LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

I/5. THE DESPERADO AGE AND THE IRON CURTAIN

I. Desperado, East and West: What is a Desperado?

To begin with, the Desperado mood is one of denial. Whatever you tell a Desperado author, he will reject the statement, if it is about himself, or even more horrid, if it is an attempt at defining him/her. Some say it is not the business of literature to pin down authors (is literary criticism not literature, I wonder?), others defer the whole responsibility to the reader (no critic allowed on the premises), and someone like Julian Barnes goes as far as stating point blank that he has ‘quit criticism’ because it never helps writing a new book. Obviously something about contemporary literary criticism is very upsetting to writers today. If we take Malcolm Bradbury with his Mensonge as a guide, scholarly criticism is the black sheep.

The Desperado author has nothing to do with despair. If there is anything desperate about him at all, then it is his sharp need to be comforted. Many novelists state they mean to entertain the reader, and many poets assume masks in order to amuse the audience. They need the reader to hug them at the end of a text and say, ‘It’s all right, I am on your side, you are the best and I shall always like you, whatever you may choose to do with your words.’ And the Desperadoes do have a wide range of choices when it comes to words and devices. They need to be comforted because they choose to trespass constantly, they mock at tradition in every possible way, and at the end of it all they feel they have gone too far, but there is no turning back. Seeking comfort and reassurance from the reader is the most they can hope for.

If comfort is welcome, sympathy may turn out to offend a Desperado. If readers as much as suggest they share a common experience with the text and they might, in consequence find out the hidden author, the Desperado has a very ambivalent reaction. He wants to share, but he hates being found out. Some novelists state loud and clear they use their imagination and avoid personal experience in their fiction, others admit openly they make use of their own biography, but completely deface it in the process of finishing a novel. With poets it is much more dramatic than that: they completely move the idea of lyricism out of the realm of diary, privacy, confession, even emotion. They deny the poet the right to make poetry out of autobiographical material. With the (notable) exception of poets like Ruth Fainlight or Fleur Adcock, poets today clamour they need imagined stories and masks in order to conjure up emotion. It is another way of showing that lyricism itself has been modified, from ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ to emotion imagined with indecent directness as an open challenge and defiance of the reader.

The Desperado is a very private author. Whether obviously lyrical (see Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift, or even Julian Barnes in Staring at the Sun), or neuter (like the wonderfully balanced David Lodge, or like Alasdair Gray), or bitingly humorous (see Malcolm Bradbury), or even worse, bitter (Doris Lessing), all Desperadoes enroll under the banner of irony. They swear to produce irony and nothing but irony, but deep down, in their souls deprived of all tradition, homeless and burdened by this avid hysteria of novelty, they fear their own irony and, more than that, they are scared to death they might have taught the reader an attitude that may well put them out of business. A Desperado is entitled to mock at every aspect of life but God forbid a reader or – blasphemy – a critic were to mock at his work. Writers like Barnes, Bradbury, Gray, Ackroyd, Swift, Lessing, Amis, Ishiguro make a livelihood out of irony. If Dickens took his characters and readers very seriously, if Galsworthy had a candid relationship with his audience although he never chose to speak in his own voice, Desperadoes reject whatever has already been used once. Their rejection is irony. The trouble is that, knowing what they have done to literature in their works, they hate the idea that anyone might reject them, too, in the long run. So, without admitting it, they fear their own irony, yet cannot help using it.

The Desperado tools are the same as ever, yet more numerous than ever before, because the author is obsessed with novelty. There must be a new trick (so many authors I have interviewed have been horrified by the use of this word, claiming a ‘trick’, a mere trick that is, is something they would never even dream of resorting to in something as serious as their ironical novels), but the devices – whether for fiction or poetry – are few and can hardly be changed in any way. One can either accept or reject them. There is no fooling around with the reader’s need for a story, characters or lyricism and confession. Fiction and poetry have created plots and heroes and emotions confessed in tranquillity for at least two millennia now. Eliot, Joyce and Woolf were the first to realize time had come for a change. They talked a lot (and did less) to impose a new pattern on literature. Woolf rejected the traditional novel theoretically (Modern Fiction), but, when we have finished reading her own novels, we realize they reform in our minds in the very pattern she rejected. Mrs Dalloway is remembered as a traditional story told in fits. On the other hand, if we deny Joyce his main discovery, which is preverbal thought forced into words, his Ulysses is lost. Had Joyce continued, though, preverbalizing, so to speak, the novel might have died. The only one whose discovery created followers was Eliot, whose poetry of the disgusting and of mockery struck gold. Eliot’s idiom – so much criticized at the time The Waste Land was written – has become a commonplace, a point to start from for contemporary poets. I should say Eliot was revolutionary in a creative way. While after Joyce and Woolf novelists had to run back to a well-told story unless they wanted to lose their audience altogether, Eliot’s bitter irony and delight in the opposite of beauty, in indecently direct shocks is still in use both in fiction and poetry. The real innovator of literature, the guru of Postmodernism although he was a Modernist himself, is T.S. Eliot. A Desperado would not know the first thing about novelty if it had not been for Eliot who taught him that lesson.

Consequently, after Woolf had preached a novelty she could not really make use of, here comes the Desperado author and actually abolishes the idea of a couple as the centre of a novel. He disposes of love interest, of family, of all the roots of shared emotion. He places himself between the reader and the text, as if trying to say, ‘No trespassing, I am keeping my soul to myself.’ His heroes are incident-addicted (a lot of things happen, after the eventlessness of Joyce’s plots, where everything grew in the mind only, although the text literally drowned in incidents). If we skip one little incident or memory, the chain may fail to make sense. The Desperado heroes are also shock-proof: everything can be understood and accepted, no matter how ugly, horrifying or unlikely. The more unusual the incidents imagined are, the crazier and the more baffling, the more Desperado they will be. There is no limit to this isolation of the writer in his own independence from tradition, his desired uniqueness of purpose and of tools.

The ambitions of a Desperado are many. First of all, he must be different at all costs. Second, he will do anything to secure the reader’s approval. Third, he constantly tries to be deeper than depth itself. Fourth, he hopes he can manage to be clear in complication. Fifth, he feels he can be chummy with his reader, yet in control of the latter’s reaction to the text. In short, the Desperado Dream is to be the writer, to achieve instant and constant success.

As for the actual relationship between East and West, we can talk about a real Iron Curtain in Desperado literature between 1950-1990. During that time, the West was both repelled by and fascinated with the East. From Orwell to Huxley, Burgess (Honey for the Bears), Lessing (The Golden Notebook), Bradbury (Rates of Exchange), Barnes (The Porcupine), Brownjohn (The Long Shadows), Greene (The Human Factor), western writers kept probing what was going on behind the curtains of communism. The East, on the other hand, had two choices: either to defect or to be politically correct from the point of view of the communist party and reject the West as the epitome of exploitation and decadence. The books that rejected the West in the communist countries would be impossible to count, as they all used this rejection either as a way of climbing the social ladder, or a device to fool censorship and state indirectly a few frail truths about the communist system. Innumerable novels and poems took place in Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, mentioning this location just to avert attention from the description of a communist capital. The communist Desperado author pretended to accuse the West, while he actually talked to his readers about poverty, corruption, injustice and humiliation in their own country. In Censorship in Romania (Central European University Press, 1998) I published a number of interviews and translations that explained this process. If a poet wrote a poem about the despair of living under inhuman conditions and wanted to publish it, communicating with his readers between the lines (direct messages of that sort were out of the question), he had to fool censorship in some way, and he sometimes did that by placing an inscription at the end of the poem to the effect that it had been written while the poet was visiting New York, and he described the evils of capitalism. People starving, dressed in rags, deprived of any news from abroad, cut off from the whole universe, made to work and eat and sleep only, these horrors could only happen in a Western country, where the state could not care less about man and the regime was certainly inhuman. Actually it was a faithful description of the tragedy that went on under communism, and all the readers perceived that at once, but since no words labelled that clearly, the censor could ignore it (if he was bright) or even failed to notice (although few censors were stupid). The Desperado freedom, therefore, had a remarkable counterpart in communist countries: it was the stolen freedom, the would-be freedom, which had to be won inch by inch, by shrewd literary subterfuges. It was, for communist countries, more a kind of resourcefulness and ingenuity than freedom. Actually, to set matters straight, it was political bondage skillfully avoided by literary artifice. From that point of view, East and West are similar: both end in literary artifice, although it happens for different reasons.

After 1990 the fascination dies and a transition sense of confusion sets in. Imagination is no longer a slave of silence and communism. Ex-communist literatures can plunge into freedom and do whatever they desire, but, as it turns out, Desperado freedom is disenchanting. While the West went on a long march from tradition to freedom from tradition, the East cherishes the liberation but mistakes it for politics. So, for quite a while journalism took the place of literature in ex-communist letters. When new writers emerged at last and Desperado eastern literature actually merged with that of the West, economic censorship took over: buying a book became an act of courage, a gesture that endangered survival (meaning food and clothes again). One way or the other, the East is still censored, while the West can safely rebel against a long tradition of freedoms of all kinds.

II. The Iron Curtain from Both Sides

Seen from the East, the iron curtain was dumb and frustrating. The official thesis was that communism was the best and the West had to be reviled. While everybody thought the very opposite, even party officials, nobody (or hardly anyone) stated openly an opposition. Sneaky hints were the most the system would allow. When Romanians read Marin Preda, Augustin Buzura or Marin Sorescu, they invariably looked for the hidden ‘lizards’ (as they were called) – slippery expressions of dissent, which could be read between the lines and which managed to avoid the censor’s vigilance. The universe of communist books, however rebellious they might have been, could only take the shape of a forbidden paradise. The literature of the East was all about inaccessibility, the forbidden heaven and the supreme daring (defection, emigration – the impossible dream).

There was a forbidden connection between East and West, though: radio Free Europe, smuggled books or films, foreign visitors. Seen from the West, this must have seemed unimportant, since, as a Romanian saying goes, the man who has just eaten will not believe anyone can starve. Some books – those considered harmless to the regime – were translated and widely read. This was the fate of John Fowles in Romania. The same holds true for Iris Murdoch. Orwell’s 1984 was out of limits. Unbelievably, as a student in the late sixties, I was required to read Huxley’s Brave New World, and also Milton’s Areopagitica, which I did with enthusiasm, and felt exhilaratingly free. A human being needs so little to be happy. If our common nightmare could be put into words and on paper, then there had to be justice and a way out somewhere, some time.

The West perceived the eastern nightmare as tragedy and described it in dystopias. The political menace of communism is the root of the Desperadoes’ dystopic mood. Few dystopias are unrelated to communism, but there are some that feed on science fiction, such as Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, Gray’s Lanark, Huxley’s Ape and Essence. Dystopia did not begin as a political species. Even a writer like Jonathan Swift, who was extremely politically minded, created his country of the Houyhnhnms from a philosophical stand. Golding did the same in Lord of the Flies. Since a dystopia is a reversal of what is good and beautiful, meaning the most undesirable place one would want to find oneself in, it was natural that Desperado writers should see it embodied in the communist space, which was the ultimate torture of the essential human being. Not all Desperadoes who described their incursions into communism perceived the essence of it, though. Each one had a point to make, a limited view, so to say. Burgess was highly alert to the menace of communism in Honey for the Bears. Graham Greene enjoyed the action, the spying flavour, in his The Human Factor, where he described an English spy ending up in the Soviet Union, cut off from the rest of the world for what was left of his life; there was no way back from the communist hell, in Greene’s view. Lessing’s The Good Terrorist is only one side of Lessing’s dystopic inclination, the political one. There is also a philosophical one in The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World, and a more scientifically biassed apprehension in The Memoirs of a Survivor, where she deals more with the material crisis of present civilisation. Politically speaking, in The Golden Notebook Lessing sends a British teacher of history and member of the British communist party to the Soviet Union, where he realizes that nothing he imagined about communism was true. What most Desperadoes perceive right about the communist regime is the huge lie it was. Malcolm Bradbury humorously recoiled from the enormity of this lie in Rates of Exchange. Something similar, with comic undertones created by the imperfect use of English by people who learnt it as a dead language (hardly ever able to actually speak English to natives), happens in Julian Barnes’ Staring at the Sun, where the heroine visits China and briefly notices significant slips, such as ‘The temple was repented. We grow ladies. Here is the sobbing centre.’ Bradbury’s examples are more numerous and more strongly focussed on: ‘...modern Slaka is a young nation proudly on the march, its eyes firmly fixed not on the day after yesterday but the day before tomorrow!!!’ Creating a space that is a menace to life, reaching out for the opposite of utopia (which was the way all communism began) is the Desperadoes’ way of yelling, ‘Beware of totalitarianism!’

Running away from communism, defectors were shipwrecked into displacement. Bradbury describes a Russian professor who loves America passionately for having offered him a home and an academic job. Burgess invents a Russian common thief, who is turned loose into the pure Western world, having been mistaken for the son of a well known musician and friend. The envoys of communism to Britain, whom Lessing depicts in The Good Terrorist, are ruthless and scary. Many writers escaped from communist countries and found a home in the West. Such are George Szirtes (who was taken across the border while he was a child), Nabokov in the United States, Solzhenitsyn, Norman Manea, Andrei Codrescu, Nina Cassian, Matei Calinescu, Virgil Nemoianu, Thomas Pavel (the last six from Romania). Displacement is sometimes the direct effect of the iron curtain. It exists both in reality and fiction: Desperadoes can be displaced authors or often create displaced heroes, running away from their inhuman homeland, and making it or losing the battle in the West. A symbol of material and intellectual freedom for the East, the West finds the scenes behind the iron curtain picturesque and comfortably alien.

The appeal of communism to Western countries has never ceased to amaze those who experienced it in their own lives. Lessing creates two heroines who grow disenchanted with the British communist party, but that implies they were enthusiastic about it at one time. Lessing herself, while a young mother in South Africa, left two small children in the care of her husband, in order to better the world. She explains in the first volume of her autobiography (Under My Skin):

‘I explained to them that they would understand later why I had left. I was going to change this ugly world, they would live in a beautiful and perfect world where there would be no race hatred, injustice, and so forth.’

The mirage of utopia turns bitter, though, and Anna Wolf, just like Molly, her friend in communism and after it, scuttle away under the roof of good old capitalism. The experiment hurt two children in the case of the novelist herself, but it hurt infinitely more in the actual communist countries. If readers who have experienced totalitarianism can read Orwell without resentment, accept ironic trips behind the iron curtain (Burgess, Huxley, Bradbury, Barnes) in a pensive mood, rather sadly, they hardly find it in their hearts (if at all) to forgive infatuation with a system that has crushed them. When Alan Brownjohn wrote The Long Shadows he was unspeakably careful not to hurt those already maimed lives, and his image of Romania under communism and emerging out of it is uniquely appealing, comforting even to a native of communism, so to say. Like all natives of a geographical area, natives of communism feel they have the privilege of one who knows best and should be an authority in the matter. They resent aliens teaching them. And western writers are aliens as far as communism is concerned. The iron curtain operated drastically here. It separated the two worlds perfectly. Again, Alan Brownjohn is the only one who was able to write a discreet and warm text about a reality he came to share though never know for sure, and whose novel on Romania would not offend any Romanian reader.

Most books written in the West about the iron curtain hide awe behind a veil of irony. This is often perceived at the level of language distortion, a mishandling of English. Bradbury is the master of such flashes of laughter (A >Dialogi= is the great spirit of amity and concorde. >Dialogi= means the desire for true intercurse B an intercurse where each partner is an equal and no one is on top!@). Speakers of English under communism are either spoilt by the regime or rebels. Both categories are sadly out of practice as contact with foreigners and speaking English to natives is strongly discouraged. Communism was a closed, stifling world. The mistakes recorded by Bradbury with half a smile imply the horror behind speech, the fierce isolation and the hidden slow death. On the other hand, English-speaking writers are deprived of a remarkable weapon when they write about the iron curtain: they are not in the habit of offering their readers bits to read between the lines. This could be done strictly on the communist side of the iron curtain. Each word had a double meaning (at least) and it functioned, it transmitted an encoded message until it was found out, recognized by censors and forbidden. Words like church, angel, God, minister were slowly expelled from the page. The list is much longer. No western writer could possibly suspect how one communicated inside the system. The ‘lizards’ were a preeminently inside matter, you had to be one of the handcuffed to enjoy such a muffled message. Consequently, the main difference between eastern and western writers is that western writers took great pains to express everything that crossed their hearts, while eastern writers knew that, if they were to communicate at all, they had to suppress what crossed their minds and veil the text in a mist of angelic utopia. This is one good reason why Doris Lessing, such a refined intellectual and an intense writer, is hard to be forgiven by a writer whose very words were taken away from him in the name of a utopia she chose to embrace. In simpler words, mockingly, as Bradbury would have done, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

Comparing a communist novel or poem to a western work, we can easily notice a distortion of human nature, in two cases: when the East writes about man, man is the best possible creature in the world (the positive hero) or the anti-communist retrograde (the negative hero); when the West writes, man is his old self, varied and unpredictable. Unpredictability was stolen by censorship from the East. Communist heroes had to be simple people who saw the light, or intellectuals who learned the beautiful philosophy of workers/ peasants. This is somewhat simplistic, though, because – rarely as it happened – some good novelist (like Marin Preda) or some good poet (like Marin Sorescu) managed to bend the rules, winking at the reader from between the lines. A young man could be a dissident while thinking of the West in the middle of a party meeting, an old man could simply remember the charm of youth (his youth having been spent before the communist takeover) and become a rebel because he involuntarily compared it to his pitiful old age under a distorting regime. On the other hand, when the West wrote about eastern heroes, the heroes usually appeared to be primitive, one-track minds, who either wanted to serve the reds or to defect. There were no other motives for the communist hero’s actions. Consequently he was a distorted, hardly credible being. If unpredictability was stolen by censorship, credibility was kept alive under communism by the so-called’ lizards’, by what everyone learned to read between the lines, by all those tricks which were meant to fool censorship. As far as Desperado tricks are concerned, therefore, eastern writers are even richer than western authors in search for success and quite often not much more. The communist writer needed to go very deep and establish a solid bond with his reader, with whom he shared the pitiful condition of silence. Literature is the opposite of silence. The West was free to speak. The East had to reinvent speech, and reinvent literature altogether, for that matter.

In many novels written on the western side of the iron curtain, a western tourist finds himself, out of curiosity, belief or by chance, in a communist country (Honey for the Bears, by Burgess, The Golden Notebook – only a fragment – by Lessing, Staring at the Sun – only a small fragment, again – by Barnes, Rates of Exchange by Bradbury, The Long Shadows by Brownjohn). In most cases, with the exception of Brownjohn, who visited Romania time and again and came to understand part of the code, these tourists fail to take in communist everyday reality. They are naive and feel left out, choosing to sulk and go back home. Displacement, estrangement, alienation from the human beings on the other side of the iron curtain haunt the heroes who pluck up the courage to go and see for themselves. Lessing’s heroine remembers going to East Germany with her second partner (when East Germany was a communist country) and being attacked by old friends turned communist now, with aggressive accusations of coming to advertise the material well-being of the West (The Golden Notebook). These intruders in the communist world fail to communicate with the people they meet there, and it is not only because English is learnt more like a dead language than a spoken one under communism. They fail to communicate because they are totally unprepared to perceive lack of freedom and distortion of human nature under the yoke of utopia put into practice. They expect the best – according to the propaganda socialist countries populated the westerners’ minds with – and complain they find the worst. Consequently they run away before they have had any time to digest the information. They are afraid they might be engulfed, enslaved, too. Fear is the Western reaction versus the iron curtain. Those under communism, on the other hand, are disenchanted with utopia and long for the jungle of the West, which is their paradise. The westerners run away from the East as from a bad dream, while the easterners, who are used to living in the nightmare, look at westerners as angels descended from a heaven of non-communism, of non-utopia. The easterners are not aware, but they long for dystopia, actually. If the West identifies dystopia with communism, it may also happen out of inadequate understanding of history. Orwell was the only one who showed that nothing was dystopic unless perceived so. Dystopias were created by the West, located in the East sometimes. No eastern writer would have dreamed of writing a dystopia located in the West, unless he had had in mind a crisis of civilization. Even that was mostly done in the West about the West. As for the iron curtain seen from both sides, that is a utopia in itself. The iron curtain can only be understood from the East and misunderstood, but dreaded, from the West.

III. Desperadoes and the Iron Curtain

Eastern Desperadoes used to be either exiles or refugees in their own country. We shall focus here on the good writers, as the bad writers, who compromised with the system and wrote its apology were no writers at all: they were the worst kind of politician that ever was. The good writers who defected or – not very often, but it happened – were pushed away by the regime (see Solzhenitsyn) either reached fame – again not very often, yet it still happened – or became mere citizens of a country where life was economically more agreeable. Some came back to their country after the fall of communism. They became very proud of their dissidence and claimed the status of a hero. Some were recognized as such, others made friends with the communist remnants of the old system and supported the power which continued the old rule under the guise of restored capitalism. Naming individuals would be reprehensible and a matter of taste. Obviously, though, there is today a divided society in ex-communist countries (continuing old regimes still in power, and the opposition, slowly building a new face, still relying on old practices and vices); the transition is hard and devious, as it usually takes longer to repair than build anew. After fifty years of damage, both politics and literature are crossing a desert right now.

The writers who did not defect – could or would not (usually the former) – were the real Desperadoes. They had to devise a kind of literature which resisted ‘socialist realism’ and managed to fool censorship, somehow getting through to the reader the message that things were very bad, and he, the reader, was not alone in thinking so. This was no easy task. It required a code. Communism is famous for the ‘wooden language’ everyone had to use socially (which gave rise, though, to a very colourful mass of private jokes that have now lost all relevance). The communist Desperado had to revive the code, which withered very quickly and was found out, had to be replaced, so that censorship could be delayed again. Escaping official propaganda, wooden language and the immense mass of forbidden literary tools led to an inevitable complication. This was one Desperado strategy which, in the case of the East, had political origins.

If eastern writers under communism could not read contemporary western authors – unless the books were smuggled, or considered harmless to the system and translated, they invented (at least Romanians did) a term for self-sufficiency: ‘protochronism’. Communist culture – some argued – did not need to synchronize because it was better than synchronic, it was the very essence, the independent prototype of culture everywhere. Socialism could recreate the universe without the help of a God or human race at large. Communism could exist all alone. The books written in this environment were shouts of despair and feats of resourcefulness. The main refuge of writers was the history of literature – dead centuries had not been forbidden yet – and this is how it happened that, while a student of English, at only nineteen years of age, I found in my compulsory bibliography for the literature course two incredible books such as Milton’s Areopagitica (extraordinary essay on censorship) and Huxley’s Brave New World (one of the worst dystopias that communism ever inspired). I read them with a feeling of victory, which came back whenever a really good Romanian novel by a dissenter was published: if someone else shared my revolt, I was not alone, there was hope. This is exactly what the western Desperado was doing in the West at about the same time: trying to reassure the reader that Joyce and Eliot would not come back, that literature was so accessible that it could be enjoyed again. What both western and eastern writers avoided to show was the complication of this new accessibility, the deviousness that the new code of simplicity implied. Out of totally different reasons (the West – literary, the East – political mainly, but not only), literature assumed an appearance of simplicity which hid iron codes. The code – meaning imagination, after all – was stronger than ever. The difference for the West was that is swerved from Modernist obscurity, and for the East that it had to veil itself in harmless clarity of purpose, which actually brought about endless ambiguities of language.

Western Desperadoes have built a variety of images of the iron curtain. Here are some:

1. Imaginary reversals of the western welfare: Huxley and Lessing devise a crisis of civilization, where politics does not come first. Alasdair Gray does not put politics first, either, resorting more to a crisis of nature (sunlight becomes so scarce it is night almost all the time), which is, of course, symbolical for those who care for decodings.

2. Misunderstood echoes from the East: Julian Barnes writes The Porcupine from hearsay. He describes the fall of communism but cannot capture the undertones, the human tragedy of an upheaval that can by no means repair the damage done by fifty years of communism to a country that was beginning to build capitalism on the eve of World War II. Burgess makes his Clockwork Orange a possible world of violence leaking from the Russian East, a book which mingles English and Russian in a medley of crime and punishment. Honey for the Bears goes even more explicitly into the communist world of deprivation and solitude, bringing out the fear that, were the iron curtain to lift unawares, hell might be turned loose.

3. The communist exile as a humorous character: Bradbury’s campus trilogy has several minor characters, who are defectors from the East. They are all weird. When Alan Brownjohn brings a beautiful heroine on a trip to England, she is suddenly clumsy, unfathomable, illogical. She has to run back home for fear of being suspected she might want to defect (why should she not? we are not told). The communist exile is not entirely a tragic figure, since he is spared the economic hardships his compatriots endure. He is a misfit, though, and has to work hard in every way: social, professional, material, cultural. Making him a humorous character is not exactly a brilliant idea.

4. The touristic view of a communist country as a picturesque hell: Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange and Burgess’ Honey for the Bears, the small inkling of China in Barnes’ Staring at the Sun describe the chaos, the comic mask of the unfathomable social, political, economic evil that communism might mean, but which the western heroes do not understand. They mock at everything that scares them and scurry away. Once back, the feeling is that home has never been sweeter, however many tragedies may be going on there. There is no worse tragedy than being lost and never again allowed out of a communist country one made the mistake to visit out of sheer curiosity.

5. Communism seen as Dracula land and its innocent western prey: the violence imagined by A Clockwork Orange and The Memoirs of a Survivor, the torture in 1984 are a spectre of the communist vampire sucking the blood of capitalist peacefulness. The writer whose wife is raped and manuscript destroyed in A Clockwork Orange, the author of the mental memoirs, the survivor in The Memoirs of a Survivor, the British writer in love with Brownjohn’s beautiful heroine and translator, are all preys to beings who, they think, can harm them and actually do, in one way or another. The harm is not lethal, but maiming. The fear is grounded, they all seem to say.

6. Economic shortages within communism make the western reader exclaim, Long live capitalism, because we are so right! Orwell’s 1984 is ample proof of how horrible communism can be: no food, no clothes, no love, no privacy, no humanity left. Wrong theory. There may be very little of the material comfort capitalism so prides itself on, but humanity is there all right, and if the writers on the west side of the iron curtain never notice it, never suspect it (not even Doris Lessing in her autobiography), it is their loss. Eastern heroes, however encoded, rigid, apparently politically correct but deep down bitter dissenters, are every bit as human as their western counterparts, and sometimes more.

7. Humour and awe are the only approaches of communism in the West. Laughter and fear, comedy and tragedy. Since in modern times they can hardly be separated, the image is inevitably superficial and unconvincing.

8. Usually the free to travel westerner meets the eastern slave bound to his land. This breeds another fear, that of being trapped, which all dystopias are based on. Lanark is trapped in his own life, which becomes dystopic and he dies there; Golding’s Ralph is bound to the island dominated by Lord of the Flies and is saved by the grown-ups; Bradbury’s professor runs away from Slaka only to find out that he did not understand anything of the rites of the land while he was there. The dystopic world, whether the iron curtain is political or of another nature, longs for liberation. The iron curtain is a trap, a lack of freedom, a slavery to nightmare, a destruction of the hope for freedom.

9. The western guest is constantly amazed at the perverted language, thought, freedom, humanity: in short he is amazed at the prevalent lie. Here, at least, westerners go to the heart of the matter. Communism is a lie, and, unlike those involved in that inhuman huge joke, westerners see and say it in so many words. Communism is no longer a utopia (or should not be – even Lessing grows disillusioned with it), it is a tragic lie.

10. Most westerners write their dystopias or read them with the feeling of relief that they have been born on the right side. A woman who knew several languages and worked for a press agency in Romania, and who committed suicide in her fifties, used to say: ‘What ill luck to have only one life and be born here.’ Westerners suddenly feel they can do anything they please with their lives, they have so many opportunities. Communism does have a revigorating effect on a westerner, even when he thinks he feels heart-rending pity for an eastern hero.

11. The western reader invariably develops a complex of superiority in this man-versus-puppet show. The easterner is – or looks like – a puppet with no choice in the matter. This puppet, however, has the huge, revigorating resource of dissent, and learns to create its own universe as it lives along.

The Desperado age has thus two political sides, the right and the wrong side of the iron curtain, but the result reached is eventually the same. The West hides ambiguity in the cloak of accessibility; literature is fighting for its audience and regains it all right, although the hidden sophistication is beginning these days to tire the readers. The East is forced to use primitive words and struggles very hard to hide ambiguity behind the simplest sentences. Both West and East express an imprecision, both do it in clear language. The difference is that in the East one has to read between the lines or else all meaning is lost. The West reads, visits, hears about the East, but fails to read into words the political torture of the compulsion to lie. Lying is, however, a form of ambiguity, too. Especially if the author can instil doubt in his reader’s mind. Western readers are in no position to doubt eastern writers. The reverse would not be true. If there is an iron curtain in literature, therefore, it certainly is one of misunderstanding. Where politics failed, it turns out that literature was no help, either.

The iron curtain is the great defeat of globalization in literature during communism. To put it in a nutshell, where the East understands artfully between the lines, the West uses misunderstanding in order to reach the same hysterical complication that characterizes both sides. Whichever the side, ingenuity is the feat. Desperado literature, therefore, whether eastern or western, is devilishly resourceful, so resourceful that the reader leaves the text feeling he could finally fool himself. The question is, will he not have enough of it all some day and, exhausted by this game of games, try to change once again? Not even the resourceful Desperado author can tell. Convention has died, long live convention: whichever, as long as literature wins.