This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. After all, the greengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course, because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination... if the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.
[much skipped]
...You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of the state.
When I first read this essay for my exams, I wasn't very sympathetic to Havel, who was, I thought, too difficult on the greengrocer who puts up the sign in question, the one who is legitimately concerned about his family and their future: why look down on him for valuing the people who are closest to him? Re-reading for class, I find Havel's position more compelling: accepting the system as its given is to do, first, an act of violence to oneself, to require a separation of public and private, to accept oppression and domination as typical parts of the human condition. But it's also to do violence to those people who the less-bold greengrocer wants to help: one passes exactly this style of life onto them--they get university, but one where certain options are foreclosed, one gets certainty as long as the right things are said and done at the right times. What kind of life is that? And that first action, the refusal to put up the party-slogan sign, is an act of, if you will, straightening what is crooked, and is therefore natural and well-to-hand as an option: it can be real and authentic in a way other possibilities cannot be. That's also, I think, the force of the second passage: one acts in a perfectly natural and normal way, and one is made an enemy, rather than making oneself an enemy, because the system is established in such a way that, from the perspective of those who have power, it doesn't matter which of the two it actually is. One can see this in the way the Russian Revolution unwinds (I finished Darkness at Noon again today): it doesn't matter, from Stalin's perspective, whether or not Trotsky, Zinoviev, or anyone else actually opposed him or the revolution (and it particularly doesn't matter whether their criticisms, such as they had, were accurate or could have been helpful) did so purposefully, or accidentally, or from good intentions or bad: all merged into one.
No comments:
Post a Comment