Author: Michał Głowiński. Date of publication: 2001-11-16

Ryszard Kapuściński is an outstanding writer. A writer practising above all the genre known as reportage. Certainly one may speak of literary reportage, to distinguish it from strictly journalistic reportage — the immediate kind, concerned exclusively with the present moment and not aspiring to generalisations or broader approaches, not claiming to transcend the ephemerality to which a newspaper or even a weekly is condemned. Literary, however, does not mean fictional.

Literary quality does not consist in fantasising, in constructing plots devised in the seclusion of a study; it consists in something quite different — in seeking the form in which the events being reported can be presented, in creating the narrating subject, and finally in grasping the events being told about in such a way as to reveal their various aspects, not only their current entanglements — political aspects, but also psychological ones; social aspects, but also individual ones.

The epigraph to one of the chapters of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black — “a novel is a mirror carried along a highway” — has become a cliché, cited when there was reason to do so and when there was not. Contemporary reportage, the kind at least that Kapuściński practises, would no longer fit this description, though — as one might think — it seems to conform to it better than any other literary form. It would not fit, if only because the reporter moves more often along byways than along roads; his highways are African deserts and bush, and also — polar ice fields. He moves in various ways, sometimes even on foot — and makes use of the most diverse means of transport, from draught animals to jet planes.

The territory of his investigation may be any place that seems to him interesting and worth examining (not for its scenic beauties), any place where something is happening that has broader significance for the contemporary world — where events are unfolding that can interest readers living thousands of kilometres from the theatre of events. In the case of Kapuściński’s reportages, these are difficult and dangerous places, places the ancients would describe as loci horridi; he does not write accounts from Parisian salons or places where elegant society enjoys the pleasures of holidaying.

But the literariness of reportage is above all a matter of a certain construction of the narrating subject. Reportage is in this respect a genre paradoxical in its own way: the author cannot speak about himself, but he also cannot be absent; he cannot accept that what he is reporting happens without his involvement; he cannot present anything from a distance. He must participate. Sociologists speak of participant observation; I think this formula applies perfectly to reportage. The reporter has no right to renounce speaking about his own experience. He does not, it is true, speak about himself; he does not place himself in the foreground — but he must be present. He must be characterised by distinctness; he must have individual qualities. Without a concrete narrator there is no reportage. And Kapuściński consistently builds such a narrator in his stories.

Above all, this narrator is a person curious about the world. Curiosity is the chief motor of his action; he must satisfy it, he must find out how things really are. Curiosity about the world in general — but above all curiosity about people. About the great of this world, but especially about the small: those caught up in historical processes, dependent on the determinisms and caprices of history, those who become victims of tyranny and revolution.

A peculiarity of Kapuściński’s reportages is that, though they tell of mass movements, great transformations and great cataclysms, their narrator is as a rule interested in individuals, in their individual experience, in their living through what fate has compelled them to take part in. And this is an important coefficient of the literary quality of these works, for literature does not narrate what is mass; its constant subject is individual fate. This is so even when — as in Kapuściński — it speaks of great social movements. His narrator asks and observes; sometimes he is surprised, but almost never directly judges. Things happen as in outstanding literary works: the power of judgement is left to the reader.

Like every outstanding writer, Ryszard Kapuściński has his favourite concerns, the discussions and visions of which dominate his entire work — some might say he has his creative obsessions. I would distinguish two principal threads: revolutions and revolts connected primarily with the great process of decolonisation, and — from the mid-1970s — the collapse of authoritarian systems. In the treatment of the first thread, important primarily for the earlier period of his work, a fascination with revolution is revealed, with the figures of fighters, partisans, and doomed men, with the clash of different orders. This fascination is not a peculiarity of Kapuściński alone; it was characteristic of the time, and the most outstanding intellectuals succumbed to it — one need only recall Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet he is not simply a panegyrist of partisans and rebels; in trying to understand and show the motives of their action, to comprehend the human situation.

One thing I wish to emphasise with particular force: revolts, revolutionary and independence movements, if they were happening far away and were directed against those on the other side of the barricade, were constantly cashed in on by communist propaganda. One might say that the more conservatively communism behaved on its own territory — the more it clung to what was called real socialism — the more fervently it supported revolutionary movements elsewhere, with nothing to restrain its loud praise of them. I imagine that to write about these processes and events in such a way as to avoid propagandistic dependencies and propagandistic servility was particularly difficult. Ryszard Kapuściński achieved this to a great extent; there are remarkably few traces of PRL [Polish People’s Republic] idioms in his prose. And for this reason too, his reportages about rebels, partisans, revolutionaries, and sometimes — the word must be said — terrorists, have retained their currency; they have not aged along with the world in which they were created.

The thread of the fall of authoritarian systems — seemingly well equipped with everything intended to ensure their long and safe duration — is in some ways the antipode of what might be called the stories of rebels. Kapuściński is interested in the disintegration of those structures which first brought themselves to a state in which they could no longer function; the revolutionary overthrow was in some measure an epiphenomenon. This is what two books tell — books I consider the most outstanding achievements in Kapuściński’s rich output: The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982). These are undoubtedly his masterpieces, and at the same time among the most outstanding works not only of Polish reportage but of Polish prose in general in the second half of the twentieth century. Published at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, they were widely read at the time as allegories depicting the decay of the system that everyone could observe in the Polish People’s Republic. These stories of absurdity and paralysis, but also of the blindness of power, were perhaps allegories too — yet they spoke of specific cases and specific experiences; they were magnificently narrated tales of collapse.

Kapuściński’s last great reportage book — Imperium (1993) — is also a story of disintegration: of how real socialism brought itself to a state of exhaustion, how it had to collapse. A story in which what is important is not political analysis; the collapse is told through accounts of concrete things — wretched and neglected places, the existence of humble, small people. From these accounts one can learn what decomposition the superpower had undergone — a superpower that was, to paraphrase a well-known formula from communist rhetoric, the bulwark of world totalitarianism.

Reportage by its very nature speaks of the concrete — those concrete things that the reporter has noticed and analysed. So it is, of course, in Kapuściński’s reportages. But they are not confined solely to the sphere of the particular. Behind the particular lie general concerns; the particular makes it possible to convey generalising observations. I wish here to invoke one of Kapuściński’s most recent reportages: an account — not yet included in a new book — of a journey by train through Belarus, published in the summer of 1996 in one of the Saturday-Sunday editions of Gazeta Wyborcza. On the surface it is only a modest account of not especially pleasant travel from Baranavichy to Minsk and then to the Polish border. Yet this account says much about various things; the description of the conductresses’ behaviour shows how much of the communist totalitarian mentality has been preserved in the attitudes of former citizens of the Soviet Union, even though the empire has collapsed; and the account of the state of the railways and the modes of travel is the best commentary on the situation of a country that does not wish to emerge from its past and determine its own separate place in the world. This masterly text is one of those in the literary output of Ryszard Kapuściński that most clearly reveals his craftsmanship and working methods. They consist in such a skill of narration that a detail, a minor fact, an apparently insignificant event becomes a vehicle of generalisation — an element of a totalising vision.

In this sketch I have looked at the reportage works of Ryszard Kapuściński (I have devoted no attention here either to his thinking prose, collected in three volumes entitled Lapidarium, or to his poetic output) from a clearly defined point of view: they interested me above all as literary works. Even when viewed from this angle, one cannot fail to appreciate their great value.

This text by Professor Michał Głowiński was written as one of three reviews commissioned by the University of Silesia on the occasion of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Ryszard Kapuściński. The ceremony took place in Katowice on 15 November 2001.

source: kapuscinski.info