scholars

Betraying the Event: Constructions of Victimhood in Contemporary Cultures

Edited by

Fatima Festic

CAMBRIDGE

SCHOLARS P U B L I S H I N G

B etraying the Event: Constructions o f Victimhood in Contem porary Cultures, edited by Fatima Festic This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, N ew castle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

C opyright © 2009 by Fatim a Festic and contributors All rights for this book reserved. N o part o f this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, m echanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, w ithout the prior perm ission o f the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0516-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0516-2

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V ic t im iz a t io n a n d it s C u r e s : R e p r e s e n t a t io n s o f S o u t h E a s t e r n E u r o p e in B r it is h F ic t io n a n d D r a m a o f t h e 1990s L u d m il l a K o s t o y a

In his extended reflection on twentieth-century history Hope and Memory (2000; English translation 2003), Bulgarian-French cultural philosopher Tzvetan Todorov singles out four major roles in “historical narrative[s] with an ethical dimension: benefactor, beneficiary, malefactor, and victim” (142). The roles o f benefactor and victim are o f particular interest to him insofar as they are central to two dominant forms o f “historical narration” : “the heroic narrative, which lauds the triumph o f ‘our side’, and the victim narrative, which relates its sufferings” (142). Todorov further remarks on the emergence o f a morally ambiguous tendency within the postmodern context o f latter-day Western democracies, which is closely related to the role o f the victim. In the past, history was predominantly written by victors. In the present, however, “past suffering” is often viewed as a source o f “power and privilege” (143) and writing “a history o f the losers, the victims, the subjected, and the vanquished” is perceived as an ethically meritorious act (144). While Todorov does not doubt the need for such a history, which should shed light on aspects o f the past that were previously erased or marginalized, he strongly objects to the uncritical idealization of victimhood and to its exploitation as a source o f moral dividends (144). The moral stance he advocates instead involves “a critical examination o f [our] own collective identity” (144) and uncovering “the weaknesses and wrong turns o f [our] own community” (145). At first glance Todorov’s moral message appears to be intended for “the Big Bad W est” primarily. However, it is also relevant to ethnic and religious groups that are not part o f that imagined cultural-symbolic and

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political entity. South Eastern Europe1 is a case in point. Commentators have repeatedly drawn attention to the role that the martyrium myth has played in the cultural imaginaries o f the region’s national and/or ethnic groups.2 The myth in question projects images o f the victimization of “our” group either at the hands o f foreign malefactors, occasionally aided by native traitors, or native despots, whose oppression o f the majority of the group has led to their symbolic exclusion from it. Representations o f despotism and its dire consequences have long been part o f the composite image o f South Eastern Europe. On the other hand, foreign malefactors have often been defined in terms o f what Lynda E. Boose aptly calls “the [region’s] chief cultural fiction o f difference [my emphasis]” (75). This means that the figures that the myth sometimes portrays as foreign malefactors are in fact territorially close neighbours. But malevolent foreignness is not always perceived as exclusively belonging to the region: the martyrium myth frequently presents “our” group as the plaything of external “great” powers each o f which is motivated by a desire for total domination. This version o f the myth may stress kinship among national and/or ethnic groups in the region insofar as each o f them has, at some point or other been a pawn in a power struggle beyond its control. On the other hand, a change o f perspective may take us away from the bleak vision fostered by the martyrium myth and reveal that Balkan diversity has not always been a source o f conflict but has also led to relative tolerance o f difference. The latter trait, however, has been decidedly downplayed and collective cultural memory both within and outside the region has chosen to retain and perpetuate images o f violence and clashes rather than visions o f harmony. Raphael Samuel notes that cultural memory is not “merely a passive receptacle or storage system, an image bank o f the past” but “rather an active, shaping force” (1, x). This should not blind us to its highly conservative character, though. Thus, it is “impervious to historical facticity” (Boose 83) and heavily relies on received images o f the self and the other. Those images have originated in specific areas o f the past but shape perceptions and mould meanings in the present. One way o f understanding this particular process o f interaction between past and present is by analyzing literary texts that are specifically concerned with representations o f foreign cultures. Issues o f identity and strategies o f cultural translation play a major role in such texts. Besides, they provide positive proof o f the power o f collective cultural memory to disseminate received images o f sameness and difference while also testifying to their authors’ complicity with or rejection o f the conservative content o f that memory. Apart from viewing oeuvres o f this kind as

Representations of South Eastern Europe in British Fiction and Drama of the 1990s

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conductors o f images from the past, one should also attempt to evaluate their role in the creation o f new images o f the other and the self. This chapter focuses on texts by four British authors purporting to highlight key aspects o f life in South Eastern Europe in the 1990s. My discussion starts with Caryl Churchill's play M ad Forest (1990), which concentrates on Romania before and after Nicolae Ceausescu‘s downfall, and ends with David Edgar's Pentecost (1994), a dramatic enactment o f some o f the moral and political dilemmas facing South Eastern Europe after the collapse o f communism. In between I look at two novels, The Porcupine by Julian Barnes and Doctor Criminate by Malcolm Bradbury. Despite the fact that both o f them came out in “Euro-year” 1992, they differ widely in their approaches to South Eastern Europe and its relationship to the West. My reading is specifically concerned with victimization as an ideological nucleus in the representations o f the region’s life and history that the texts project. The task, which I set m yself in this chapter, presupposes an engagement with a particular type o f critical theory. As will be seen, most o f the theoretical tools I use come from versions o f postcolonial critique adapted to the ideologically ambiguous terrain o f South Eastern Europe. It should be remembered that the Balkans did not experience “conventional” colonial domination by the W est and the parts o f the world for which postcolonial theory was originally devised did. I likewise make recourse to previous work by scholars similarly influenced by aspects o f postcolonial studies, notably, American intellectual historians Larry W olff and Milica Bakic-Hayden. Their observations are further supplemented with insights (rather than direct quotations) from a recent study o f myth significantly entitled Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (2005) to which I briefly referred earlier. The reading o f the four texts is preceded by a general survey o f perceptions o f South Eastern Europe from without and within. In the course o f my own interpretation o f the selected plays and novels I occasionally address specific readings by other commentators from the region. Their work is o f particular interest as it is, in the words of one o f them, “ignited [sic] by a level o f frustration and ... outrage towards various misrepresentations, complacent attitudes, and stereotypical constructs created and proliferated in the W estern world” (Radulescu and Glajar 2). Such a reaction may strike some interpreters as too intense; for me, however, it is above all symptomatic o f the high level o f tension involved in the negotiation o f one’s national, ethnic an/or regional identity in a context that is felt to be totally dominated by “the Big Western

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Other’s desire” (Ditchev 240). This negotiation, as will be seen, is not free from contradictions or awkward silences. They, too, are meaningful and merit examination.

Martyred by the turns and twists of history: perceptions of South Eastern Europe from without and within The real (or imagined) victim status o f South Eastern Europe is often seen as a consequence o f the region’s historical destiny. To understand the logic behind this, we need to glance at conceptual divisions within Europe and the ways in which they have been theorized. Larry W olffs writing o f the early and mid-1990s is not specifically focused on the Balkans as a separate symbolic-geographical entity but is in many ways relevant to my present argument. W olff is above all concerned with the invention of Eastern Europe in the Enlightenment. He stresses the novel way of viewing the “old” continent from the eighteenth century onwards. As late as the Renaissance, “the crucial conceptual division o f Europe” was between the South and the North. The Enlightenment “introduced a different perspective “with Paris and London - rather than Rome and Florence - gaining supremacy and becoming “fixed points o f the cultural compass” (W olff 1995:933). This shift in perception resulted in the production o f the notional entities o f “Western” and “Eastern Europe.” The relationship between the two constructs was characterized by asymmetry as “Eastern Europe was made legible and accountable to Western Europe” W olff 1995:935). Western Europe assumed the role o f a “centre” while Eastern Europe was assigned that o f a “periphery” or, I would add, “peripheries”, a series o f marginal localities distinguished from one another on the basis o f their difference from, or relative affinity with, the “centre.” W olff further remarks that the invention o f Eastern Europe involved a process o f “demi-Orientalization” (W olff 1994:7): Enlightenment “Philosophic Geography” excluded Eastern Europe from Europe “proper” whereas scientific cartographic research exposed the exclusion as merely fanciful. However, even scientific cartography was in doubt as to the exact geographical demarcation between Europe and Asia. The shifting location o f the “old” continent's Eastern borders (the Don, the Volga or the Urals?) “encouraged the construction o f Eastern Europe as a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion” (W olff 1994:7). Generally speaking, Eastern Europe’s exclusion was motivated by the perceived presence in it o f features that some representatives o f the Enlightenment


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usually identified as “Oriental” or “Asiatic” such as primitive forms o f religious worship (for instance, enlightened W estern travellers frequently derided Eastern Orthodox priests on account o f their ignorance or mocked at the superstition o f “primitive” Roman Catholic congregations), despotic governments that fostered a slavish mentality and general backwardness. These features were gradually made part o f local and foreign plots of victimization. W o lffs model o f the two notional Europes thus sheds light on some o f the ideological work that the “heroes” o f the Enlightenment did. At the same time, it primarily reflects the conceptualization o f the “old” continent before the disintegration o f the so-called Eastern bloc in 1989 and the early 1990s. W olff makes no attempt to explain contradictions or differences within the large entity he identifies as Eastern Europe and this is best interpreted as a consequence o f the virtual disappearance, during the Cold War period, o f smaller symbolicgeographical categories such as Central Europe and the Balkans.3 Once that particular “ideological era”4 ended, they were brought back into cultural-symbolic circulation - with a vengeance. Using the disintegration o f Yugoslavia as a point o f departure, Milica Bakic-Hayden proposes a different approach to what may be termed Eurasian “poetics o f space.”5 She speaks o f “a gradation o f Orients” or “nesting Orientalisms” (918). In her view, Eurasian space is organized through “a pattern o f reproduction o f the original dichotomy upon which [Saidian] Orientalism is premised” in which “Asia is more ‘East’ or ‘other’ than Eastern Europe” (918). W ithin Eastern Europe itself, certain ethno-geographical spaces might appear more “Eastern” than others. The validity o f this line o f reasoning was borne out by the large-scale revival of the concept o f Central Europe after 1989 and the corresponding emphasis on its essential difference from “Oriental” localities such as the Balkans. Developments in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Europe have shown that “Eastemness” is for the most part defined in terms of Ottoman rule in the past and a tradition o f Eastern Orthodox (“Byzantine”) Christianity or Islam. A history o f Habsburg domination and Roman Catholicism and/or Protestantism, on the other hand, may be interpreted as “credentials” for belonging to “Europe.” W ithin the conceptual scheme developed by Bakic-Hayden, the Balkans would appear to be Europe’s most irredeemably Oriental(ized) region but even there certain ethnogeographical spaces may be interpreted as being more “Eastern” than others.

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Interpretations denigrating the “East” and privileging the “West” may be placed within the category o f positive Occidentalism. I follow James G. Carrier (1996), rather than Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (2004), in defining Occidentalism as a conglomerate o f “stylized images o f the West” (1). Carrier stresses the simplistic and essentialist character o f such images (3). For the purposes o f the present reading I am going to distinguish between positive and negative Occidentalism. Both kinds of Occidentalism have been closely bound up with the construction of national and/or political identities in South Eastern Europe as well as with images o f victimhood and plots o f victimization. Such plots involve resentment at history’s injustice to “our” group. The essays included in Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe show that they still structure most national historiographic accounts in the region. Thus, interpretations o f the past may take the form o f narratives o f failed purpose focusing on the glorious destiny, which “our” group was just about to fulfil when foreign malefactors intervened and changed the course of “our” history. Bulgaria is a case in point: the country’s long-term domination by the Ottoman Empire is usually interpreted as a detour from its “proper” road o f development within Christian European civilization. The native intelligentsia that was chiefly responsible for the implementation o f the national project o f modernity from the beginning o f the nineteenth century onwards devised a scenario o f “de-orientalization” targeted at healing the trauma o f Bulgaria’s separation from that civilization. The scenario was by no means unique to Bulgaria. Indeed, the country shared its distinctive features with most o f its Christian neighbours in South Eastern Europe.7 From their inception, scenarios o f “deorientalization” in the region functioned through the (re-)drawing of ethno-cultural boundaries between Christians and Muslims. Significantly, this process never lost its relevance completely. Events in Bosnia in the 1990s showed how deeply entrenched it was in Serb cultural memory (Boose 75-81). The current resurgence o f nationalism and anti-Turkish feeling in Bulgaria likewise testifies to its potency.8 Apart from periods o f foreign domination being represented as detours, certain historiographic accounts produced in countries across the former Eastern bloc portray the post-WWII years similarly as a deviation from their states’ “right” historical road. This is usually coupled with a tendency to blame Churchill and Roosevelt for their betrayal o f Eastern (and Central) European nations into Stalin’s hands. Such a view in fact continues the Enlightenment trend o f representing most peoples from Europe’s “other” half as victims o f despotism. The trend further re


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surfaced in the ways in which a lot o f Western media and authors chose to represent the downfall o f the totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and the ensuing Change? Romania especially was produced as a gothic locale whose history was marked by unbridled tyranny, violence and chaos. In the North American context, this cultural practice engendered ingenious vampire films such as Stuart Gordon's Bloodlines: an Evil Ancestry (1989) and Ted Nicolaou's Subspecies (1991) as well as a neo-gothic political fantasy by Dan Simmons which bore the suggestively familiar title o f Children o f the Night (1992).10 Elizabeth Kostova has recently contributed to what may be described as a post-1989 Gothic trend in American culture with her monumental bestseller The Historian (2005). Significantly, Kostova does not dwell on Romania only but spreads the events o f her plot over a wide terrain comprising Istanbul, parts o f Bulgaria and Hungary, Western Europe and the United States. This terrain is a backdrop to the tyrannical machinations of the vampiric W allachian lord Dracula. In the context o f the book, Dracula embodies an overwhelming desire for power and a childish disregard for the lives and feelings o f others. In other words, he stands for (South) Eastern European primitivism. One is reminded o f some o f the Western impressions o f despotic Eastern European aristocrats that Larry W olff uses as examples in his book (cf. Comte de Segur’s narrative o f his encounter with Prince Potemkin [W olff 1994: 66-68]). Like the other works o f popular culture cited above, Kostova’s novel brings into play some o f the stock images o f South Eastern Europe preserved in collective cultural memory. The Historian may enlighten Western readers about unfamiliar aspects o f Balkan life and history (e. g. Bulgaria’s legacy o f Manichaean dualism) but the book hardly problematizes preconceptions about the essential victimhood o f the local people or, for that matter their exotic primitivism (fire dancing, for instance, is portrayed as part o f the day-to-day life of a Bulgarian rural community [Kostova 2005:537-60]). The four texts I have selected for discussion represent and/or embody most of the contradictions inherent in the imaginative construction o f South Eastern European identities. These contradictions further complicate the difficult task o f cultural translation that their authors have ambitiously undertaken. Caught in the tensions o f ongoing political and economic changes in the region and hampered by legacies o f received images and preconceptions, Churchill, Barnes, Bradbury and Edgar have nevertheless courageously attempted to make sense, through literature and the theatre, of ethical dilemmas and political quandaries that defy easy solutions.

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M ad Forest: between uncertainty and historical anachronism Caryl Churchill's play appeared at a time when events in Eastern Europe and, particularly, in Romania were being avidly covered by the Western media. By 1990 when M ad Forest was first produced the street violence in Bucharest and Timisoara and the trial and execution o f Nicolae and Elena Ceasescu had acquired emblematic significance and were fostering stereotypes in the W est o f the way “things were” in the crumbling Eastern bloc. The world seemed to be witnessing a melodrama in which an evil dictatorship (Ceausescu was repeatedly likened to Dracula!) had toppled down and the oppressed millions triumphed. The dramatic potential o f what was happening was made use o f almost immediately. Apart from M ad Forest, the disintegration and fall o f repressive Eastern European regimes inspired Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali's Moscow Gold (1990), David Edgar's The Shape o f the Table (1990), and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1992). Evidently, the need to translate the latest developments in that part o f the world for Western audiences that knew little about it was acute. In the early 1990s M ad Forest was (arguably) the most highly acclaimed o f all British plays about pre- and postcommunist life in Eastern Europe. Sceptical comments were not lacking but, by and large, Churchill was praised for the stance of “a reporter-observer” she assumed in the play." This was linked to her earlier attempts to use theatre “to stage ‘democratic history’” and encourage “interaction between people on the stage and in the audience” (Orlich 216). Churchill performs the task o f cultural translation in M ad Forest by emphasizing the limitations o f her own vision and knowledge as she presents her spectators with received images o f Romania as a site of historically conditioned victimization and guilt, on the one hand, and problematizes media-produced political mythology, on the other. The events o f Romanian history to which the play draws attention are frankly depressing: between the 1960s and 1989 the country was governed by a repressive political regime headed by Nicolae Ceasescu, who promoted members o f his own family to the highest governmental posts and plunged the country into economic chaos through his megalomaniac schemes. His regime nevertheless received lukewarm support from Western governments, most notably from the United States, because o f his maverick stance vis-avis Moscow. A look at Romania’s earlier history shows that there was little in it to offset the record o f Ceasescu’s dictatorship. Apart from


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stories about the murky feudal past, accounts o f Comeliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard with its policy o f ultra-nationalism, flagrant AntiSemitism and political violence became firmly rooted in the W est’s collective cultural memory. Unlike most fascist movements in Europe, the Iron Guard or the Legion o f the Archangel Michael, as its members preferred to call it, was steeped in religious mysticism, which, in Martyn Rady’s apt description, owed “much to the peasant populist movement of the nineteenth century, but with the rational element burnt out leaving only a malignant emotionalism” (24). Apart from arousing strong suspicions about the Romanian Orthodox Church’s complicity with the Guard, this must have also awakened old prejudices about the essential irrationality o f “Byzantine” Christianity. Churchill never denies that every turn and twist o f Romanian history involved a lot o f communal suffering but, at the same time, sharpens her spectators’ awareness o f the collective guilt implicit in memories o f the Iron Guard’s fascist ideology and its acts o f political violence. She thus advocates a critical perspective on the past, which is in many ways similar to the one outlined by Todorov in Hope and Memory. Significantly, latterday Romanian commentators on M ad Forest have for the most part ignored those episodes o f the play which touch upon the Iron Guard’s excesses. Thus Ileana Orlich never mentions them in what is otherwise an insightful study o f gender relations in the play. To Dominica Radulescu the angel and the vampire enacting the unsavoury aspects o f the South Eastern European nation’s pre-communist past appear absolutely irrelevant, and the figure o f the vampire in particular does not carry any political message but merely demonstrates that the “Western imagination cannot get over its vampire obsession” (51). Such responses are indicative o f the difficulties involved in “a critical examination o f [our] own collective identity” (Todorov 144) and the uncovering o f “the weaknesses and wrong turns o f [our] own community” (Todorov 145). Coming to terms with images o f what may be termed “straight” victimization is much less problematic. A lot in M ad Forest testifies to its author's determination to avoid the sensationalism fostered by the mass media. Rather than focusing attention on high politics (cf. Moscow Gold where Mikhail and the late Raisa Gorbachev are central to the play's action), M ad Forest presents scenes from the lives o f two ordinary Romanian families, the middle-class Antonescus and the working-class Vladus, before and after the overthrow o f the Ceausescu regime. Opting for a polysemic representation o f history

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(Sakellaridou 146-149), Churchill renders the momentous events o f 1989 through the divergent accounts o f anonymous citizens: a housepainter, a boy student, a girl student and a translator, among others (29). The dramatist avoids the use o f documentary video material even when she refers to the Ceausescus' trial and execution. She resorts to a defamiliarizing strategy in an attempt to distance the play's audience from the widely televised image o f the scene. As a result Radu and Fiorina, two o f the play's characters, take up the roles o f Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu and mimic their performance (Churchill 69). Distrust o f the mass media and of the simplistic versions o f South Eastern European reality they were instrumental in producing at the time is thus among M ad Forest's distinctive traits. Another notable feature the play possesses is the emphasis on cultural difference. Signifiers o f the “exotic” such as the vampire noticed by Radulescu are few and far between. In fact, they are definitely outnumbered by indicators o f the author's own puzzlement by the unfamiliar culture, which she is trying to translate for her audience. The play thus initiates an intercultural dialogue in which the dramatist is a participant rather than an omniscient mentor contemplating the exchange from the outside. At the same time, M ad Forest does imply a certain amount o f scepticism about events in Romania and their consequences. The Revolution, as Romanians prefer to term the Change in their country, may well have been manipulated by members o f Ceausescu's own secret police, the dreaded Securitate: the authenticity o f what looked like an unpremeditated popular rising against Romania’s repressive regime is repeatedly questioned by different characters starting with an anonymous hospital patient, who is pronounced to be insane, and ending with the young intellectual Radu: Patient. Have they told you who was shooting on the 22? And why was it necessary to kill Ceausescu so quickly? [...] Did we have a revolution? Or what did we have? Fiorina. He was wounded on the head... Yes, he's a bit crazy. [....] Radu. Who was shooting on the 22nd? That's not a crazy question. [...] The only real night was the 21st. After that, what was going on? It was all a show. [...] Were they fighting or pretending to fight? Who let off firecrackers? Who brought loudhailers? (Churchill 52-54)

Significantly, no straightforward answer is provided to Radu’s questions in the context o f the play. A n emphatic “yes” would represent the rising as a strategic ploy o f the Securitate and would reinforce the element o f “straight” victimization in Churchill’s interpretation o f Romania’s


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historical destiny. A straightforward “no” would be in tune with the dramatist’s own socialist convictions.12 As a Western leftist Churchill found it difficult to accept the Eastern European rejection o f Marxist revolutionary theory and practice during and after the dismantlement o f the old totalitarian regimes in the region. It is greatly to her credit, though, that she refrained from imposing her own politics on her material. As a result the play lacks a “strong sense o f political direction” (Adiseshiah). Commentators have drawn attention to the marked undecidability o f its plot. Some o f them have linked this feature to the play’s overall postmodernist character. Thus, Frances Gray maintains that “it is impossible to draw simple conclusions from M ad Forest” as it does not present “a linear argument but a mosaic” (58). W hile Adiseshiah attributes this trait to the overall “lack o f clarity and weakening confidence that exists on the British Left in relation to its response to the demise o f the Eastern bloc,” she also finds in the play “a commitment to both individual and collective emancipation” as well as affirmation o f “the characters’ desire for self-empowerment and self-realization” (Adiseshiah). By and large, M ad Forest asserts the right o f ordinary people to take action against a repressive political regime but also highlights a number o f factors that prevent this emancipatory project o f grassroots change from coming to fruition. Anachronistic attempts to bring back to life the pre communist parties and implement their outdated political programmes are among those. Several characters discuss the murder o f a member o f the newly re-established National Peasants’ Party who was suspected o f wanting the whole o f his family’s land back (Churchill 80). Significantly, he is also said to have been working for the Securitate. Past and present thus appear to be inextricably mixed in the play’s representation o f Romania. However, it is ethnic hatred, which constitutes the worst threat to the tentative promises o f the Change. As was already remarked, a vampire, who follows the crowds because he senses violence and blood, and an angel are among the play’s dramatis personae. Both characters represent the entanglement o f past and present, and the angel is even rather nostalgic about the Iron Guard: “the Iron Guard used to be rather charming and called themselves the League o f the Archangel Michael and carried my picture about” (Churchill 27). The play's closing scene alerts spectators to the danger o f the eruption o f ethnic hatred. At the wedding o f Fiorina and Radu, which should in principle stand for renewal and reconciliation, the Hungarian character Ianos seriously inflames some o f the Romanians by stressing his own superiority over them as a middle-class Central European:

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Chapter Three Ianos. You were under the Turks too long. It made you like slaves.[...] Bogdan. Leave my son alone, Hungarian bastard. And don't come near my daughter. Ianos. I’m already fucking your daughter, you stupid peasant. (Churchill

84) A general scuffle ensues. The symbolism is painfully clear: rather than issuing in a “New Order,” the Change has unleashed old hatreds. Interestingly, British directors o f the play have found a way o f modifying the ending by foregrounding the festive setting o f the scuffle episode. The angry exchange is superseded by a general celebration because there is, after all, a wedding going on. Adiseshiah mentions an amateur production by the Birmingham School o f Speech and Drama, which she watched in 2003. The play “closed with a strong sense o f solidarity and celebration” as audience members joined the dancing actors (Adiseshiah). In this particular case, the bitterness o f historically conditioned victimization was eschewed, albeit in a rather facile and superficial way. Leaving theatre directors’ solutions apart, M ad Forest presents past history as a powerful presence in the Romanian context. Re-examining that history and rejecting negative precedents may be a way o f overcoming victimization and gaining new dignity but the play does not indicate which o f its characters are prepared to perform this difficult task.

The Porcupine: observations on the morally dubious exercise of scapegoating Published a little over two years after the downfall o f totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Julian Barnes’ short novel The Porcupine voiced more o f the scepticism which was already implicit in Churchill’s play. The earliest stage o f the book's life was marked by a curious circumstance: its Bulgarian translation was published before the English original. In “Euro-year” 1992, this was seen as a sign o f the (postmodern) times and o f Europe's growing integration. Bulgarians, whose country had not attracted all that much attention in the early years o f the postcommunist era (the fall o f Bulgaria's communist leader Todor Zhivkov on 10 November 1989 caused only a mild international stir as it coincided with the far more dramatic opening o f the Berlin Wall) initially welcomed the book. For many o f them it provided proof that the country's recent history boasted at least one truly memorable event: Zhivkov's public trial which, as far as Western public opinion was concerned, contrasted favourably with the Ceausescus’ summary trial and execution. Reactions changed somewhat after people had had time to sit down and read the book: what


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was interpreted as Barnes' representation o f Bulgaria's very recent history seemed disturbing, the Change in particular was portrayed in a way that made it difficult for readers to make up their minds about the author's attitude to it. Swayed by the potent desire to erase all signs o f communism's presence in Bulgaria and by the conviction that the West was uniformly and unequivocally anticommunist, some readers resented the book. Others urged a more tolerant attitude to it and to foreign (i. e. Western) representations o f Bulgaria in general. As a very authoritative reader, The Porcupine's, Bulgarian translator Dimitrina Kondova, argued on another occasion, “we should at least take some notice o f the ways others see us... difficult though it might be to accept their interpretations o f our life.” 13 The Porcupine, it should be noted, is set in a nameless postcommunist country, which is linked to Bulgaria through the characters' names and a few recognizable political events such as Zhivkov's public trial.14 However, the fact that the author chose not to identify his setting as specifically Bulgarian is significant. Malcolm Bradbury, the creator o f another fictitious Eastern European country called “Slaka,” claims that it was “made like a cocktail: a mixture o f [his impressions of] Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary ... [with] tiny little bits o f Poland stuck in” (Bradbury 1994: 21). Barnes' postcommunist Anonymiana would appear to be a similar creation, although in his case the ingredients appear to have mostly come from literature and journalism rather than from “direct” observation o f the “other” Europe.15 While The Porcupine's decidedly dark and cold world is strongly reminiscent o f the Stalinist Russia o f Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940)16 and o f Alexander Solzhenitsyn's major novels, some o f the stereotypically “other” European figures that inhabit it - such as kerchiefed housewives and the local Dictator's decidedly stout daughter - have undoubtedly come from the mass media. The book's deposed Dictator Stoyo Petkanov is a composite product: he is a mixture o f Bulgaria’s Zhivkov, the USSR’s Nikita Khruschev and, possibly, a few Latin American caudillos added in for extra spice. Such generalizing traits indicate that Barnes' novel is, above all, a parable o f power and corruption, which purports to alert us to such politically motivated and historically conditioned human flaws as the need o f scapegoating. This need is repeatedly diagnosed and diligently analyzed throughout the text. Petkanov's public trial becomes the focus o f the analysis. It is meant to serve as a moral test o f the social order that the Change has brought into

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existence. In the context o f the novel, attitudes to this order vary. Thus the ex-dictator Petkanov repeatedly emphasizes its “effeminacy” which, in his opinion, contrasts with the “masculinity” o f his own regime (Barnes 1319). The newly established order is irredeemably flawed because it involves a return to an outmoded system o f “bourgeois” values, which Petkanov, in the manner o f Koestler's theorist Rubashov and his disciple Gletkin, regards as so much “ethical ballast” (Koestler 184). The Prosecutor General Peter Solinsky is Petkanov's (ineffectual) antithesis in the novel. A one-time believer in communism, he has renounced the old ideology and is currently a member o f the oppositional Green Party. It is Solinsky's task to stage-manage Petkanov's trial and press convincing charges against him. The trial is based on what is recognized as a “W estern” judiciary pattern: the prosecution should undertake to prove the defendant's guilt; theoretically at least, the accused would not be expected to prove his innocence. While such a pattern would not exclude the possibility o f the defendant breaking down and confessing his crimes, confession in, and by, itself would not be considered a sign of guilt. Ideally, the trial should be open-ended. Petkanov is sceptical about the proceedings and the possibility o f a fair trial. Such an attitude is not completely unjustified. Despite the emphasis on playing by the rules and performing a ritual o f memory that should “cure” the country o f the ravages o f its communist past and help it overcome its historically determined victim status, the new authorities are trying to turn Petkanov into a convenient scapegoat. As the trial is televised, viewers are hoping that the former Head o f State would break down and they would have the satisfaction o f witnessing his humiliation. For the middle-aged professor o f law Solinsky the trial is a means o f selfassertion, a way o f proving to him self and to everyone else that he has not been turned into a non-entity by the communist system for which he now has only contempt (Barnes 101-3). Petkanov's trial comes to be known as “Criminal Law Case Number 1” (Barnes 32). Producing evidence o f the Dictator's serious crimes against the nation turns out to be very difficult: most o f the details have been conveniently forgotten. As a result, Petkanov is charged with trivial offences, which he finds fairly easy to refute or belittle. At the very end o f the trial, the story o f the ex-President's crimes is changed once again by the addition o f the (possibly false) charge that he ordered his own daughter's murder. This is the only charge against Petkanov, which satisfies the expectations o f the trial's sensation-hungry viewers. Pressing it turns Solinsky into a celebrity. However, as the


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evidence on which the charge is based is suspect (forged documents provided by a member o f the country’s new elite), it seriously vitiates the open-ended character o f the legal proceedings. Petkanov's trial seems to be just another show trial, not all that different from the Moscow Trials o f the 1930s that Darkness at Noon is about. Thus teaching history not “to repeat itself’ seems - as ever - a fairly tricky proposition. The emphasis, however, is on “seems there are some differences after all. For one thing, The Porcupine does not end with the defendant's execution but with the Prosecutor's moral awakening and slow realization that latter-day evil is “banal” (meaning, as Judith Halberstam reminds us, “common to all” [Halberstam 162]). The key text on the “banality” o f evil in the modem world is, o f course, Hannah Arendt's 1963 essay Eichmann in Jerusalem. W ritten in the wake o f this sceptical commentary on demonization and conflicting accounts o f the Ceausescus' trial and execution, Barnes' novel repeats the lesson, which Arendt attempted to teach by stressing the fact that Eichmann was primarily a “cog” in a huge bureaucratic machine. Similarly, Barnes' Petkanov is no supernatural or metaphysical incarnation o f evil: his regime endured for such a long time because o f the complicity o f the governed and the strategic interests o f the West. Significantly, while he was in power, the dictator was repeatedly praised for his political acumen and willingness to cooperate with the democracies on the other side o f the Iron Curtain (Barnes 122-6). Representing him as an inhuman monster at his public trial and turning him into a scapegoat will not help justice but will prove, yet again, that a powerful drive towards demonization and victimization defines the human condition. Barnes' novel is thus about certain “universal” historical verities. There is, however, more than a hint in it that certain countries tend to grasp those truths later, or less readily, than others. The novel's treatment of scapegoating therefore implies a mentorial attitude to postcommunist Europeans insofar as it recommends that they should learn a moral lesson that the rest o f the world was taught about forty years earlier. Such an attitude is likewise suggested by the text’s vision o f the “delayed maturity” of the local people (Barnes 19-20). The phrase brings to mind Kant's definition o f Enlightenment as “a process that releases us from the status o f ‘immaturity’” where “immaturity means... a state o f our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us where the use o f reason is called for”.17 South Eastern Europeans are evidently expected to repeat the lessons of the (Western European) Enlightenment as they “grow up'” and

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come to resemble the “adult” intellectuals o f the “old” continent's privileged half. Barnes' stance is thus unmistakably mentorial. Overall, The Porcupine represents an anonymous postcommunist country most o f whose inhabitants (themselves victims o f Europe’s historically uneven development!) are intent upon the victimization o f their former leader because they need a scapegoat that would rid them o f their sense o f guilt. There is more than a hint in the text that they might outgrow this condition yet - with the writer's own generous help. I f anything, the attitude is strongly reminiscent of the liberal Victorian ethos o f helping Europe’s “younger” nations. Barnes may be said to number among his predecessors William Gladstone18 and the George Bernard Shaw o f Arms and the Man (1894).19 The underlying intention was positive in all cases. The trouble is that it implied condescension - in the late twentieth century no less - than a hundred years earlier.

Doctor Criminate: rejecting the gifts of chaos Unlike The Porcupine, Bradbury's D octor Criminale is not about an anonymous “other” European country but contains a number o f references to actual geographical locations scattered all over the “old” continent. These locations participate in an “imaginative-geographical” scheme,20 which is intimately linked to the figure o f the novel’s resident villain Doctor Criminale. This character is seen by his creator as “a Danubian man [. . .] whose life is a progress up the river” (Bradbury 1994:25), from his birthplace, the Bulgarian town o f Veliko Tumovo, to Budapest and then to Vienna. Despite the text’s references to “real” places, the representation o f Europe, which it projects, does not conform to realist conventions. The work's characters exemplify, for the most part, the postmodern human condition, which means, among other things, that the concept o f authenticity is not relevant to their fictional universe. Doctor Criminale is an experimental neo-picaresque novel bristling with irony at the expense o f various modes of representation and brands o f critical theory purporting to explain them. As is often the case with ironic fiction, the story is narrated by a figure whose assertions and actions should evoke detachment rather than readerly identification. The narrator in question is a young British journalist called Francis Jay who is steeped in diverse fads and fashions characteristic of Western European political and intellectual life in the nineties. He is


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definitely not “a character in the world-historical sense” and in this respect resembles Angus Petworth, the ineffectual British visitor to Slaka in Bradbury's earlier novel Rates o f Exchange (Bradbury 1984: 129). As “a mega-star in the [world's] cultural firmament” and a “Great Thinker o f the Age of Glasnost” Criminale is the diametrical opposite o f the “naive, anonymous, [and] provincial” Jay.21 These two characters are apparently meant to typify a postmodern and highly problematical version o f the relationship between W estern “centre” and South Eastern European “periphery.” However, many old fears and anxieties are definitely part of it. Despite his global fame and importance, Criminale is portrayed as a liminal figure, embodying deeply seated anxieties over the fluidity and indeterminacy o f the borderline separating the West from an alien and unfamiliar East. He mediates between East and W est (in the Cold War sense of these concepts), but his mediation often involves the transgression of moral boundaries and the disruption o f basic political distinctions. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is one o f the intertexts for Doctor Criminale. Like the archetypal Carpathian transgressor, Criminale serves the powers of evil represented, in his case, by the heavily mythologized secret police services o f the Eastern bloc. Before the Change, he unscrupulously exploited the West's academic, political and financial institutions to further their sinister plans. After the Change, he is still tied up with them. Criminale is eminently successful in his espionage and other unsavoury activities because o f his ability to pass fo r a bona fide academic. Like Dracula in Stephen Arata's seminal interpretation o f Bram Stoker's vampire classic, he is “a most accomplished Occidentalist” (Arata 1990:637), who has made a point o f studying the W est in order to exploit it all the better. This is indicated by, among other things, his superior command o f English: unlike other foreign characters in Bradbury's novels, Criminale hardly ever makes language mistakes. Even though the similarities between Dracula and Criminale are integrated into the novel's overall ironic structure, they point to the presence o f a Eurocentrist myth in the text, which, in the present writer's opinion, never gets deconstructed. This myth affects the representation o f Criminale's birthplace, the town o f Veliko Tumovo, and, for that matter, o f the whole of South Eastern Europe. W hile researching Criminale's life for a television programme entitled “Great Thinkers o f the Age o f Glasnost,” Jay (who may also be seen as the novel’s Jonathan Harker) is at first unable to identify Criminale's birthplace. Characteristically, he is misled by various reference books, which locate the philosopher's place o f origin

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in countries as different as Lithuania and Moldavia. What underlies this facile disregard o f cultural, ethnic, and historical demarcations within the locale loosely labelled “Eastern Europe” is the assumption that differences in this part o f the world are infinitesimal and unimportant. They may matter to the locals but are best disregarded by an outsider.22 When Jay finally learns from an Austrian professor's critical biography that Criminale was bom in Veliko Tumovo, Bulgaria, he consults more reference books (“atlas and gazetteer” [Bradbury 1992:31]) in an attempt to obtain information about what appears to be “darkest Eastern Europe.” This, however, does not lift the cloud o f anonymity obscuring the country of Criminale's birth. Apart from a few decidedly touristic details about Veliko Tumovo (“the ancient capital o f Bulgaria, famous for its old university and monasteries, its storks and its frescoes, its castle and its ancient Arabesque merchants' houses”[Bradbury 1992:31]), Jay is presented with a cliched description o f Bulgaria as “land o f attar o f roses, fine frescos and also poisoned umbrellas” (Bradbury 1992:31). Its post war history is shown to conform to a generalized “Eastern bloc” pattern of events: “liberated to the Russians [sic!] by Georgy Dimitrov” (Bradbury 1992:31), the country was a minor Soviet satellite during the Cold War years, and, in the 1990s, is in the process o f heading toward a market economy. This information, naturally, does not excite the narrator's curiosity about Bulgaria. As a result the country is mentioned only rarely. Criminale is repeatedly characterized by Jay as “a Hungarian” and (strange to say!) the young man's own travelling companion, the Hungarian secret agent Ildiko, never disagrees with this (Bradbury 1992:152). The philosopher him self mentions Veliko Tumovo on one single occasion and his description o f it fits the stereotypical Western view o f the unimportance o f localities in the “other” Europe: “a place you have never heard of, a place you will never visit” (Bradbury 1992: 235). Then he modifies his statement to “it was a place to be bom in, also a place to leave if you wished to lead a significant life” (Bradbury 1992:235). The theatre o f great events is assumed to be elsewhere and South Eastern Europe's peripheral status is confirmed once again. Criminale’s prominence in world philosophy is repeatedly mentioned in the book. However, it is only towards the end o f Jay’s narrative that we finally get inkling into the nature o f his ideas. Criminale, it transpires, is the century’s theorist o f chaos and nothingness. Significantly, the character that makes that startling revelation to the reader is Dr. Ludmilla Markova o f the University o f Veliko Tumovo, Bulgaria. She attempts to


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open up a belated dialogue between South Eastern European “periphery” and Western “centre” by addressing Jay at an academic conference and taking issue with the paper on Criminale he has just presented. In her view, it is “very good [...], quite deconstructive” but also radically marred by Jay’s incomprehension o f the Bulgarian thinker’s philosophy: “Only one thing. You understand nothing [my emphasis].” (Bradbury 1992: 337) The reason for the narrator’s inability to make sense o f Criminale’s ideas is his ignorance o f life in the country o f the philosopher’s birth. Markova claims that this ignorance is universal: “nobody understands Bulgaria, it is too small country, [...] our image is negative, we are always the toy of others” (Bradbury 1992:337). Bulgaria is thus doubly victimized', first, because no one has taken the trouble o f “understanding” it, and, secondly, because o f its manifest lack o f independence (“always the toy o f others”). For Markova Criminale’s Bulgarianness is a point o f pride: “but Criminale is ours” (Bradbury 1992:338). That alone seems to provide her with an insight into his philosophy that Jay as a W esterner lacks. The insight primarily relates to Criminale’s “struggle[...] to exist in a world o f forces no one can stop” Bradbury 1992:338). Markova adds further on: He [i. e. Criminale] was bom in chaos, he lived in chaos. [...] He did not only play with nothingness. He knew it. For us chaos is not a theory, it is a condition. We do not like him so much, but he is very Bulgarian writer. (Bradbury 1992: 338)

Criminale appears to have shared his country’s victim status but rather than turning this into a tragedy or a sentimental melodrama he transformed it into a system o f philosophical ideas. Engendered by his native legacy o f chaos, his philosophy became his somewhat dubious gift to the world. Markova urges Jay to visit her country in order to gain first-hand experience o f chaos as a “condition o f life” rather than as a mere “theory” (Bradbury 1992:338). This should presumably help him understand Criminale’s philosophy. It would also expose him to life in a country in which “nothing works” and which emphatically proclaims its difference from “Europe”: “we are not Europe and cannot live like Europe” (Bradbury 1992:338). Dr M arkova’s arguments do not have any impact on Jay's late-liberal conscience. Being no late twentieth-century Byron, he cannot see the long neglected Balkan periphery in the light o f an espousable cause. Indeed, by the end o f the novel Jay has comfortably shacked up with a Euro-German bureaucrat called Cosima Bruckner and has, to all intents and purposes, turned his back upon Criminale’s native country and its discontents. As

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was remarked above, he is not an exemplary figure and readers are not expected to identify with him. Yet, his centrality to the plot and the fact that everything is filtered through his consciousness are factors that are difficult to ignore. His inability to act ethically and responsibly makes us wonder what the novel’s moral message is. The final impression that we are left with is o f a boundary being (re-)drawn between South Eastern European “chaos” and W estern European “order.” The latter category is emblemized by Cosima Bruckner and her fellow bureaucrats in Brussels.23

Pentecost: ignoring the lessons of history Produced in 1994 when the Change was already well under way in the whole o f the former Eastern bloc, David Edgar's Pentecost resembles the other three texts in purporting to analyze the “old” continent's (and the world's) destiny in the late twentieth century. As was already pointed out above, Pentecost is not the playwright's only engagement with that momentous theme. In his 1990 play The Shape o f the Table a similar analysis was underwritten by his preoccupation with Marxism, and Eastern Europe was chosen for a setting for what Elizabeth Sakellaridou has seen as “his self-debates about the future o f M arxist thinking in the world” (151). Criticism o f the postcommunist condition in Pentecost is similarly fuelled by Edgar's Marxism. The outcome o f this criticism is a dystopia set in an anonymous South Eastern European country in which Bulgarian is spoken but readers and spectators are warned that it is not Bulgaria (Edgar xx). The author's dystopian vision o f the “triumph” o f capitalism in “our country” (Edgar xx) brings into play a fair amount o f Eurocentrism, which seriously weakens his argument against the rise o f racism and xenophobia in postcommunist South Eastern Europe. Eurocentrism is apparent in the overall ideological representation o f the setting and the unfolding o f the play's plot. Thus, it is rather broadly hinted that following the collapse of communism even countries from the Balkan fringe, such as “our country,” are planning to “join Europe.” This civilizational choice is made at a time o f military crisis, newly awakened nationalist feelings and unthinking hatred o f all “non-Europeans.” Oblivious o f its own traditional exclusion from European affairs, Edgar's Balkan Anonymiana defines its identity through persistent self-occidentalizing references to its “Europeanness” and through the rejection o f all undesirable “aliens.” In the context o f the play, that category includes characters from the region such as a refugee from Sarajevo as well as asylum seekers from the Third World.


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The play is strikingly multilingual: Bulgarian is only one o f a variety of “exotic” tongues spoken in it. The linguistic bouquet also includes Polish, Russian, Arabic and Turkish. English, in various states o f grammatical decrepitude and with its American variant added for extra piquancy, is the lingua franca and the main vehicle o f interpersonal communication. Two other Western European languages, German and French, are used toward the end o f the play, when, to all intents and purposes, the action appears to have moved beyond verbal communication. Apart from being in unison with the play's title, this mixing o f Eastern and Western tongues should highlight the “unnamed south-east European country's” (Edgar xx) hybridity and bring to mind a frequently quoted, cliched description o f the Balkans as the region where East and W est literally meet. Pentecost's opening scene enacts an aspect o f that meeting: Gabriella Pecz, a local art historian, and her British colleague Oliver Davenport look at a religious painting in a building whose fictional history is yet another embodiment o f the Western view o f the “other” Europe: As well as warehouse, church is used by heroic peasantry for store potatoes [...] And before potatoes, Museum of Atheism and Progressive People's Culture. And before museum, prison [...] 'Transit Centre'. German Army. [...] [and still earlier] When we are Hungary, it Catholic, when we are holy Slavic people, Orthodox. When we have our friendly Turkish visitor who drop by for few hundred years, for while it mosque. When Napoleon pass through, is house for horses. (Edgar 5)

Apparently, conquerors and ideologies came and went leaving suffering in their wake but also fostering endurance among the local people. Pecz’s recital does not include “our country’s” market-oriented present. However, a brief episode shows that the church is currently being used by prostitutes and their (Western) clients. Yet it is in it that Pecz has discovered a painting, which may change Western ideas o f art history. The painting is so much like Giotto's The Lamentation that Davenport jokingly suggests that it was produced by the Italian artist “on an undocumented Balkan holiday” Edgar 8). Pecz, however, manages to prove, through references to the local epic tradition, that the painting was produced before Giotto. It would thus seem to be “the starting point o f six hundred years o f Western art” (Edgar 20). It would appear that, rather than “starting” in Italy, the European Renaissance began in “our country,” a Balkan periphery hovering uneasily between East and West. Davenport and Pecz are therefore fired by the Eurocentrist ambition o f restoring the painting and making the (Big Western) world take notice o f it. Pecz's argument in favour o f this course o f action is frankly redolent o f positive Occidentalism:

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Chapter Three And you know [...] progress can seem less big deal, if you go through your renaissance and enlightenment, if you have your Michelangelo and Mozart and Voltaire.[...] But, for us, it is maybe bit different. For us being child not so far back. For those who stand on Europe's battlements all of last 600 years. (Edgar 42)

Her interpretation is well familiar to “other” Europeans. The image of cultural history as a fast train that stops at stations with convenient labels like “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment” and “Modernism” still shapes local cultural discourses - alongside with the need “to catch up” with the West and thus provide proof positive that we “belong” to “Europe.” Edgar apparently means us to adopt a sceptical attitude to Pecz's reasoning. Pentecost is likewise highly critical o f some o f the more unsavoury consequences o f the Balkan Anonymicina's love affair with (Western) Europe. As was already pointed above, contempt for “non-Europeans” is one o f those. In the play's closing episodes, a multiethnic group o f refugees takes over the church. Pecz, Davenport and their American colleague Leo Katz become their hostages. The refugees are labelled “terrorists” by “our country's” officials and numerous attempts are made to compel them to give themselves up. Eventually armed commandos pour in through a hole in the wall, where the disputed painting should have been, and shoot most people on sight. Before the action reaches its sanguinary climax, however, a multilingual community is established in the church. They manage to communicate successfully, despite the fact that some of them only speak their native tongues, thus reminding readers and spectators o f the utopian significance o f the Pentecost event as a reversal o f the myth o f Babel. Through this communication the building is, as it were, re-consecrated as a temple o f mutual respect and understanding and its long history o f violence and victimization is - temporarily - negated. In this morally exemplary atmosphere, Davenport comes up with a new interpretation o f the painting and the history o f Western art. Because the anonymous artist used a dye that only became known in Western Europe centuries later, the British art historian assumes that he was an Arab who tried his hand at figurative painting. His painting then provided a model for Giotto's (Edgar 53). It would appear, then, that one o f the distinctive movements in W estern culture, the Renaissance, was “started” by someone from the East. Interestingly, “our country” is (yet again!) left out o f the grand march o f HISTORY. In Davenport's revolutionary re-telling o f the story o f W estern art, it only figures as the meeting ground o f Western and (truly) Eastern geniuses. The irony implicit in the British art historian's cultural scheme is never permitted to come to the surface.


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Characteristically, Davenport tells his own story in a general context o f story telling: while waiting, the refugees kill time by telling each other stories that could be traced back to a shared, “all-human” stock o f narratives comprising fairy tales o f European provenance as well as portions o f the Ramayana (Edgar 53-55). Edgar's play attempts the deconstruction o f some o f the West's privileged concepts as well as versions o f the traditional dichotomy between East and West. However, despite all grand iconoclastic gestures, his text remains within the charmed circle o f Eurocentrism. Even the play's defiant gesture of “orientalizing” the Renaissance turns out to be, in the last analysis, futile: the existence o f Giotto's Arab precursor remains only hypothetical and the painting is destroyed before the serious work o f re-writing Western (and world) art history can begin. The anonymity o f the play's setting and the presentation o f “our country's” history as a mixture o f all the negative traits that have traditionally been attributed to the Balkans, if anything, confirm W estern prejudices about the region’s “impurity.” Significantly, while the representatives o f the “real” (i. e. non-Christian and extra-European) East are portrayed with sympathy and understanding, the inhabitants o f “our country” hardly ever rise above the level o f inept cartoon figures. Gabriella Pecz appears to be the only exception. This may have led two o f the play’s South Eastern European commentators to tear the veil o f anonymity imposed on her by her creator and endow her with a specific national identity. While Raluca Vijiac assumes that she must be Slovak and leaves it at that (Vijiac 106), Roumiana Deltcheva takes Edgar to task for “honouring” Pecz with an “Occidental” Hungarian identity. As her commentary is in many ways symptomatic o f the internalization o f images o f Balkan denigration and, indeed, victimization by intellectuals from the region and o f their attempts to integrate such images into an antiBalkan conspiracy narrative, I will quote it in full: ... he [i. e. Edgar] gives his female Balkan protagonist the absolutely nonSlavic name of Gabriela Pecs [sic]. It is unlikely that Edgar is unfamiliar with the Slavic onomastic principles. Thus, the significance of his choice is beyond that of arbitrary coincidence. Making her the proponent of the heretical idea of Balkan art as Giotto’s inspiration, Edgar unconsciously tries - if not to appropriate - then at least to bring her closer to the Western centre by virtue o f her Hungarian name. O f all the characters, she is the most “Western” — her English is better and her accent is less perceptible. She possesses a distinct voice... [my emphasis]24

In a note Deltcheva explains that she specifically refers to a 1997 production o f the play (184) and this might explain her impression of

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Pecz’s “less perceptible accent.” As the two earlier citations from the play illustrate, the character’s English is far from good. The “Hungarian” element in her name should, in my view, be linked to “our country’s” history o f changing identities throughout the centuries: “[w]hen we are Hungary ..., when we are holy Slavic people ,..[w]hen we have our friendly Turkish visito r...” (Edgar 5). As was already demonstrated, the play retains distinct traces o f Eurocentrism, despite Edgar’s attempts to deconstruct the historiographic myth o f the “purely” Western roots o f the Renaissance. However, nothing in his text justifies Deltcheva’s imputation o f Pecz’s (conscious or unconscious) “Magyarization." Edgar’s play is focused on a positive-Occidentalist fantasy that has traditionally played an important role in the construction o f identities in cultural border zones such as the Balkans. The fantasy in question envisions integration within a superior cultural entity that is emphatically not liminal. “Our country’s” insistence on its “Europeanness” is part o f this psychological complex. Edgar’s plot represents the fantasy as decidedly immature but unlike Barnes, the dramatist does not adopt a friendly-mentorial stance and is not prepared to help “our country” along the road to adulthood. He appears to feel very little sympathy with his “other” European Anonymiana, and this is borne out by, among other things, its representation as a highly undesirable locale. N ot even the refugees wish to remain in “our country” but prefer to use it as a transit base on their way to the West. Edgar’s portrayal o f postcommunist South Eastern Europe is thus tinged with strong pessimism.

Conclusion: examining tentative “cures” for victimization As was already remarked above, the task o f cultural translation is fraught with contradictions. This statement could also be applied to the dialogue in which I tried to engage (albeit indirectly) the four authors whose texts were the subject o f the present discussion. In closing I can say that all four texts dramatize the difficulties that their authors must have experienced as they attempted to rise above the conservative content o f collective cultural memory and address, in novel ways, the political and ethical problems o f imagined characters from elsewhere. The chapter also considered the responses o f readers from the region to some o f the texts. Being a South Eastern European myself, 1 can attest that viewing the part o f the world that one comes from in a mirror provided by an outsider is at best part o f an unpleasant negotiation. The process


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involves questioning and self-questioning but may also result in awkward silences and simplistic (mis)interpretations o f the kind touched upon above. The latter reactions may be said to express resentment o f the powerful, constructing W estern Other. Yet another example o f resentment is provided by a recent article on “Western Writing and the (Re)Construction o f the Balkans after 1989: the Bulgarian Case.” Its author Yonka Krasteva focuses on “biased Western representations o f recent Balkan history” in order to demonstrate that Bulgaria, as an example of the Balkan Other, is used “to alleviate the crisis o f Western subjectivity conditioned by the loss o f the former ideological enemy” (Krasteva 99). The “biased representations” my fellow Bulgarian addresses include two o f the texts I considered above alongside with an impressive array o f other oeuvres. Her reading attests the denigration o f our native country and, by implication, o f the whole Balkan region by the texts’ authors. Given South Eastern Europe’s history o f victimization, her reaction is comprehensible in psychological terms, but its intellectual efficacy is doubtful. Constructing a “morality tale ... [which] expose[s] Western bias in [the] framework o f either imperialism or orientalism” (Todorova 1997:iii) hardly helps us understand our own history or make sense o f the interventions o f others. Regretfully, such a project is conducive to self-pity and can never provide a cure for victimization. A very different approach to what may be termed the South Eastern European condition is provided by Nikita Nankov in his genetically elusive piece “Cultural Coordinates o f a Bulgarian Art-Hoax: ‘Drafts’ by Virginia, A Tragedia dell’Arte” (2002). N ankov’s text ironically reproduces the main “event” o f Pentecost, the “discovery” o f an art work that would lead to a radical re-writing o f Western art history. In this case the art work turns out to be an indisputable hoax. What is more to the point, however, is that Nankov successfully pokes fun at both the Western academic establishment’s postmodern theories o f art and his own country’s anxieties over its historically conditioned and geographically determined liminality. His disavowal o f ready-made ideological scripts of any kind, including the script o f victimhood, may yet prove to be the most effective cure for victimization. 1 started with Tzvetan Todorov’s recommendation for “a critical examination o f [our] own collective identity” which should alert us to “the weaknesses and wrong turns o f [our] own community” (Todorov 144, 145). Nankov has successfully done this by resorting to humour and thus symbolically obliterating the historically conditioned script o f the

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victimized “periphery” and its discontents. In the process he has likewise turned the tables on the self-styled Western “centre” and problematized its claims to ideological dominance. Humour is admittedly no panacea but it can certainly take us out o f the simplistic universe o f morality tales and help us maintain our self-respect with no recourse to such desperate remedies o f resentment as symptomatic omission and simplistic (mis)reading.

References Adiseshiah, Sian. 2005. “Socialist constructions o f the velvet revolution: Caryl Churchill’s M ad Forest.” Conference paper. Thessaloniki, Greece, and Veliko Tumovo, Bulgaria: Politics and/in Aesthetics (4 10 June 2005). Arata, Stephen D. 1990. “The Occidental tourist: Dracula and the anxiety o f reverse colonization.” Victorian Studies, 33, 621-45. Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics o f Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bakic-Hayden, Milica. 1995. “Nesting Orientalisms: the case o f former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54 (4), 9 0 1 - 29. Bames, Julian. 1992. The Porcupine. London: Picador. Boose, Lynda E. 2002.“Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian rape camps, Turkish impalement, and Serb cultural memory.” Signs: Journal o f Women in Culture and Society 22 (1), 71—97. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1984. Rates o f Exchange. London: Picador. — . “New rates o f exchange: British fiction and Britain today.” In Britain and Europe, eds. Ludmilla Kostova et al. Sofia: the British Council and Petrikov Publishers, 21 - 30. Doctor Crininale. 1992. London: Seeker and Warburg. Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit. 2004. Occidentalism: the West in the Eyes o f Its Enemies. New York: The Penguin Press. Carrier, James G. 1996. Occidentalism. Images o f the West. Oxford University Press. Churchill, Caryl. 1990. M ad Forest: a Play fo r Romania. London: Nick Hem. Deltcheva, Roumiana. 2004. “Eastern women in Western chronotopes: the representation o f East European women in Western films after 1989.” In Vampirettes, Wretches and Amazons. Western Representations o f East European Women, eds. Valentina Glajar and Dominica Radulescu. Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 161-185.


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Ditchev, Ivaylo. 2002. “The Eros o f identity.” In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, eds. Dusan Belie and Obrad Savic. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 235 - 250. Edgar, David. 1995. Pentecost. London: Nick Hem. Fleming, K. E. 2000. “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan historiography.” American Historical Review (October), 1218-33. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 32-50. Gladstone, William. 1976. Bulgarian Horrors and the Question o f the East. London: John Murray. Gray, Frances. 1993. “Mirrors o f utopia: Caryl Churchill and Joint Stock.” In British and Irish Drama since I960, ed. James Acheson. London: Macmillan, 47 - 59. Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows. Gothic Horror and the Technology o f Monsters. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Haynes, Michael. 2004. “The Rhetoric o f Economics: Cold War Representation o f Development in the Balkans.” In The Balkans and the West. Constructing the European Other, 1945 - 2003, ed. Andrew Hammond. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 26 - 39. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation State. New York and London: Routledge. Koestler, Arthur. 1970. Darkness at Noon. New York: Knopf. Kolsto, Pal (ed.). 2005. Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe. London: Hurst & Company. Kondova, Dimitrina. 1993. “Veche desetiletie Malcolm Bradbury se valnuva ot sadbata na Balgariya.” Standart, March 24: 12. Kostova, Elizabeth. 2005. The Historian. London: Little, Brown. Kostova, Ludmilla. 1997. Tales o f the Periphery: the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. Veliko Tumovo: St. Cyril and St. Methodius Press. — . 2000. “Inventing Post-all Europe: visions o f the ‘old’ continent in contemporary British fiction and drama.” In Beyond Boundaries, ed. Andy Hollis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 83 - 102. — . 2003. “A gateway to Europe’s Orient(s): Austria in nineteenth-century British travel writing and vampire fiction.” In Austria and the Austrians: Images in World Literature, ed. Wolfgang Goertschcher and Holger Klein. Tuebingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 93-105. Krasteva, Yonka. 2004. “Western writing and the (re)construction o f the Balkans after 1989: the Bulgarian case.” In The Balkans and the West. Constructing the European Other, 1945 - 2003, ed. A. Hammond. Aldershot, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 97-109.

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Leask, Nigel. 1992. British Romantic Writers and the East. Anxieties o f Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nankov, Nikita. 2002. “Cultural Coordinates o f a Bulgarian Art-Hoax: ‘Drafts’ by Virginia, a Tragedia d e ll’Arte." In Thresholds o f Western Culture. Identity, Postcoloniality, Transnationalism, eds. J. B. Foster, Jr. & W. J. Froman. New York & London: Continuum, 170-185. Orlich, Ileana. 2004. “Mad voices in the forest: Caryl Churchill’s configurations o f women in pre-post Communist Romania.” In Vampirettes, Wretches and Amazons. Western Representations o f East European Women, eds. Valentina Glajar and Dominica Radulescu. Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 215-28. Radulescu, Dominica. 2004. “Amazons, wretches, and vampirettes: essentialism and beyond in the representation o f East European women.” In Vampirettes, Wretches and Amazons. Western Representations o f East European Women, eds. Valentina Glajar and Dominica Radulescu. Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 23-60. Radulescu, Dominica and Valentina Glajar, 2004. Introduction, In Vampirettes, Wretches and Amazons. Western Representations o f East European Women, eds. Valentina Glajar and Dominica Radulescu. Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 1-22. Rady, Martyn. 1992. Romania in Turmoil: a Contemporary History. London: IB Tauris. Roessel, David. 2002. In B yro n ’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. 1995. “Interculturalism - or the rape o f the other: some problems o f representation in contemporary British theatre.” Gramma 3: 141 - 156. Samuel, Raphael. 1994. Theatres o f Memory, vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. Scammell, Michael. 1993. “Trial and error.” The New Republic (January 4 & 11): 3 5 - 3 8 . Todorov, Tzvetan. 2003. Hope and Memory. Reflections on the Twentieth Century. Translated by David Bellos. London: Atlantic Books. Todorova, Maria. 1994. “The Balkans: from discovery to invention.” Slavic Review 53 (2 ), 453 - 482. — . 1997. Imagining the Balkans. London/N. York: Oxford University Press..


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Tumbleson, Raymond D. 1998. Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination. Nationalism, Religion, and Literature 1600 - 1745. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Vijiac, Raluca. 2005. “Pentecost, or the postcommunist syndrome.” Euresis 1, 105 - 110. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map o f Civilization on the M ind o f the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 1995. “Voltaire's public and the idea o f Eastern Europe: toward a literary sociology o f continental division.” Slavic Review, 54 (4), 932 — 942.

Notes 11 am well familiar with the controversy over the use of the terms “South Eastern Europe” and “Balkans.” The use of the former in my title does not imply denigration or rejection of the latter. To prove this, I am going to use both terms interchangeably in the rest of the text. For a lucid commentary on the use of the terms and its implications, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (1997), pp. 38-61. Moreover, “the ‘other’ Europe" will be used ironically in this chapter to designate the same symbolic-geographical entity that the other two terms refer to. 2 For a recent commentary on this and other myths prevalent in the region, see Pal Kolsto (ed.), Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (2005), esp. pp. 1 34. 3 On the “disappearance” of the Balkans as a category during the Cold War era, see Michael Haynes (2004), pp. 2 6 - 3 9 . Haynes maintains that the meaning of “East” as a conceptual designator changed as it came to betoken “the Soviet empire” rather than “the Orient” (28). The “disappearance” (“death”, “tragedy” or “destruction”) of Central Europe has received a lot of attention with writers such as Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel being among the most authoritative commentators upon the issue. It may be argued that the European Union’s last two enlargements (in 2004 and 2007) have led to a revival of the East/West divide within Europe as an influx of cheaper labour from some of the new member states has penetrated into Europe’s Western half, thus awakening old fears and bringing back to life some of old stereotypes of “Eastern Europe.” 41 have borrowed the phrase from Ditchev (2002), p. 235. 5 My reference is to Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics o f Space (1969). 6 Bakic-Hayden’s model of “nesting Orientalisms” has been challenged by Maria Todorova for whom attitudes to the Balkans and the discourses through which they are expressed should be placed under the heading of “Balkanism” rather than be “circumscribed in the category of Orientalism” (Todorova 1997:8). Todorova first advanced the concept of Balkanism in her 1994 article “The Balkans: from discovery to invention”, Slavic Review 53 (2), 453 - 482. For her, Balkanism constitutes an independent and distinctive rhetorical paradigm because of (among

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other things) the white and predominantly Christian population of South Eastern Europe (Todorova 1994: 454). Such an attempt at “de-orientalization”, however, does not prove that Balkanism is a paradigm sui generis, totally distinct from Orientalism. Moreover, instances of rhetorical “orientalization” are not restricted only to localities that have experienced long-term direct domination by MuslimOriental powers such as the Ottoman Empire but can be found in, inter alia, Protestant texts dealing with Roman Catholic cultures in “properly” European localities. On the historical link between anti-Catholic and Orientalist images in Protestant British culture, see Raymond D. Tumbleson (1998). On the rhetorical “orientalization” of Austria, see Ludmilla Kostova (2003). 7 Apart from similarities arising from the Balkan Christian countries’ political situation vis-a-vis the Ottoman Empire and the West, there were significant differences. For a commentary on the Greek case, which has predictably received the greatest attention, see Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East. Anxieties o f Empire (1992), pp. 15-24; Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation State (1997), esp. pp. 89-108; and David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (2002), esp. pp. 132- 158. My reference is to statements made at public rallies by the leader and functionaries of the ultranationalist Ataka party over the last three years. 9 Throughout this essay, ‘‘'Change” is used to designate the complex process of transition characterizing post-totalitarian societies in Europe. For a discussion of the term, see Ludmilla Kostova (2000), pp. 84 - 85. 10 Interestingly, Children o f the Night developed out of a short story called ’’All Dracula's Children” (1992). 11 For a commentary on the play’s early reception and its experimental character, see Ileana Orlich (2004), pp. 215-7. The phrase “reporter-observer” is Orlich’s. 12 For the emphasis on Caryl Churchill’s political convictions I am indebted to Sian Adiseshiah, who presented her paper “Socialist Constructions of the Velvet Revolution: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest” which was presented at the GreekBulgarian conference Politics and/in Aesthetics held in Thessaloniki, Greece, and Veliko Tumovo, Bulgaria, on 4 - 10 June 2005. Subsequent references to the paper will be given in the text. 13 Dimitrina Kondova, “Veche desetiletie Malcolm Bradbury se valnuva ot sadbata na Balgariya,” Standart, (March 24, 1993): 12. 14 Shortly after the publication of the book Julian Bames indicated in an article in The New Yorker that the plot reflected aspects of Bulgaria’s recent history. For a commentary on the contradictions involved in Bames’ choice of setting, see Michael Scammell’s review of The Porcupine “Trial and Error,” The New Republic (January 4 & 11, 1993): 35 - 38. 15 “Direct” observation did play some part in the production of Bames' book, though. By his own admission he spent nine days in Bulgaria in 1990. 16 Scammell similarly cites Darkness at Noon as an intertext for The Porcupine and further relates this to Bames’ friendship with Koestler towards the end of the latter’s life. See Scammell, p. 38.


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17 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 34. 18 William Gladstone was among the proponents of this view. See, inter alia, his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question o f the East (1876). For a commentary on this tract and his liberal views, see Ludmilla Kostova (1997), pp. 161-174. 19 For a critical commentary on Arms and the Man, see Ludmilla Kostova (1997), pp. 175-184. On “imaginative geography”, see Edward Said (1979), pp. 54, 55. 21 Malcolm Bradbury, Doctor Crininale (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1992). The quote comes from the blurb of this edition. 22 For a commentary on the erasure of differences in the “other” Europe, see K. E. Fleming (2000), 12 1 8 - 19. 23 Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union in 2007 sets the novel’s ending in a rather ironic perspective. 24 Roumiana Deltcheva, “Eastern women in Western chronotopes: the representation of East European women in Western films after 1989” (2004), p. 177. Deltcheva never bothers to explain why Edgar’s play has been included in her discussion of post-1989 Western cinema.