Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  One has hardly breathed again after this scene when there is another tightening of poignantly ironic resolution. Father and son walk home together. Outside the door of the D.C.’s office is Sergeant Slama, helmeted, with rifle and fixed bayonet, his ledger under his arm. ‘Good day, my dear Slama,’ says Herr von Trotta. ‘Nothing to report, I suppose.’ ‘No, sir,’ Slama repeats, ‘nothing to report.’

  Carl Joseph is haunted by the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, and though himself inept and undistinguished in his military career, dreams of saving the Emperor’s life as his grandfather did. A failure, haunted as well by the death of Slama’s wife (Roth leaves us to draw our own conclusion that the child she died giving birth to may have been Carl Joseph’s) and his inadvertent responsibility for the death of his only friend in a duel, Carl Joseph’s only fulfilment of this dream is when, incensed by the desecration, he tears from the wall in a brothel a cheap reproduction of the official portrait of the Emperor—that other image which haunts his life. Roth reconceives this small scene in full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her ‘Collateral Campaign’ to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s son at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: ‘We all agree we ought to be glad the swine’s done for.’ Trotta, drunk, takes ‘heroic’ exception—’My grandfather saved the Emperor’s life . . . I will not stand by and allow the dynasty to be insulted!’ He is forced to leave ignominiously.

  As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvellous subtlety what was withheld, longing for release in the father. The aged District Commissioner’s unrealized bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set-pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is first merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.

  The second set-piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The levelling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The D.C. not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is against Carl Joseph’s demission in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph, ‘ “That’s the young fellow I saw at the last manoeuvres.” Since this confused him a little, he added, “You know, he saved my life. Or was that you?” A stranger catching sight of them at this moment might have taken them for brothers . . . the one felt he had changed into a District Commissioner, the other, that he had changed into the Emperor.’ The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin speaks of as ‘an extensiveness of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes.’

  Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before. It is the Internationale. At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the ‘innocent’ past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. ‘Lieutenant Trotta died, not with sword in hand but with two buckets of water.’

  Carl Joseph’s cousin, of The Emperor’s Tomb, has never met him, although Roth knows how to give the reader a frisson by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle at which Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta does link with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut-roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the D.C., cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the D.C. with Jacques composed in a new key), this Trotta forms his warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cabby. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his mega-novel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what have seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and post-war that contain them. Like all Roth’s work, this phase is wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfilment in the relationship between him and her. But it was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year the next war was preparing in his world, his time; although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and—for me—the summation of his work, with Trotta in a café. On that night ‘My friends’ excitement seemed to me superfluous’—as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history, ‘the moment when the door of the cafe flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on the threshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters . . . and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.’

  The Anschluss has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he calls to the vanished waiter. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over ‘uncanny crosses’ that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the Kapuzinergruft, the Emperor’s tomb, ‘where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi’ . . . ‘I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Josef . . . Long live the Emperor!’ The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. ‘So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?’

  I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that he collapsed, for his own death, in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.

  AN EXCHANGE: KENZABURO OE,

  NADINE GORDIMER

  4 April 1998

  Dear Miss Gordimer,

  I am reminding myself of the occasion of the visit you paid to Japan coming all the way from South Africa in the autumn of 1992. I took the underground to go and see you at your hotel in central Tokyo. On my way there my train passed the station that was to be the target of the indiscriminate sarin poisoning conducted by the terrorist leaders of the AUM Cult. The AUM incident was to be preceded earlier in the same year by the great earthquake which devastated another big city of Japan. You talk about it in your recent work The House Gun as an apocalyptic catastrophe along with the tragic incidents that took place in Bosnia and Somalia.

  Naturally I had no premonition about the catastrophic incidents that were to happen here. But I was somehow sunk deep in melancholy. I was thinking of the modern history of South Africa which you initially experienced in your childhood and continually kept on representing in your novels and stories. In the b
eginning was the colonisation. It was followed by the establishment of apartheid, the long history of resistance against it, the victory of the organisation for the liberation of black Africans, and the release of Nelson Mandela. However, it was not a smooth progress towards liberation, freedom, and coexistence. On my way to your hotel I remembered the latest news by the foreign press of the attack on ordinary black citizens by the armed black forces, which resulted in as many as fifty deaths.

  Waiting for my melancholic face, however, was your welcoming smile. While talking with you, I was relieved by the equipoise in which your intellectual profundity, emotional richness and empirical certitude were so well balanced. Our conversation took a humorous turn.

  During our conversation I told you how impressed I was by and sympathised with the Preface to your Penguin edition of Selected Stories which I was reading on the underground. In your Preface you write: ‘For everything one writes is part of the whole story, so far as any individual writer attempts to build the pattern of his own perception out of chaos: the story . . . will be complete with the last sentence written before one dies or imagination atrophies.’ You also write: ‘ . . . in a certain sense a writer is “selected” by his subject—his subject being the consciousness of his era. How he deals with this is, to me, the fundament of commitment . . .”

  It now comes home to me too that a writer spends his lifetime continuously in writing a story which comprehends the whole of his life in its entirety. A few years ago I made up my mind to give up writing novels and more directly to comprehend my own life and the age in which I lived. By doing so I meant to try, a little prematurely, to read the whole story built up of all the words and sentences I had written.

  In a critical review of your new writing someone asked why you continue to deal with the social situations in South Africa. However, you had already answered the question with conviction. Like you I am now determined to continue to write, to the very last of the words I write, the subject selected by the age I live in, and I have resumed writing a novel.

  Your most recent novel available in Japan is My Son’s Story. I once discussed the opening of this novel: a leader of the liberation movement in South Africa who is ‘coloured’ and falls in love with his supporter, a white woman, who reciprocates; his wife, in the meantime, had become an active revolutionary, even before he knew about it, and was arrested. The white woman realised that she was not qualified to shed tears over the predicament of her lover’s wife, caused by the wife’s struggle for justice, because she, the white woman, had betrayed the wife by loving her husband. I emphasised that in this situation which was hard to bear she maintained her human integrity. Later I received a letter from someone who had been a student among the audience of my lecture at a women’s college and was now married, with a baby, telling me that after having read through the whole novel in translation she was now able to understand what I had then said.

  Recently in Japan a novel of ‘infidelity’ has been read so widely as to become a social phenomenon. Here, however, the theme of double suicide as the ultimate consequence of a love affair has tended to be contained in narratives of extremely narrow scope with no bearing on social situations. Very different from them is your novel which also deals with the theme of infidelity. In your My Son’s Story the daughter is upset when she comes to know about her father’s secret. She attempts to commit suicide. She gets over her predicament, however, and transforms herself by taking part in the liberation movement with her comrades. Her mother, too, through collaborating with her, comes to lead an entirely new life. She never flinches in the face of oppression. Further this brings about her father’s regeneration as a leader. And the son comes to write a novel about the entire history of the whole family.

  I sincerely hope that My Son’s Story will be read by a larger audience in Japan. I wish that The House Gun also would be translated into Japanese as soon as possible. You deal with the theme of the new role of family and that of violence. These themes are most relevant to the Japanese consciousness of our era. You have been ‘selected’ by these themes and you tackle them with utmost sincerity.

  One of the central social problems of present-day Japan is juvenile delinquency resorting to violence. A boy killed another boy, who was inferior physically as well as intellectually, and hung up the victim’s head in public. On another occasion a middle-school boy stabbed his woman teacher to death with a knife. There have been a number of suicide cases as a result of the bullying of weaklings. An old man was beaten to death by two girls; a father killed by his son and his son’s friend.

  The mass media in Japan is busy dealing with these social phenomena in wide-ranging terms such as the personality of the juvenile delinquent, the state of local communities, the Juvenile Law, the national education system, etc.

  More relevant to me as a writer is to deal with the problem as that of the inner psyche of these juvenile delinquents. It is characteristic of our age that when a symbolic or typical incident brings a cluster of problems to the surface, then, as if given stimulus to turn into an avalanche, similar kinds of incidents follow in its wake. I have once written to express my wish for the children to be restored to their normal selves with the power of self-respect inherent in them originally.

  My remarks evoked the criticisms against me from a sometime school-teacher and writer of children’s literature, and a woman actively engaged in running a circle of children and their mothers. They said: attention must be drawn not to the power inherent in children but to the external pressures that are driving them into difficulties; one must try to listen to their muted cries for help. I had to admit that they were right. Even so, I still hold that education, whether public or private, should be based on trusting the power of recovery inherent in children themselves.

  We must be wary of the view gaining more ground and spreading widely: that responsible for children’s bent towards violence are the Juvenile Law and the education system, which were both moulded under the democratic constitution after the end of World War II. According to this view even the democratic idea of the family is criticised. Such views are nothing but an unmistakable variation of the blatant neo-nationalism that has been aggrandising itself during the recent years in Japan.

  I fear that such views will give rise to another avalanche in the mass media in Japan: tolerant laws that should protect juvenile ‘rights’ (even this word in Japanese is now used in a pejorative sense) will be turned into the ones that would bind them; schools would be furnished with equipment for containing violence; and the family would become a repressive institution. Children as a whole would then find themselves cornered even further.

  Under such circumstances the family relationship in particular would see a grotesque re-emergence of undemocratic environment that I experienced as a child during World War II. You would come to consider, again, Japan and the Japanese ‘different’ or deviated from the norm. All this would no doubt disturb you in the Western world.

  What then could specifically be done with the deplorable state of violence occurring frequently in which some children prey upon other children or are preyed upon by them? As a writer (for the writer in many respects stands on the same side with children) I think as follows: now the whole world is covered with massive violence; children’s bent towards violence in Japan is not a phenomenon unique to Japan; all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are the mirrors upon which that massive universal violence is reflected or are its miniature models. We grown-ups cannot segregate children and put them aside. We cannot but stand all on the same side, listen to all their cries for help, whether muted or amplified, and confront face to face the roots of violence. Only with such an essential shift of attitude on our part would the family, as a flexible instrument for children and grown-ups alike, be able to restore our true selves with the power inherent in us.

  My reading of your novels has shaped these thoughts of mine. I am thus writing this letter in the hope that your answer w
ill serve as the best possible encouragement for Japanese children and their parents.

  Yours sincerely,

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Johannesburg, 18th April 1998

  Dear Kenzaburo, (may we use our given names?)

  Your letter brings the pleasure of realization that we are simply taking up from where we were interrupted by the end of our encounter in the Tokyo hotel six years ago. There was so much to exchange; it has existed, in the parentheses of our separate lives, ready to continue any time. The ambiguity, the connections that criss-cross against chronology between that short meeting and what was going to happen—an invisible prescience which would influence our individual thinking and writing—that turns out to have presaged the links of our then and now. You came to our meeting unknowingly in the foreshadow of the terrible earthquake that was to devastate a Japanese city later that year, and that I was to use, in a novel as yet not conceived, as a metaphor for apocalyptic catastrophe wreaked by nature, alongside that of contemporary devastation by humans upon themselves in Eastern Europe and Africa.