Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
How can I explain it? Here I was, a good latter-day liberal humanist, if that isn’t too grandiose a term to describe the chaotic mixture of tolerance, permissiveness, pragmatism, moral
uncertainty, global anxiety and (as you know) deconstructive scepticism I had come to steer my small life by. I lived (as I knew perfectly well, because all the experts kept telling me) in the age
of historyless history, the time after the great meta-narratives. Rather like some amiable American who had spent rather too long on the West Coast, I perceived the recent European past as a handy
aid to the present: a birthplace I had long left behind, a festering ground of old political resentments, a theme park for constant nostalgia, a useful source of designer imports. In other words, I
gladly took the fruit off the European tree, plucking from it just what I needed in the way of decoration, ambience, mental backcloth, occasional ideological food and drink. Taking the fruit, I had
never bothered to look very hard at the tree itself.
Then, thanks to an excess of professional curiosity, a brash careerist wanting a story, I had started examining the knotted trunk more carefully: I discovered that I didn’t like what I
found. The familiar if not entirely companionable past had turned into an ugly, twisted growth, hung about with deceits, obscurities and betrayals. The story Gertla had poured out on the pampa was
of course a very old tale: thirty-five years old, in fact, set well and truly before my birth, in a time I had never touched. But it concerned a Criminale whom I had (after a long search) met and,
having met him, liked. I had no complaints of him. I found him human and benign, generous and serious. He had done me no harm; no, he had done me good. His ideas gave me pleasure, his thought had
made a difference. He had shared with me his confidence, a certain passing friendship, even – on the boat on Lake Geneva – his cigars. I had no wish at all to find him flawed.
I also had no need either. The Eldorado programme had definitely been aborted, pronounced defunct by all formerly interested parties. I had quite lost touch with Ros. I had no Lavinia breathing
down my neck, asking for thrills and spills, loves and crimes, trips and travels and tickets for the opera. If the story made my present newspaper, it would go somewhere at the back, after the much
more familiar scandals about the Royals that obsess British national life. I had no scores to settle, no advantage to gain. I knew no easy way of checking if what Gertla said was actually true.
Even if it was, I remembered the other thing she had said: that if Criminale had taken the side of Irini, he would probably have gone the same way as she did, gone to prison, become an un-person.
Then we would have had no Bazlo Criminale. The fruit of the tree was perfectly good: why start trying to show it was corrupted?
So I did what most good latter-day liberal humanists would very probably have done in the circumstances: nothing, that is. But there is one trouble with human curiosity, aka the need to
investigate. Once you have nourished it, it doesn’t go away. Which is why, over the next weeks, you could have frequently found me (if, that is, you had cared to) sitting alone in some
Islington pub or other, a large glass of lager in one hand, a small German dictionary in the other, reading – no, I mean re-reading – Codicil’s little life of Criminale. Now
re-reading is not like reading; it is something you do with changed eyes. This time, I knew that the book by Codicil was almost certainly not by him at all, but by one of the several other people
who had crossed my life over the recent months. And if the author was doubtful, so, of course, was the subject. The book’s Criminale wasn’t the real Criminale, and certainly not my
Criminale – who in turn no doubt wasn’t the real Criminale either. And if writer and subject had changed, so had the reader. After what had happened during my recent wanderings, I was
certainly not quite the same person who so gaily had given his witless opinions over the tele-waves at the Booker.
In every respect, then,
Bazlo Criminale: Life and Thought
(Wien: Schnitzer Verlag, 1987, pp. 192) was now not the book I, or he, had read before. In fact my Sussex tutor – who, you
might like to know, had resigned his post during the year, and opened a French restaurant in Hove famous for its experimental kiwi-fruity menus – would probably have been proud of me, as I
picked up the authorless text, noted the disappearance of the subject, and read the text not for what it said but only for what it didn’t. Now I indeed deconstructed: read for the omissions
and elisions, the obscurities and absences, the spaces and the fractures, the linguistic and ideological contradictions. I read it, in fact, as a fiction, which of course is what I should really
have done in the first place. But now I read it with the benefit of alternative facts, which of course were also, as it were, fictions, to set against
its
fiction. I had alternative authors
to try out on it, alternative Criminales to poke into its pages. This was a text I could work on.
With benefit of my new wisdom, it was now very plain to me what kind of book it was: a progressive, uplifting and piously Victorian story about a virtuous man of virtuous mind who is confronted
with conflict and adversity, but finally triumphs in a reasonably happy ending. In other words, it was a whitewash. It also matched and mirrored the line of recent European history fairly exactly.
It started in the time of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, of
angoisse
and
Angst
, of the collapse of the old pre-war philosophies and the need for new ones. It opened in the terrible,
shameful chaos of Europe after 1945, and the growth of dreams of a new, anti-fascist Utopia. It followed those brave new dreams into times when they were cursed and corrupted, and then shifted into
the age of Adidas and IBM, the materialist, multiple, post-technological age, the era of the economic miracle, when the vague proletarian dream gave way to the late-twentieth-century bourgeois
revolution, hi-tech, scattered, multinational. It started in hard ideology; it ended in random, uncertain metaphysics. You could say, if you were European, it was more or less the story of us
all.
It was also, of course, a romantic tale, of a man and his female muses: the Bazlo Criminale version of the mistresses of Borges. In the ruins, physical, political, moral and philosophical, of
postwar beaten Berlin, two student lovers, Bazlo and Pia, he a young scholar from Bulgaria with philosophical inclinations, she a keen anti-Nazi and Marxist, met and married. They gave their lives
to anti-fascism, the building of the progressive and socialist future. Then, somehow, their lives separated. The where, how and why of this were unclear, but I gathered it had something to do with
their ideological disagreements over the East German Workers’ Uprising of 1953 (an event which I had totally forgotten). It was hard to see who was on which side, but I fancied Criminale
dissented from Ulbrecht’s repression. Now Pia disappeared from the story, as, I had gathered from others, she had disappeared from life itself. What should have appeared in Criminale’s
love life next, as I knew now, was Irini. However, she didn’t; she was not mentioned at all. Instead the next important figure, in love and life alike, was Gertla, the Hungarian writer and
painter who took up the muse-like role for most of the remainder of the story.
They had met and fallen in love: but where and when? In this section dates became strangely obscure: the entire period between 1954 and 1968 was treated as if continuous. Criminale was now the
reforming socialist democrat in the glacial Cold War age. He was under constant attack from younger Stalinist critics, one in particular (could it be Sandor Hollo?). His books ran into trouble;
some were banned in the Marxist countries, presumably at Russian behest; others appeared but then were withdrawn. Yet, by one of those strange ‘Aesopian’ arrangements that occurred in
the Marxist world at the time, he was allowed, even encouraged, to print them in the West. This had worried me from the moment I first read this book in Ros’s house. But I was naive then, and
I understood a little bit better now. This was one of Ildiko’s arrangements under the table, which the times and Party deviousness sometimes permitted. Now, though, I realized it was possible
that, for political reasons, Criminale had been deliberately asked to play the role of East– West linkman. At any rate, this was when his influence began to spread, his reputation as a
reformer began to rise, he became a world traveller, and took on international fame.
Conspicuously omitted was any mention of the events in Hungary in 1956: Imre Nagy’s democratic reform government, the Russian invasion, the suppression, the mass arrests, the imprisonment of Nagy. Unlike the reference to the German
Workers’ Uprising, where the implication was that Criminale had taken a critical line, here he had no role. In fact the general impression given was that Criminale and Gertla were nowhere
near Budapest at the time. The stress was on his travels, his rising fame, his high philosophical detachment, his continuing intellectual voyage beyond Marx and Lenin, Heidegger and Sartre. There
was also little about his general love life. Conspicuous throughout was Gertla’s role, which was represented as quite opposite to everything she had told me in Argentina about herself and her
links with the regime. Here she played a part more like that of the nebulous Irini. She was the loyal wife, the intellectual helpmeet, the supporter, above all the brave companion in daring
revisionist thought. And even after the marriage had broken up (this was briefly referred to, with no how or why), she retained the role of intellectual muse through the later years.
Now, of course, Sepulchra – our great La Stupenda – popped up in the story. But it was only in a perfunctory role, as the attractive artist’s model and lowlife bohemian who had
become a sexual and secretarial appendage to the now undeniably great man. Of course, anyone who had met them both would know that, in stature, Sepulchra did not compare with Gertla. But this was
an unkind portrait, and she might just as well have been omitted altogether, along with Irini. The other women in his life – I realized now there must have been many – were not touched
on at all. I particularly looked for a mention of Ildiko, whom I naturally hunted for in the text just as I did elsewhere, but there was no sign. And nowhere in the book was it suggested that
Criminale had clay feet, that in the view of the author he had ever committed any serious error, moral, philosophical or political. Yet, as I’d noticed earlier, the book also seemed quite
distant and critical. And this was particularly true of one section that I had not really taken in before.
This was actually not too surprising, since it was an extremely obscure discussion of something the book called ‘Criminale’s silence’. It turned on various deep philosophical
concepts, as well as on some splendid German compound nouns that reached parts of thought that even my larger German dictionary did not reach. But it concerned his interpretation of Martin
Heidegger, the German philosopher with whom he had had, in print, a very famous quarrel (it was over irony, you will probably recall). Criminale’s attack was in English translation, and by
putting this and the book together I was able to grasp rather more of the issue this time round. Briefly, the question was whether it was possible to elevate thought over circumstance. The issue
was Heidegger’s famous silence after 1945, when the acknowledgedly great German thinker had refused to give any real account or explanation of his activities both as a philosopher and as a
university rector over the Nazi years. (Incidentally, there is plenty written about this, if you want to follow it up.) Despite being banned from teaching for a while, Heidegger simply insisted
that his thought lay so immeasurably far above and beyond the historical episode of Hitlerism and the Holocaust that it required no explanation, no confession, no apology.
To Criminale, Heidegger was here taking the line of Hegel: ‘So much the worse for the world if it does not follow my principles.’ But this, Criminale said, led his thought into a
fundamental philosophical error. This arose from two contradictory beliefs: thought stood above history, but also created it. For Heidegger, the task of the philosopher was to deliver history, and
the task of the
German
philosopher (Heidegger saw Germany as the true philosophical nation) was therefore to deliver German history. That Heidegger tried. He thus trapped philosophy in an
impossible position. He was fundamental to modern philosophy, no doubt about that. He placed it over and above history; yet the philosophy helped make the history, and it proved disastrous.
Criminale held that this was in fact inevitable, since history could never satisfy philosophy, being made of muddle, conflict and uncertainty. But that is what led to ‘Heidegger’s
silence’, which was impotence, and marked the end of the road not just for his thought but for his concept of the philosopher’s task itself.
So Criminale took the opposite view: the philosopher’s work was what he called ‘thinking with history’. This meant that philosophy itself was actually ‘a form of
irony’, one of his more famous remarks. It observed failure, and dismantled itself. It did not consider a truth was something that corresponded to a reality. It assumed there was no escape
from time and chance. However, the author of the book (this made the who, who, who much more interesting) argued that this had simply caught Criminale in the opposite trap. His view tied philosophy
irretrievably to muddle, historical directionlessness, moral confusion. It also robbed him of the means of being free to think, or even to decide. So if one path led to ‘Heidegger’s
silence’, the other way led to what was called ‘Criminale’s silence’, which prevented him from constructing any form of mental or ethical independence. A familiar state, I
thought, not unlike my own.
Of course I found this highly obscure, as I expect you do too. It somehow reminded me of the term we spent at Sussex with my tutor on the complex matter of Nietzsche’s umbrella (we had to
discuss whether Nietzsche’s umbrella was, as Derrida argued, a hermeneutic device, or whether it was a thing that stopped him getting wet when it rained). Both of these were philosophical
silences. Both had a strange aroma both of honour and betrayal. Heidegger had not stood out against a time of evil, perhaps because to do so was impossible, perhaps because he had not seen that the
time was turning to evil, the problem of so many in our century. But when the chance came he had not ‘confessed’, perhaps because it is hard to confess that a considered thought is
wrong, or that all that comes out of our time of history is wrong. The same might be said of Criminale. His silence had become a philosophical paradox, but he too had not ‘confessed’,
brought his contradiction into the open. If Criminale, a hero of thought, had betrayed, is there any way he would or should have ‘confessed’?