready-made
statement on just about everything. If you don’t
want to run up against taboos, be sure your mind gropes
around ever so gingerly. Better yet, do not have anything
in your head that was not put in by the culture—that
way you won’t entertain thoughts that might induce
you to dissemble. Do not simply turn down the person
who asks you to sign a letter of protest—turn
him in.’ Those in Budapest, as in many other
lands, who found themselves co-opted by the system
against which they had once in youth rebelled, often
ingratiated themselves with the authorities by turning
tout. After 1956 there, after 1968 in Prague, after
decades in Derry or Belfast, we know thanks to testimony
preserved—often via samdizat rather than the
mainstream media—these choices of loyalty and
betrayal. The parallels between state socialism then
and state capitalism now persist. Flags and emblems
may change, but human behaviour persists.
A
final note may summarise the difficulty behind such
easy comparisons and truisms. In Hungarian, A mincos
translates as ‘the panderer’ or ‘the
accomplice.’ Ivan Sanders chose in 1982 to render
the title as ‘The Loser.’ While the Magyar
original emphasises the go-between nature of the intellectual
trapped between the machinations of the lustful power
the State and the ambiguous object of the State’s
desire, the English version conveys the emptiness
accompanying one’s surrender to the State. Like
Winston Smith under the chestnut tree at the conclusion
of 1984, we never know when our tormentors
will summon us to our own personal fears in Room 101.
Many, in Konrad’s time and ours, could not resist
the forces allied against one individual’s rebellion.
Yet, unlike Oceania, we in the extended, ever-warring
empires of our world can still hope that our articles
find an audience and an enduring forum that evades
the censor, the sharp tool or excision, and the bully-boot
threatening to crush the human face, voice, spirit,
and all our individual complexity. This message presents
the rationale for the Orwells, Konrads, and Blankets
of our time. Like our predecessors, we lack one ultimate
truth. Yet, as these two authors have insisted, we
speak for the neglected. Biased as all our interpretations
may be, we have the right to speak out as and on behalf
of the unheard and the whispering voices.
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