Author: Andrzej W. Pawluczuk, source: Rzeczpospolita

Excerpts from the unpublished book “Reporter of a Vanishing World: A Story About Ryszard Kapuściński,” which was due to appear in 1997 from the publisher MOST. The book has not been published to this day.

Very few books about contemporary literature are published today. In the last five years only a handful have appeared, whereas ten or fifteen years ago several per year was the norm. Even the most eminent critics have fallen silent, and that can already be taken as a significant sign of our times.

What kind of sign? No one has yet named it or charted the area in which its existence and operation can be felt. The subject of this book says several times, in both volumes of Lapidarium, that our era — the second half of the twentieth century — is characterised by changes so vast and so rapid that the world has never experienced anything like them before. They have shattered the old patterns and paradigms, but new ones have not taken their place. A void has arisen, and human beings — as well as whole societies — have lost their traditional points of support.

Literature, as the art of the word, the art of storytelling, is always a slave to its own era, and even writers who programmatically disavow the task of describing surrounding reality always reflect, to some visible degree, the spirit of their time. Indeed, even science fiction authors, though they create worlds light-years away, can only imagine what their experience and current knowledge suggest to them.

Kapuściński’s books have withstood the test of time above all because he wrote about the fate of people and the meaning of events without allowing himself to be dictated political interpretations or immediate verdicts. The political authorities held it against him in the 1960s and 1970s that his view of the Third World, and especially its revolutions, did not match the current ideological requirements. But Kapuściński stubbornly wrote in his own way, and today it is clear that he was right.

Why Kapuściński?

I call Kapuściński a writer, but more than one purist of genre — and there are many among critics and reviewers — will exclaim with indignation: a writer? He is only a journalist and reporter. Some will say: reportage writer, which is how the author of long, narrative, character-driven texts is distinguished from the mere news reporter. Yet his writing escaped easy classifications a good fifteen years ago and is today a separate, unrepeatable, unique phenomenon. It has its own distinct style, but it is not a mannerism that can be observed and copied.

Kapuściński has no imitators. Let us pay attention to this, for it is rare in literature — and in the other arts — a rarity almost without exception. It is always the case that those who achieve market success and win the esteem of connoisseurs immediately trail a long retinue of hacks who repeat their style in hopes of repeating their success and fame. But Kapuściński’s writing cannot be imitated. Why?

I sought the answer to this simple but crucial question for a long time, since it concerns what is most essential in this writing. Textual analysis — even structuralist analysis — proved unhelpful, because the problem does not reduce to the way of speaking (of writing) or, to put it differently, it is not a question of narrative technique. The critical methods that pass the test admirably even with such difficult prose as Joyce or Faulkner prove completely useless in relation to Kapuściński’s writing.

When I drew up a private list of writers who cannot be imitated alongside those who quickly found imitators, the matter was soon explained. For nobody has dared to ape the style of Miłosz or Jerzy Stempowski (in prose, in both cases), or the poetics of Wisława Szymborska, whose work in places surprises with its effortless simplicity. What matters is not simply style. In Lapidarium II Kapuściński invokes Fernand Léger’s observation in Functions of Painting that “works in which the principal thing was the subject matter pass away; those in which the principal thing was form — remain.” The ability to find the meaning of events is what makes Kapuściński’s writing — like that of Miłosz, Stempowski, or Szymborska — impossible to imitate. One can observe someone’s language, their manner; one cannot imitate their unique and unrepeatable vision of the world, arising from their life, their reading, their reflection, and their emotions.

Questions of Meaning

Why does someone live one way and not another? What is the meaning of dying for the values one believes in? What is the meaning of someone’s death, their work, their sacrifice, their loyalty — and why, conversely, is someone else’s death (or work) devoid of all meaning? The questions posed here are fundamental to human life, and what we answer to them determines what our life is.

These are basic, foundational questions, and until recently they were called metaphysics. Who has time for metaphysics today? Who is drawn to questions requiring deep, prolonged thought? Today, it is commonly said, the cult of novelty reigns, and contemporary “television man” can no longer focus attention on anything for more than fifteen seconds. “The audience,” Kapuściński writes in Lapidarium II, “wants the whole story in three minutes today.”

I think this is a partial, fragmentary truth, and does not apply to everyone. If today’s person really could not focus attention for longer than three minutes, Imperium would not have had three editions and over two hundred thousand copies (in Poland alone). The same applies to The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, and many other writers who live today. There are people who seek meaning and want to read books that will bring them closer to it.

The Career of The Emperor

Only after the publication of The Emperor does Ryszard Kapuściński’s international career begin. This account of the mechanisms of authoritarian power and the properties of totalitarian systems, woven around the history of Haile Selassie, won enormous popularity immediately. The book was read in many ways: as a parabolic portrait of Stalin, and even as a satire on the final years of Gierek’s rule.

As Bill Buford wrote in Vogue: “When The Emperor — the first of Ryszard Kapuściński’s books to be translated into English — landed on the desk of Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of the publisher Pan, he decided to reject it without reading it. The proposal seemed unpromising: a profile of the Ethiopian autocrat Haile Selassie, written ten years after his overthrow. The author was an unknown Polish writer whose name contained too many consonants and lost accents to be easily pronounced. (It did not help that ‘Ryszard Kapuściński’ translates into English as ‘Richard of Cabbage.’) Dictating a letter of rejection, Mehta glanced at the book and was drawn in. He sent the secretary away and cancelled his next appointments. Two hours later he appeared at the editorial meeting and read aloud, word by word, the first fifteen pages of the book.”

In that same year of 1983, the London Sunday Times named The Emperor book of the year, and Salman Rushdie compared Kapuściński to Italo Calvino. Shah of Shahs and Kapuściński’s subsequent books were translated and published abroad almost immediately after appearing in Poland. Today foreign publishers reach even for books that might seem unpromising for readers elsewhere, such as The Polish Bush. Foreign editions now form a sizeable library, with translations into more than twenty languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Farsi, Hungarian, Russian, Dutch, Danish, Ukrainian, Italian, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Serbo-Croatian, among others.

This Is Not Reportage

The stylistics of The Emperor suggest, moreover, that it is not a reportage about a failing autocrat who happens to be named Haile Selassie. It is composed of accounts from the emperor’s courtiers and servants, yet all these people speak the same language. The sentences they utter have the same phrasing, intonation, even similar internal rhymes. This is a strange method of writing reportage — when the reporter tries to make the stylisation visible, to let it show through, so that no one should doubt that the witnesses’ accounts are only fragmentary, auxiliary raw material for the author’s own visions.

The fate of the imperial courtiers after the fall of the monarchy also deserves notice, though Kapuściński dismisses it in a single sentence: these people must hide from the new regime.

But why? What wrong have they done? Whom did the third-door lackey harm, the cushion-bearer, the table-setter, the cloth-wiper who wiped the dog’s puddles with a satin cloth? They had the misfortune that their master was overthrown by force, and the power that succeeded him must also strive not to lose power. This is the eternal and obvious law; it is better to hide early, burrow in, keep silent, wait.

With the fall of Haile Selassie, no era definitively ended — not in Ethiopia, nor anywhere else. In The Emperor Kapuściński shows the decay and destruction of a small corner of the world, but in his customary way he does not say whether the new corner will be better and more just. For who can know whether what is coming will prove better than what has gone.

Andrzej W. Pawluczuk

source: kapuscinski.info