Worlds Apart? A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945 East-Central European Culture
By
Cristina andru
Worlds Apart? A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945 East-Central European Culture, by Cristina andru
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2012 by Cristina andru
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3999-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3999-0
To my parents, who have always believed in me
To my niece and godchild, Natalia, that she may grow to understand the past and love books
Part I: A Controversial Paradigm: Postcolonialism in East-Central Europe
Chapter One............................................................................................... 14 Cultures of Empire 1.1 Relocating the Postcolonial: Towards a post-Cold War Cultural Critique 1.2 Imperial Formations and Post-imperial Identities: Nationalism, Balkanism and Eastern Europe 1.3 Post-Cold War Legacies: Nostalgia, Memory and Neo-colonial Cultures
Chapter Two.............................................................................................. 54 East-Central Europe as Colonised Space: The Empire of Communist Ideology 2.1. On Ideology, Utopia and its Terroristic Fictions 2.2. The Two-sided Intellectual Wall 2.3. Cooptation, Censorship and Cultural Resistance
Chapter Three............................................................................................ 96 Dissidence, Complicity and Resistance: The Poetics and Politics of Literary Production in Post-totalitarian East-Central Europe 3.1. Resistance and Overcoding: When Language Means without Signifying 3.2. Documentary Realism and the Intellectual Novel: Memorialising Terror 3.3. Postmodernist Intersections and Narrative Experiment 3.4. The Literature of the Parable and the Dystopian Imagination 3.5. In the Footsteps of Bakhtinian Carnival: Post- totalitarian Fiction and Magical Realism Table of Contents
viii Part II: Narratives of Remembering and Forgetting: Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie
Chapter Four............................................................................................ 170 Translators between Cultures: Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie 4.1. Exilic Sensibility and the Migrant Imagination: Intellectual Allegiances and Aesthetic Choices 4.2. Sites of Memory, Frontiers, and Worlds In-between: The Politics of Cultural Translation 4.3. Demystifying Truths: In the World of Play, Magic and Carnival
Chapter Five............................................................................................ 208 The Trouble with History: Re-visions and Re-writings 5.1. Inside the Idyll: The Bitter J oke of History 5.2. Pickling the Past, Telling Stories: The Allegories of History
Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 240 The Imagological Age: A Physiognomy of the Contemporary 6.1. Europe in Disarray: Kitsch and the Commodification of Culture 6.2. Cultures of Excess, or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Present
The beginning of any sustained exercise of writing is, as any writer whether academic or creative knows, a rather awkward moment: the blank screen stretches dauntingly ahead, and one cannot help but wonder whether the ideas, and the conceptual impulse behind them, will coalesce successfully into a coherent, persuasive and elegantly-shaped whole. So I shall start somewhat predictably by sharing a few reflections on the genealogy, context and intellectual ambitions of this study. As an East- Central European scholar with a personal investment in my research- subject, I am acutely aware of writing from within that uncomfortable space of the native informant in the West or, in postcolonial parlance, as a comprador intellectual, with all the ambivalences that result from such problematic self-identification. The impulse that has gradually shaped the contours and substance of this book (in its initial form as a doctoral project successfully completed a few years ago) was a desire to translate the ideological and cultural specificity of communist life experiences into the theoretical and critical languages with most currency in todays humanistic studies. The most self-evident paradigm within which one could articulate this impulse was, it seemed to me, that of postcoloniality; the long-gestating project has in the meantime acquired numerous extra-layers and has changed direction a number of times as a result of developments in postcolonial scholarship, as well as the complex cultural and intellectual transformations that East-Central European countries have been undergoing after their release from the grip of communist autocratic rule in 1989. A decade after the annus mirabilis of 1989, Salman Rushdie was summing up the sombre spirit of the times in this somewhat dispiriting pronouncement:
The collapse of communism, the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the wall, was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. Instead, the post-Cold war world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many of us stiff. We retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller stockades, imprisoned ourselves in narrower, even more fanatical definitions of ourselves religious, regional, ethnic and readied ourselves for war. (Rushdie 2003, 301)
Introduction
2 Indeed, few critical intellectuals would have anticipated in the early nineties the direction of the momentous changes brought about by the end of the Cold War. After an initial period of joyous triumphalism at the prospect of a finally united, happily globalised planet, a variety of hardly anticipated tensions emerged, as statal units collapsed under vicious ethnic conflict and economic deprivation set in. The situation replicated in a paradoxical way the post-independence moment in much of the Third World half a century earlier, which saw the desired achievement of decolonisation drown in tribalism, excessive nationalism and political dictatorship. On a different level, the post-Cold War era as the decolonisation decades that preceded it has recast the players on the contemporary scene, with the local and the regional now standing in for the national or colonised, and the global rearticulating the imperial (Moraru 2005, 89). The end result of the ensuing economic insecurity, coupled with political ignorance and a variety of popular resentments, is that sectarian violence and mutated xenophobia have made a triumphant if unexpected comeback. This has led to the resurgence of the same old/new set of stereotypical images, projected by a media thirsty for scandal and the extraordinary, and entailing a reduction and simplification of complex situations into what Samuel Huntington has dubbed a clash of civilisations (1996). His formulation of inherent civilisational rifts has uncovered a form of metaracism which no longer works on visible assumptions of superiority, but locks individuals and groups a priori into their cultural genealogy and insists on maintaining frontiers and a healthy distance from the Other, typologically incompatible cultures 1 . This forma mentis is the obverse side of the ethics of competition set by the Western world to its decolonised peripheries and the newly liberated Eastern neighbours across
1 The following excerpt from Etienne Balibar, the Frech social theorist who has originally coined the term metaracism, is illuminating: The new racism is a racism of the era of decolonization, of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space. Ideologically, current racism fits into a framework of racism without races which is already widely developed in other countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones. It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but only the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is what P. A. Taguieff has rightly called a differentialist racism (E. A. Balibar 1991, 21). Worlds Apart? 3 the Berlin Wall, in which the strict monitoring of economic parameters has only served to re-confirm old structures of civilisational difference. This presumed post-ideological universe of pragmatic administration, consensus and dialogue goes hand in hand with an aestheticised hedonism (iek 1997, 37) working under the guise of a plurality of ways of life which conceals a foreclosed political passion that makes its triumphant comeback under the guise of xenophobia and terrorism. In his study After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia? (2004), Paul Gilroy uses the concepts of melancholia and conviviality to explore Britains failure to come to terms with the loss of its empire and pre-eminent global position, and its inability to value the unruly and non-standard multi-culturalism that has evolved organically (but off-centre) in its major cities. Instead, multiculturalism has been reduced to a multitude of ethnic cuisines and the traditionally-clad colourful populace that one can see in the London public transportation system (iek 1997, 37). It has become, in Balibars terms, an otherness- within-the-limits-of-citizenship (E. Balibar 2002, 159), signifying that which is tameable, assimilable, regimentable. The Other is only tolerated in its aseptic, benign form when its irreducible alterity emerges out of the ghettoised quarters of big cities, the shock of its unexpected hatred shatters the thin layer of peaceful coexistence. The real Other re- emerges as the violent, fundamentalist, deceitful beast that it had always been, its essential alien-ness from our values vindicated by the unpardonable atrocities it perpetrates. As a result, the crises of cultural authority, national identity and democratic conscience persist in spite of or maybe also because of the much bandied about multicultural vocation of Western liberal-democratic society. While the social body implodes into group particularity and exclusivist fragmentariness, each element of a fractured subjectivity race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual affiliation claims totality and primacy over the others. Such universals that the postmodern moment has so cleverly dismantled have returned to haunt us with a vengeance, reinstating religious, national and ethnic structures of feeling as powerful categories of human action. For in the economic, political and intellectual spaces between the West and the rest, relationships continue to be uneven, polarized, and, above all, remembered differently hence a certain rhetoric of blame (Said 1994, 19) and the resurrection of various enemy figures, chief among which the illegal immigrant and, recently, the Introduction
4 terrorist 2 . Imperium might have become a shared memory, but it has preserved a highly conflictual texture of culture, ideology, and policy (Said 1994, 11). These somewhat unexpected developments have sent ripples through the newly-settled and increasingly canonical mode of postcolonial cultural analysis, forcing the discipline to respond to the challenges that globalisation poses, and to modulate its engagement with contemporary neo-imperial practices by supplementing a certain set of preoccupations centred around the narrative of decolonisation with others (environmentalism, the war on terror, new geographies etc.). By and large, it succeeded in adapting its modes of critique to the new, post-Cold War dispositions of power and influence, and their resultant inequities; indeed, so successful has it been that the postcolonial has moved in recent years from being a historical marker to a globally inflected term applicable to a variety of regions, as the recent collection of essays I co-edited with Janet Wilson and Sarah Lawson Welsh (Rerouting the Postcolonial, Routledge, 2009) suggests. Yet in one crucial respect the postcolonial paradigm has fallen short of its critical potential and ethical ambition, namely in its interaction or lack thereof with the communist Second World and its post- communist aftermath. Clearly the most significant event marking the end of the 20 th century was the fall of the Soviet Union and its outlying satellite system; the break-up of communist modes of government has been posing a variety of challenges ideological as well as economic ever since. In particular, as far as our discipline is concerned, it has stressed the need to reformulate neo-Marxist models of postcolonial critique to account for a post- communist set of realities and the resurgence of neo-liberalism in the former Second World. Yet concrete efforts in this sense have, so far, been few and far-between; and, with notable exceptions, relatively little account has been taken of the communist historical experiment in theorisations of
2 In his interview with Homi Bhabha in Relocating Postcolonialism, John Comaroff traces a number of metaphorical connections between the two: the immigrant as the living metonym of the global age [the] cipher of new signs and practices, of novel imaginings, of possibility, of danger and pollution, illness and contagion, trespasser of boundaries, inhabiting an interstitial space of ambiguity and contradiction, becomes a figure of symbolic transgression that is uncannily paralleled by the image of the international terrorist, an equally shadowy figure, invisible and anonymous, who slips easily across borders, impersonating the civilised citizen: like the immigrant, the international terrorist erases boundaries and opens up new ruptures in which the uncontrollable, the unmentionable, might take place (Goldberg 2002, 26; 28). Worlds Apart? 5 the postcolonial. It is in this particular scholarly context that I would like to situate my comparative project, starting from the premise that the postcolonial paradigm is open and flexible enough to be able (and willing) to address its own blind spots and ideological biases, of which the reluctance to engage with (post)communist experiences is surely one of the most significant. While fully aware of the difficulties in bringing together perspectives that are differentially charged across historical and ideological contexts, my view is that, if we are to revitalize postcolonial studies, we need to search for a dialogic space that is beyond the discipline, but adjacent to its interests and sensitivities. Such a space, I contend, is East-Central Europe, whose cultural identity has been crucially shaped by its history of subjection to foreign rule. Postcolonial perspectives and methodologies can be used productively in order to shed light on instances of ideological colonisation and resistance common to the cultures of the region. Such a comparative approach could help amend a state of undertheorisation of postcommunism, and simultaneously enhance the scope of postcolonial theory to an area where it can meet, and thus conceptualise, its borders. Clearly, there are several levels of difficulty in such a comparative enterprise. With its mix of ethnicities, religions, and imperial legacies, East-Central Europe poses similar problems to those faced by postcolonial critics seeking a synthetic cross-cultural approach to the question of empire and its aftermath. The pressure of nationalist impulses has often precluded a collective examination of the regions historical experiences and their reflection and imprint on the cultures thereof; as M. Corni-Pope and John Neubauer remark in their introduction to the monumental 4- volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004- 2010), there are many local and national literary histories, but very few comparative and/or collective enterprises. In political science or sociology this has sometimes been tried, with theorists looking at the outcomes of the transition period in postcommunist East-Central Europe, for instance, in parallel with similar cases of nation and state (re-)building in the postcolonial world, particularly Latin America. Yet in terms of culture, each national entity tends to compare itself primarily, often exclusively, with the Western model it seeks to emulate, much more rarely with neighbouring cultures, to say nothing of non-European ones. The yet more salient difficulty concerns the multiple levels of disjuncture that one must consider when attempting a comparative analysis of the two major posts of the 20 th century: differential inflections in terms of historical and geographical coordinates; divergent types of imperial occupation; asynchronous advents of modernity; different practices Introduction
6 of othering; and, finally, post-Cold War ideological emphases. It is therefore important to discuss briefly some of the ways in which the two posts, both marking the nominal fall of empires, can be seen to simultaneously converge and diverge. Clearly, a parallel can be traced between the development of postcolonial, respectively postcommunist, critical analysis within emerging sub-disciplines: postcolonialism, insofar as it existed as a distinct field of inquiry at the time, was dominated at its inception by monumental studies such as Edward Saids Orientalism (1978), with its emphasis on colonial representations of the Other; it then shifted gradually to a preoccupation with forms of active resistance on the part of the colonised even when this resistance was construed as ambivalent or ambiguous in relation to its object. A similar process is now occurring in postcommunist studies there already exists a wealth of research on the ideological and structural underpinnings of the communist system, as well as on the various forms and embodiments this has taken in East-Central Europe, much of it the preserve of political science; a lot less has been produced on the cultures of accommodation and resistance during communism (in both its totalitarian and post-totalitarian phases 3 ), which is the main reason why I dedicate a substantial part of this book to amend this state of relative neglect. Although the past decade has seen a rapid acceleration of this particular trend, few studies have attempted to link the two majors posts of the 20 th century, and, indeed, one can more readily see the obvious ways in which they differ rather than the subtler ways in which they inform each other. If one looks at an abridged version of the century that has recently ended, one can discern an asymmetrical historical timeline between much of the Third World (used as a purely functional term here, for reasons of brevity and inclusiveness) and the East-Central and South-East European regions: Europes Eastern regions have entered their first post-imperial decades immediately after the end of the First World War, and have experienced thereafter the birth-pangs of national projects of development, as well as the excesses of nationalism and the lures of extreme ideologies; during this time, the rest of the colonial world was still very much alive, even though signs of its impending decay were already evident to perspicacious analysts. Then, after the end of the Second World War, when the colonial world started crumbling, East-Central Europe entered a new imperial age, driven by ideology, but imposed by the military and
3 See Vaclav Havels definition of the post-totalitarian phase of communism in his essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) included in the volume Living in Truth, 1986. For an online version of the essay, see http://vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_eseje.html&typ=HTML Worlds Apart? 7 political might of the Soviet Union. In this respect, as many commentators have argued, the true significance of the Cold War, beyond its political repercussions, emerges from its role as a form of knowledge and representation of the world which has neatly filled the gap left by the rapid dissolution of Western empires after WWII: it laid down, in a different fashion, but using old assumptions and binaries, the conceptual geography grounded in the East / West opposition. Not only was East-Central Europe part of this new epistemic paradigm, but the Third (non-aligned) World too, itself a creation of the Cold War and subject to its action on both sides of the ideological divide. The relevant question that any postcolonial approach should ask, therefore, does not only concern the construction of the West and its forms of globalised capitalism, but also how numerous postcolonies were affected by socialist ideological pressures and promises. Indeed, while the post-1945 rhetoric common to both the Third World and East-Central Europe was one of liberation and independence, a more or less overt neo-colonial process was taking place: the post-imperial liberation assumed either a capitalist globalising flavour (in much, though by no means all, of the Third World), while liberation in the East of Europe, by and large undesired and deeply resented, took the form of applied Marxist-Leninism. While a large chunk of the postcolonial intelligentsia was advocating or, in some cases, seeking to implement, the Marxist project (as a liberating alternative to neo-colonial capitalism), East-Europeans were waiting (in vain) for the Americans with their capitalism to free them from under the boot of the Big Socialist Brother . Hence the continuing misunderstanding and suspicion between the two worlds, if I may be forgiven such a lack of theoretical subtlety, the reluctance on both sides to engage in a meaningful dialogue, a wilful opacity to the others particular baggage of historical experience, only occasionally illuminated by (mostly timid and over-hedged) comparative forays. This, of course, is a very schematic representation, for the Marxist experiment took hold of a sizable part of the liberated Third World as well, before it crumbled under the weight of its own atrocities or mismanagement; and the post-1968 decades in East-Central Europe lost much of their revolutionary Marxist flavour and became bureaucratically frozen in a state-capitalism of sorts, the contours of which are best described by Vaclav Havels term of post-totalitarianism. After 1989, the blanket domination of global capitalism has placed the two regions in even closer proximity to each other, though arguably the East/West rhetoric has given way to an earlier North/South divide. East-Central Europe is now going through its own accelerated postcolonial period, Introduction
8 which is many ways replicates more closely a whole range of post- decolonisation social, political and cultural phenomena than the anti- totalitarian movements of the 1970s and 1980s. In this asymmetrical historical timeline, one can nonetheless identify a certain overlap of ideological/ cultural stages that post-imperial nations have gone through. Thus, for instance, forms of nationalism or Marxism have marked the history of both post-imperial East-Central European cultures and postcolonial societies, and, as suggested in the brief synopsis above, many aspects of the latters historical development are refracted in the evolution of East-Central Europe today. For every disjuncture one can respond with an equal number of potentially shared experiences hence a certain commonality, or, rather, certain shared dispositions in the way cultural representations in postcolonial societies and East-Central Europe have responded to their various imperial legacies. A dialogic space can thus be created, which could accommodate problems common for both, such as: structures of exclusion/ inclusion (the centre/ periphery model and theorisations of the liminal and in-between); formations of nationalism, structures of othering and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (which involves issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re- writing of history); resistance as a complex of discourses ranging from openly oppositional to carnivalesque and magical realist. Insofar as East-Central Europe has been seen through a postcolonial lens, the main approaches have been variations on the Orientalist model (in key studies by Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova and Vesna Goldsworthy). The main achievement of these studies lies in their recovery of the silenced voice of Europe that other Europe whose invisibility in both Western and postcolonial theorisations of the continents historical development was central to the formation of a certain occidentalist vision of what it means to be European. At the same time, they highlight the specific character that imperial domination has taken in the region, of which the tendency towards self-colonisation in relation to the West is central and goes a long way in explaining the current ideological climate in East-Central Europe, in which the Western model of economic and social development (in its most libertarian forms) reigns uncontested. These have provided central findings for my own comparative enterprise, and will be probed extensively in chapter one. Yet this analytical framework, while of undisputed scholarly significance, does not in itself explain the persistence of certain modes of thinking in the West in relation to the new members of the European Worlds Apart? 9 family 4 . The critical space occupied by dissident voices in communist times has by and large been filled in the post-communist decades by unrestrained capitalism, conspicuous consumption and an ever-widening gap of wealth and opportunity between various categories of citizens. As Katharine Verderey and Sharad Chari remark in their seminal article on the conjunctures and disjunctures between postcolonialism and post- socialism, the process of transition in post-Cold War East-Central Europe has brought with it a cocktail of accelerated marketisation, commodification and integration in the global circuit of capital; this, coupled with a large supply of cheap labour and the very postcolonial phenomenon of economic migration to the affluent metropolis (from brain-drain to the siphoning off of skilled labour), has turned the region into the capitalist Wests proximate Third World. The dominant response to these complex post-Cold War developments has been to attribute all failings of democratic governance and capitalist enterprise to the negative political, social and cultural legacies of the communist regime. In more ways than one this is a valid argument, borne out, as we shall see, by the traumatic disruptions in the fabric of both public and private life that almost half a century of imposed ideological orthodoxy has inevitably effected. Yet the conglomerate legacies of communist political and economic governance cannot by themselves explain the nefarious aspects of contemporary policy-making in the region. The political and economic developments in the countries of East-Central Europe also raise difficult questions about how one can conceptualise post-colonial futures in the absence of a competing framework to capitalism. While the traditions of critical Marxism can be used to throw light on certain aspects of the rapacious form that unregulated capitalism has taken in the more vulnerable parts of the world (and, increasingly, within its core Western region), I do not believe that the failed socialist experiment can offer any basis from which we can start thinking the conditions of possibility for an alternative to the current dominance of finance-based capitalism. On the other hand, the retrieval impulse characteristic of postcolonial modes of investigation can and should be extended to post-Cold War East- Central Europe and its complex and turbulent communist past. Where my project differs from similar undertakings, of which Natasha Kovacevics study Narrating Postcommunism: Colonial Discourse and Europes Borderline Civilization (2008) is probably the most sustained and
4 By European family I specifically mean the EU here; the East European nations either ex-Soviet or ex-Yugoslav republics which have not yet joined this political organisation pose an even more challenging problem. Introduction
10 systematic, is in the insertion of the postcolonial problematic into a comparative framework in which communist (post)totalitarianism is the main analytic category, rather than the various forms of Western hegemony over East-Central Europe, both predating and post-dating the 20 th century communist experiment. That said, I am not interested in how the postcolonial can provide a theoretical matrix for postcommunist transitions; nor will I be applying ready-made postcolonial precepts and methodologies to examine communist ideological imperialism in East- Central Europe. The key question to pose here is not whether postcolonial modes of analysis are applicable in the wider post-communist context (a question that has had many positive replies in the past decade or so, particularly from scholars working from within postcommunist studies in East-Central Europe), but, rather, how they might be applied. Many postcolonial approaches particularly those formulated in neo-Marxist terms, from an ideological position that cannot accommodate a coupling of the post-phase of socialism with the post of capitalist colonisation are certain to view such comparative enterprises as, at best, of doubtful scholarly effectiveness, or, at worst, as fallacious and illegitimate. Yet while all disciplines must have a relatively circumscribed field of inquiry and a clearly defined area of investigation, they also generate knowledges that go beyond the preoccupations defining their initial emergence; they create, in other words, translational spaces. The trope of translation used in this particular sense (of one culture into another, of a cultural object from one context into another etc.) thus opens up the possibility of (re)shaping and (re)conceptualizing the relationship between post- communism and post-colonialism, as Monica Popescu suggests in her article Translations: Lenins Statues, Post-communism, and Post- apartheid, with reference to post-Soviet and post-Apartheid cultures (Popescu 2003, 408). It is on this translational premise that my study is based, that the two different posts, both marking the wake of empires, can successfully translate their methodologies, instruments and hermeneutic practices within the space of differential cultural contexts. Accordingly, the following chapters will look at the ideological structures, cultural trends and literary practices in communist and post- communist East-Central Europe in terms of their reflection of, and response to, previous decades of imperial influence or occupation. My contrastive approach in both theory and textual interpretation capitalises on points of confluence such as: the constitutive splitting at the level of both culture and subjectivity; the construction of colonialism/communism as ambivalent processes, triggering differential moments of resistance, accommodation and complicity; the phenomena of nationalism, exile and Worlds Apart? 11 immigration; the role of an imaginatively shared past and memory in the re-writing of history; the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance in the post-1945 cultures of East-Central Europe; textual resistance as a doubly-inscripted or overcoded discourse, with particular focus on literary and filmic modes (from documentary realism to dystopian visions, from postmodernist experiment to magical realism and black humour). At the same time, it reveals moments of rupture, which pre-empt the conflation of differentially constituted historical and cultural experiences, and the valorisation of certain types of subjectivities or political agencies at the expense of others. Structurally, the book consists of two interrelated parts. Part one is a critical discussion of the ideologies, cultural imaginaries and representational practices articulated in a diverse range of representative postcolonial and post-1945 East-Central European texts; these are shown to share, despite dissimilar conditions of production, uncannily related narrative modes and thematic emphases. Part two is a comparative literature case-study which discusses two authors whose work is both highly representative of the cultural formations I compare (Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie) and, at the same time, highly controversial. While I do not construe their work to stand, metonymically, for postcolonial, East-Central European or (post)communist fiction in general, they are highly visible practitioners of the genre, and do provide a measure of illustrativeness many of the thematic emphases and narrative devices that their novels embrace stem from more general tendencies, as I show in my discussion of the literatures of accommodation and resistance in post-totalitarian East-Central Europe in the third chapter of this book. My main interest is in the cultural geography of Kunderas and Rushdies novels, particularly in the writers use of memory and story-telling to reconfigure history and personal identity in conditions of literal and metaphorical dis-placement. While their novels thrive on ironic subversion and ambiguity, they simultaneously gesture towards a redemptive space of the imagination, transcending the constraints of both locality and history. One final caveat: I should add that I do not intend to examine and discuss the phenomenon of resistance in all its diverse and complex embodiments; nor will I be able to offer a comprehensive assessment of the multiplicity of literary production in what is culturally and linguistically a very variegated region. Objective limitations of working with translations aside, I do not think it is possible, or even desirable, to perform such a mammoth task. Rather, this book is an attempt to look at some of the ways in which a selection of writers in East Central Europe have used practices of subversion, resistance and experimentation in order Introduction
12 to breach the monolithic political and cultural order in which they were forced to create. I must avow, too, that my selection of writers and writings reflects my own background, interests and cultural attachments; other choices and comparisons could have been made, with equally fruitful results. I should hope, however, that this will not prevent my readers from engaging with the arguments I advance, and, in the process, think of alternative examples based in their own backgrounds and historical experiences. The interpretive model I have sought to build does not exclude other readings and meanings I would like to believe it complements them.
PART I: A CONTROVERSIAL PARADIGM: POSTCOLONIALISM IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE
CHAPTER ONE CULTURES OF EMPIRE
In his study Culture and Imperialism (1994), Said argues for the necessity of a contrapuntal approach in the examination of the overlapping territories and intertwined histories of imperial domination, one whose aim is to identify distinct moments of resistance excluded from standard accounts of European rule. Such an approach would not involve solely an examination of overseas colonial settlements, but also engage the complexities of the making of Europe, its own internal colonies, its history of internal conquest, annexation, disruption and devaluation of certain cultures and languages. Internal expansion, after all, predates overseas expansion by several centuries, and the coalescing of nation- states began as an enterprise of overland conquest, thereafter consolidated by competition in overseas colonisation. This analytic approach, insisting as it does on the faculty of boundary-crossing (both in geographical and disciplinary terms) and reading cultures and histories together synchronously and coevally, enables me to interrogate the multiple versions of the Orient, not only outside, but also inside Europe, particularly in the guise of its Eastern spaces. In other words, I intend to use Saids double-inflected notion of travelling theory in its revised acceptation, rather than in its initial formulation as domesticated analytical paradigm 1 .
1 In his 1982 essay Travelling Theory (included in the collection The World, the Text and the Critic, 1984), Said questions the ability of theories that have originally been developed in specific locations in response to a definite set of historical and social circumstances to preserve their insurgent spirit and sharpness when they migrate to different historical-ideological locations. With the passage from one location to another, theory runs the threat of becoming tamed, domesticated from an insurrectionary idea into just another analytical paradigm that is useful mostly for professional mobility or for policing a new orthodoxy. A dozen years later, Said revised this argument by proposing that ideas and theories can also be reinvigorated and made to speak to whole new political situations when they travel from one location to another. See Traveling Theory Reconsidered (Said 2000, 456-452). Cultures of Empire
15 Much has been written in the past decades about the various postcolonial regions of the world, in great detail and specificity and across an impressive range of disciplines (from historiography, anthropology, colonial discourse analysis, and sociology to literary criticism and cultural studies), while comparatively little has been written and published about Europes Eastern regions, beside traditional books of history, political science or travelogues. The kind of interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and ethically-engaged investigation that has been applied to postcolonial histories and cultures is still underdeveloped in the region of Europe formerly under Soviet influence. Other scholars have also remarked on the lack of a synthetic theoretical construction similar to the conceptual reach of postcolonial theory from Canada and Australia to Nigeria and India, as well as on the scarcity of critical utensils of wide applicability in the region (Moore 2001; Ooiu 2003; Popescu 2003). The competing disciplines that have emerged (such as Central European Studies, or postcommunist studies), and the sometimes minute analyses confined to specific geographical regions, still fail to encompass them all:
in the thirteen years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the yet-to-be- coalesced discipline of postcommunist studies has failed to produce a theoretical construction that should have acquired the intellectual force, cultural prestige, and scholarly coherence that postcolonial studies have in the Western world. (Ooiu 2003, 89)
This book is, among others, an attempt to address this failure, and an exercise in the type of cultural critique that postcolonialism has consistently practiced in the past few decades. What gives the postcolonial its theoretical force and makes it a suitable point of departure in my comparative analysis is the articulation of how structures of domination work, how models of alterity are formed, and how the imbrication of power and knowledge produces ideologically interpellated subjects, as well as the emphasis on how subjects negotiate and contest these hegemonic ideological structures. This is why it has been taken up, with varying degrees of success, by Central and Eastern European scholars based at academic institutions in the West, since it has proved to be a useful paradigm for interrogating the construction and representation of this other Europe in the Western imaginary. Indeed, a growing body of research has diagnosed the structures of domination and representation that mark the interaction between Western metropolitan centres and the Third World as very similar in style, accent and underlying attitude to those practiced by the same Occidental powers towards their adjacent others in East-Central Europe. In identifying the strategies of othering Chapter One 16 and practices of discursive (and often also political and economic) mastery deployed by Western Europe over its Eastern half, such work has borrowed from and reworked extensively key concepts in postcolonial theory and criticism. This was not a favour much returned by scholars working in the postcolonial field, who, with notable exceptions and these of a very recent date 2 have remained largely uninterested in the potential parallels that could be traced with East-Central Europes own imperial past, whether distant or more recent. In particular, there is a curious lack of engagement on the part of postcolonial theorists and critics with the situation specific to the former Soviet colonies, which has led to various analysts observation that postcolonialism is the paradoxical example of a world system with no theory of its former Second World (Moore 2001, 117). Thus, the Eastern part of Europe, which until recently constituted the Second World, either appears to fully partake of the discourse of Eurocentrism, or is figured as an absence there is nothing in-between Western Europe and the Third World. When East-Central Europe is mentioned at all, it is only as a passing reference to the collapse of communist ideology (usually connoting regret at the foundering of the utopian-revolutionary ideal of anti-capitalist liberation struggle) and the embrace by the Second World of the globalising-capitalist West 3 . Anne McClintock is among the few postcolonial critics who refers to the totalitarian rule of the former USSR over East-Central Europe in the context of imperialism, touching on the implications that the demise of the socialist idea now a morally discredited narrative of progress and emancipation might have for a politically-engaged postcolonial criticism (McClintock 1993). Her intervention is all the more remarkable in the context of continued exhortations to join [the] intelligible and still viable indigenous resources and old-age traditions of colonial resistance with the ethical horizon and utopian reach of socialism (Parry 2004, 301, my emphasis). After the downfall of one of the centurys most horrendous projects of social
2 See the 2010 conference at the University of York entitled What Postcolonial Theory Doesnt Say and a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing dedicated to a comparative discussion of postcolonialism and postcommunism (48.2, May 2012). 3 Thus, in his article The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality, Aijaz Ahmad speaks about the progressive projects of socialism and anti-imperialist nationalisms (285) and makes a derisive reference to the rise of conservative, market-friendly regimes in the erstwhile Comecom countries (285), in which one can read more than a tinge of regret at the collapse of socialist regimes in East- Central Europe. Cultures of Empire
17 engineering, and the revelation of the violence and indignity it has perpetrated, it is disturbing to read pronouncements of such a projects ethical horizon. The elision of communist and postcommunist experiences in a variety of postcolonial discourses 4 addresses indirectly the difficulty of situating a phenomenon which cannot be comfortably framed within either an Occidentalist or a Third World-ist paradigm. It is also indicative of the potentially disabling problem posed by a comparative approach which seeks to find a common ground in intellectual perspectives that are differentially charged across historical and ideological contexts. It is, indeed, highly unlikely that a left-wing Western academic, a postcolonial Neo-Marxist critic and a civic-liberal Eastern European intellectual will share many commonalities in a dispassionate examination of Marxism and its historical consequences. This begs the question, before any further comparative effort is expanded, of whether the respective systems which they purport to be supplanting share anything ideologically or in terms of practices. Apparently colonialism and communism could not be more different: one capitalist, pragmatic, based on competition, exploitation of labour and maximal return of profit, and, politically, on a paternalistic/ hierarchical system whereby the (superior) elite (the colonials) govern the (inferior) masses (the colonised). The ideology of communism, on the other hand, is nominally based on equality, community of decision, communal labour and sharing of profit, and government representative of the working people. It appears that the two systems share very little indeed. In practice, however, communist systems could be accused of all the evils of capitalism, and many more besides, and in many respects the workings (if not the theoretical premises) of the two ideological systems have led to similarly disastrous consequences in terms of human suffering, deprivation, humiliation and destruction of cultural traditions. With one crucial difference communisms roots in radical, utopian emancipatory ideals, its universalist tenor, is precisely what rendered it both so dangerously appealing and so essentially terroristic: because it could not conceive of compromise, pragmatism, or negotiation, and tended to see things in black and white, it has gone to greater lengths of systematic violence than most colonial systems did; the latter, despite sharing the
4 Speaking of the great outrages of the twentieth century, John Comaroff mentions all (the Holocaust, apartheid, colonialism, racism, the excesses of industrial capitalism) except the Gulag and the wholesale destruction of traditional civilisations perpetrated by communism, not only in East-Central Europe, but also in various parts of the formerly colonised world, in Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, etc. Chapter One 18 logic of us and them, did not deny the ontological basis of otherness and alterity. The non-Western Other may have been perceived as different, indeed inferior to the Western self; the main point, however, was not to exterminate it, but chiefly to dominate and, perhaps, civilise it (and in the process make it indistinguishable from the self). No such desire existed in the totalitarian version of us and them whether of a fascist or a communist stripe; in these systems, the racial or class Other was the Enemy, and no ethical considerations could forestall its systematic annihilation. If in their expansionist foreign policies liberal democracies applied principles that ran against the premises that prevailed in their domestic systems of governance, they also benefitted from the compromising and pragmatic influence of the economic system on which they were based capitalism. Chapter two of this study will have a great deal more to say on why a postcolonial examination of post-war East- Central Europe under Soviet-style communism is not only a good idea, but essential in understanding the dynamics of the post-Cold War ideological order. In addition, there is a strong case to be made for such a rapprochement to start coalescing at this time as postcolonial modes of analysis become institutionalised and increasingly canonical, thus partly losing their critical edge, approaches which situate colonialism in the context of the centurys other major sites of trauma, such as the Holocaust and the communist camp and forced-labour system, could serve to reinvigorate the discipline and help propel it beyond its comfort zone and its mainstay object of critique, global neo-colonial capitalism. 1.1. Relocating the Postcolonial: Toward a post-Cold War Cultural Critique Imperialism can be defined as the policy or practice whereby a state extends its rule over other territories, cultivating unequal international relations of economic and political authority, coupled with an exercise of knowledge and representation that construes the metropolitan centre as superior in material, intellectual, and moral terms. Yet it has most often been construed as a specifically Western overseas practice quintessentially British, or American in its more contemporary forms. This assumption, or construction, has been at the heart of most classic versions of postcolonialism, firmly placed there by the disciplines founding figures. Thus, for instance, the late Edward Said, while acknowledging the existence of other imperial projects (such as the Habsburg, Russian or Cultures of Empire
19 Ottoman ones, which Hannah Arendt usefully described as continental 5 ), only chooses to examine the British, French and American experiences of empire, because, in his view, they possess a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality (Said 1994, xxv) 6 . Moreover, in deconstructions of Western structures of authority, postcolonial theorists all too often conceptualise Europe as specifically Western, in effect replicating the homogenising gesture which construes the Third World as a unitary field of analysis. They treat Europe as their opposite pole, and as a result conflate their concept of Europe to fit the European/postcolonial binary opposition. Even while deploring the totalising gaze of Western knowledge that seeks to subsume distinct traditions, cultures and subjectivities under a coherent system of representation (such as Orientalism), many postcolonial critics perpetuate a similar type of epistemic violence by erasing from the intellectual and cultural map of Europe those small nations which have never been part of the imperial project. This conflation effectively screens out non-European colonisation and ignores colonial-type regimes within Europe, both of which have features analogous to those that came into being as a result of European colonization overseas (Peiker 2006). The nominal geographical location of Europe when adopted as a homogenous validation of otherness (as represented by non-Europe) thus occludes the relevant case of the otherness within (or what I call adjacent otherness).
5 As critic Pascal Grosse (2006) remarks, Arendts Origins of Totalitarianism is a constitutive book of postcolonial studies, one whose premises anticipate the present comparative excursus in that it links colonialism as a social and political formation to totalitarian ideologies in Europe, primarily National Socialism, but also communism. 6 As David Moore Chioni remarks in a seminal article on the posts of postcolonial and post-Soviet, Saids granting of primacy to overseas colonisation over colonisation by adjacency is somewhat odd, for it overlooks a drive of power that was in many ways in direct competition with, for instance, British imperial ventures in South-Eastern Asia. On the other hand, Russian expansion in the 19 th
century was consciously mimicking the colonial drive of Western powers, as admittance into the select club of the rich and strong was conditioned by the existence of colonies. Even if Western European powers regarded this advance into Central Asia contemptuously as a conquest of Orientals by other Orientals (as different from the noble-minded crusade of manners and morals that civilised Europe pursued against the barbaric Asians), in Russia itself it was perceived as a kind of revenge against previous conquests of Christian Orthodox Russians by pagan Turkic and Mongol tribes in the 13 th and 14 th centuries. (Moore 2001, 119- 120) Chapter One 20 The above tendency testifies to a surprising lack of awareness of the connections between empires (in the plural) and our common inheritance of ideological predispositions, as well as the problems of remembering and forgetting posed by these connections. As Dennis Walder remarks in his recent study of memory and nostalgia in a postcolonial context (Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation, 2010), most postcolonial critics seem to forget, or to place under erasure, the fact that the British empire was only one among many; he suggests that it would be constructive to examine with more diligence the sometimes barely visible connections and affiliations across as well as within empires. The following section will take up his suggestion and seek to uncover precisely those structures of feeling and reference that align the Western European imperialist project (essentially overseas) with other European imperial projects (essentially continental). The resulting framework is premised on variant forms of power-imposition and ideological/cultural dominance, in which race and the historical experience of colonialism are not allowed to obscure other Western (and non- Western) European constructions of alterity. The (post)colony thus becomes a signifier of cultural violence and ideological imposition a colonisation of the mind, as much as a project of geographical expansion and economic exploitation 7 . In certain important respects, there is no such thing as colonialism in the singular, for the practice was an obviously uneven affair: there were different empires, different colonial strategies, different levels of colonial penetration, control and exploitation (Childs 1997, 10). There were areas in which colonialism was violent, vicious and bloody (Algeria, Kenya), others in which it was relatively swift and peaceful (Nigeria); areas occupied and settled by white colonialists, others in which political and
7 A similar model advocating the conjunct examination of overseas and continental imperial legacies is sketched by Barbara Fuchs in her article Imperium Studies included in the collection of essays Postcolonial Moves (Ingham & Warren, 2003). Imperium studies as theorised by Fuchs addresses histories of expansion, conquest, occupation and colonisation on different temporal and geographical levels, thus dismantling the binary opposition between the metropolitan core and its colonised peripheries privileged in most postcolonial approaches. While building on the central preoccupations of postcolonial theory, i.e. the structure of power-relations, processes of othering, economic exploitation of marginalised peoples, and the cultural significance of border zones, imperium studies attend both to the Europe-in the making and to its internal and external colonies. Her article has been very useful in formulating my own inquiry, within a postcolonial framework, into the dynamics of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and their role in the development of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe. Cultures of Empire
21 institutional control was exercised by a small number of colonial representatives in regional centres of domination (India). Then, of course, there is the paradoxical simultaneity of several types of colonisation in regions such as Australia or Canada, or the equally paradoxical case of the US, once a colony itself, but now the neo-imperial force of economic and cultural globalisation. If we add to this complex panorama the continental imperial projects that have split Europe into a dominant West and a liminal, underdeveloped and variously othered East, the resulting picture becomes even more blurred. After 1945, the wests imperial reach has gradually become softer in the sense of soft power, transferred largely from European empires to American cultural and economic hegemony; yet a hard version of imperialism, of an altogether different nature than previously existent ones, was consolidating its grip on half of Europe and a substantial chunk of the larger world. Yet the Soviet Union is rarely referred to in imperial terms in Western political and cultural analysis outside the sphere of Cold War studies or Sovietology. For the largely leftist Western and postcolonial intelligentsia, that is a label reserved only for the US. But the Soviet Union was a worthy heir of Czarist Russia. It undertook a massive colonisation of Asia and Eastern Europe, both before and after WWII, creating two levels of imperial- ideological control: an inner (internal) one (the states incorporated into the Soviet Union Caucasian states, Central Asia, Ukraine, and, after 1940, the Baltic states and Moldova), and an external layer of orbiting satellites in a state of semi-colonisation the outer (external) Soviet Empire, of which the states of East-Central Europe were a part. While formally independent and autonomous, they were de facto under Soviet ideological, political and economic control, especially up to the late 1960s. Moreover, USSR colonised politically not only its neighbours, but also remote countries such as Angola, Cuba, Mozambique, and Laos through aggressive export of Marxist ideology. For countries in East-Central Europe, Soviet overlordship had all the ingredients of classical colonialism: military occupation, economic exploitation, mass deportation and strategic relocation of Russian-speaking populations in various occupied regions, forced labour, political repression, religious persecution, a cult of the invaders values and culture. Given such diversity of imperial practices, theorists have made sustained efforts to come up with consistent and encompassing typologies of colonialism. Thus, Moore Chioni proposes a triadic structure which places various historical processes of conquest or imposition into one of the following three categories: 1) classic overseas colonisation; 2) internal colonisation or settler colonisation; 3) continental or dynastic colonisation Chapter One 22 (involving the conquest of neighbouring peoples) (120). This model is complicated by the economic system on which various colonial empires were based: whereas Western overseas inroads responded primarily to a capitalist drive for wealth and profit, the strategic-territorial considerations of the feudal-bureaucratic Ottoman or Habsburg empires were rarely formulated in similar terms. In all categories, Soviet imperialism constitutes a case somewhat difficult to integrate, since its colonial impetus was neither capitalist, nor was it an outmoded form of imperial expansion based on territorial acquisition. The glue holding together the Soviet empire was clearly not based on capitalist accumulation; and, although the preservation of already occupied territories in East-Central Europe in order to offset American influence and impose a status-quo of power-balance played a major role in Stalins considerations, the main impetus was ideological. East-Central Europe is therefore the example of an uncomfortably situated region that has experienced a combination of imperial tendencies and practices, most often at work synchronically and coevally. On the one hand, imperium often assumed ambiguous forms, as the territories of East-Central Europe were simultaneously claimed by different imperial powers. Whether they belonged in them institutionally and politically, or were orbiting their zones of influence 8 , their relationships with the neighbouring Western and/or Eastern empires have never been as unequivocally aligned as those between the metropole and its overseas dependencies. At the same time, however, Western practices of othering and peripheralisation, compounded by an uneasy recognition of these territories essential (though backward) Europeanness, have produced a dialectic movement of acceptance/rejection and the split cultural consciousness so characteristic of colonised and postcolonial societies. This schizophrenic mode of self-definition most often rested on the perceived gulf between ones status as peripheral colony and a constant aspiration to emulate a somewhat idealised European model what the American historian Andrew C. Janos calls the demonstration effect of Western economic and cultural models in a constantly lagging-behind Eastern part 9 . In Immanuel Wallersteins systems theory, East-Central
8 Much of Central Europe was an administrative part of the Habsburg Empire, as was (in vastly different ways) most of Southern Europe under the direct sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. Other territories were often buffer zones in which zones of interest conflicted as in Poland, for instance, or in the Romanian principalities. 9 See Andrew C. Janos, East-Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).