Author: Magdalena Horodecka (University of Gdańsk) Source: Pamiętnik Literacki XCVIII, 2007, no. 3, pp. 21–45

Each reproduction of reality in a work is its creative interpretation through text, and each interpretation is a specific form of reproduction. To speak paradoxically: reality cannot be reproduced in text, but neither can it not be reproduced.

— Dorota Korwin-Piotrowska, Problems of the Poetics of Prose Description

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Dorota Korwin-Piotrowska’s apt observation signals a phenomenon occurring in many works of non-fiction literature. This paradox of the clash of the mimetic and the creative principle has reached a particular degree of concentration in Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor. What, however, is the creative principle in this work? Some critics perceived it in the stylisation and “near-fiction”, and Kapuściński himself called the reportage a fairy tale, “which is, but is not, about Haile Selassie and his palace”.

Przemysław Czapliński, for his part, places The Emperor in the current he calls the “adventure of anti-fiction”, but in terms of genre classifies this work among quasi-documentary forms, designating The Emperor as a “fictionalised reportage”. He does not, however, indicate the arguments supporting the thesis about the belletristic nature of this work. Is it adventurousness, fabularity, the dominance of the aesthetic function over the journalistic, or the occurrence of fictional elements? Or perhaps — as Melchior Wańkowicz wrote — a fictionalised reportage is a document that has the privilege of “gluing certain threads”, for example of building the portrait of one character from the traits of several figures? It seems that all the elements mentioned occur in The Emperor to a greater or lesser degree. What will particularly interest me is the distinctive belletristic quality of the narration.

The aim of this sketch is an analysis of the narrative techniques used by Kapuściński in The Emperor and a demonstration of their significance for the interpretation of the text. For it gives the impression that it is precisely the narration that can be considered an important component of the creative principle operating in this reportage. Creativity would not here be closely bound up with fictionality, but rather with such a shaping of the stylistics and structure of the work as transforms the document into a parable. It is precisely the narrative techniques that determine in a substantial measure the literariness of this work — they cause the empiria to be placed within the requirements of artistic composition. Such a treatment of narration brings The Emperor close to the current of American journalism of the 1960s and 1970s known as “new journalism” or “literary journalism”.

Let us recall that Tom Wolfe’s famous preface to the anthology of The New Journalism he edited is considered the exposition of this direction — in it, the essence of the phenomenon was defined as the combining of typically journalistic work, consisting in many hours of gathering material (with particular attention to detail), with its subsequent description in the form of a narrative typical of the novel — employing dialogue, tension-building techniques, and even means of auditory instrumentation. These phenomena introduced reportage into the realm of belles-lettres — and thus into the sphere of problems concerning narration in an epic work.

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Let us begin with a few remarks connected with the genesis of the work, for they explain one of the fundamental characteristics of the narration — parabolicism. The Emperor was published in 1978. Kapuściński went to Ethiopia (not for the first time, at that) approximately two years earlier, to describe the revolution there that in 1974 had stripped Haile Selassie of power. What emerged, however, was a book with a considerably broader semantic field, in which the Ethiopian emperor and the Ethiopian revolution function as symbols, being only one of many names for the broader phenomenon that is the mechanism of the legitimation and overthrow of power together with its social and philosophical implications.

The reason for encoding the story in a universalising, parabolical formula was also, it would seem, the context of the work’s creation. For the task set for Kapuściński by the editorial office was not a mission entirely ideologically neutral. What was happening in Ethiopia both under the emperor’s rule and after his overthrow was not confined to a national or even a continental scope, but constituted a fragment of the world-political game, one of the cogs of the Cold War. Haile Selassie was for years supported by the United States, while in neighbouring Somalia the Soviet Union had its influence. The overthrow of the emperor in 1974 was therefore an excellent opportunity for the USSR, which with the assumption of rule in Ethiopia by Mengistu Haile Mariam shifted its influence onto his power. It is estimated that in the years 1977–1990 the USSR sent Mengistu 12 million dollars. Mengistu began to introduce communism in Ethiopia: ordering the establishment of collective farms, the building of monuments to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, destroying all opposition.

In the context of these events it is permissible to suppose that Kapuściński’s journey was not a chance editorial decision. He was probably expected to bring back a reportage about the successes of the red revolution.

Perhaps here too lies the source of the dilemma signalled in some interviews — the dilemma experienced by the reporter after his return to Poland. Kapuściński recalls that for a long time he was unable to sit down to write a relation from Ethiopia. He pointed to boredom, fatigue, surfeit after many years of reporting coups, revolutions, and wars, which in essence have a similar, almost schematic course. But it seems that the truth also came into play, and the awareness that it would not be possible to describe that truth. We would owe the parabolicism of this reportage then not only to the author’s boredom, but also to censorship, which somehow had to be circumvented. Kapuściński, deciding on the metaphorical structuring of the narration, employs one of the strategies of literary Aesopian language. Ryszard Nycz describes it as the stylistic shaping of an utterance that gives it the rank of metaphor, allegory, or symbol. One might add that in the case of The Emperor this symbolic shaping of the narration occurs not only in the stylistic register but also in the compositional and intertextual ones (evoked among other things by the mottoes opening successive chapters).

Interestingly, the reception history of this reportorial parable began with an interpretive reduction to one dimension — however extraordinarily topical. When Kapuściński brought successive instalments to the editorial office, there was a fear that the story too vividly resembled a description of Gierek’s rule and the structure of the Central Committee. But it was already too late to withdraw the announced series of reportages. The censor, approving individual instalments in the press version, had probably not foreseen what the readers’ interpretation of the whole would be — “and it was only the whole that was devastating” — as Artur Domosławski aptly notes. As a result not only the editorial office but readers and reviewers too received the text as a metaphor for the rule of the Polish People’s Republic. One-dimensional interpretations of The Emperor also saw in the reportage a metaphor for the rule of Stalin, Nixon, Tsar Alexander I, Louis XIV, even Margaret Thatcher.

For The Emperor is an allegorical — perhaps even symbolic — narration, and it is precisely its polysemy that has become its value. Nowacka therefore rightly perceives in this reportage, following Alvin Toffler, a parable of all authoritarian rule, and also — what broadens the problematics of the work still further — of all power, including that exercised in contemporary capitalist institutions.

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It is worth pausing for a moment over the original, press narrative form of The Emperor. The text appeared in the Warsaw weekly “Kultura” in 15 instalments in the first half of 1978, in the form of a cycle under the name A Little of Ethiopia. The reportages were illustrated with black-and-white photographs by Kapuściński (predominantly portraits of adults or children against a desert landscape background). The first instalment was also accompanied by a reproduction of an invitation to a banquet written out in the name of “Mr Ryszard Kapuscinski”. It is worth mentioning these details, as they added a dimension of attestation to the press reportages — they were veracity-operations confirming the referential character of the text. These attesting materials were abandoned in The Emperor; here the function of referential attestation is performed above all by the reporter’s narration — that of a witness and participant in the events.

Significant changes occurred in the title. The little-expressive formula of the cycle entitled A Little of Ethiopia disappeared in the book version. The new title, The Emperor, goes beyond the frame of the history of a specific African country — and thus acquires a more universal dimension. The title of the first part was promoted to the title of the whole; in its place a new title appeared: The Throne. Besides these minor modifications the text was reprinted in the book in almost unchanged form.

In comparing both versions one can also see which part of the narration the reporter considered least satisfactory. The greatest transformations were made in the selection and arrangement of the mottoes. In “Kultura” each instalment is opened by one quotation. Some of these return in The Emperor, some change their position in the text, others are removed.

An analysis and interpretation of the mottoes of The Emperor could become the subject of a separate study. Kapuściński retained only those with the strongest potential for parabolising the story — for that is precisely the main function of these paratexts. Besides the parabolising function one can also discern in the mottoes places of particularly intense indirect authorial commentary. Their important role is also to anticipate coming events, to prepare the reader for turns in the plot.

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Wańkowicz wrote in Prosto od krowy that a reporter must escape destruction by the “Niagara of facts” that can overwhelm him. In The Emperor Kapuściński made of this virtue not only a way of writing a good reportage. The extraordinarily precise, even economical, management of the gathered material became an artistic principle — one of the means of creating the superimposed organisation. If we recall that this asceticism in the selection of facts is accompanied in The Emperor by an extraordinary, at moments baroque, linguistic stylisation, it will turn out that the work is governed by a paradox — some oxymoronic formula of ascetic lushness.

Surely anyone who has ever seen photographs of Ethiopia will wonder why there are so few descriptions of the landscape of this country, of its extraordinary beauty, the dress or customs of its inhabitants. While dates and individual pieces of topographical information about Ethiopia occur in the reportage, there is almost a complete absence of tourist information. The reader of The Emperor, for example, will not guess that Haile Selassie’s country is covered in high mountains. This absence is not a sign of the conditions in which the reportage was produced, but a sign of a narratorial decision arising from the striving for reduction, minimisation of superfluous detail. The desire accompanying the author of The Emperor during writing — the desire to build a synthesis — required asceticism. That is why the time-space of The Emperor closes itself almost entirely within the palace, which brings the atmosphere of the story close to a fairy tale or parable.

This distinctive absence of natural space causes the action to seem to unfold in some place suspended in a void, while Haile Selassie’s palace transforms into a theatre of mannequins, whose performance could have been staged in any other corner of the world. This is an important device for universalising the entire story, giving it the hallmark of a parabolical history. Precisely such a function — that of accessories — is served by the tourist details that appear so rarely in the narration of The Emperor.

This absence of natural space causes The Emperor to be a peculiar anti-guidebook. In the narration one can sense an extraordinary authorial concentration on one cognitive goal and the subordination to that goal of all other episodes, threads, and narrative devices. The author consistently refuses to let the reader breathe, leading him along the corridors of the system of power, drawing him into intricate intrigues. In this sense one can speak of a labyrinthine shaping of the narration, which leads the reader from account to account, giving the illusion of moving towards an exit while intensifying the sensation of stuffiness, confinement, and deadlock as the dominant traits of the world presented.

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Another characteristic of the narration is the compositional discipline of The Emperor. For the empirical material gathered by the reporter was subjected not only to procedures of reduction and selection but also to complex formal transformations. The result is a multi-planar and fairly intricate deep structure of the narration. In the linear order it is two-track: the reporter’s voice alternates with the monologue accounts of the servants; in the vertical order we have to do with a multi-layered, palimpsestic arrangement.

The Emperor begins with a sentence that is a kind of anticipation of the entire story: “In the evenings I listened to those who had known the Emperor’s court.” This first, calm, almost melancholy phrase announces the compositional mechanism of the reportage, whose chief principle is precisely the presentation of the accounts listened to. One can say that The Emperor in this narrative layer is a collection of monologues of eyewitnesses — palace people who survived the revolutionary purges. Secretly, often under cover of darkness, they reconstruct their histories, their palace curriculum vitae.

The reporter kept their personal data secret; all are anonymous, hidden under initials (e.g. F., L. C., P., H.-T.). This device accentuates the universal, not individual, character of the figures presented — making them figures of the system rather than individuals. In total The Emperor has 34 sub-narrators, whose first-person singular accounts the reporter quotes. Most of them speak only once; several speak two or three times.

It is worth adding that a distinctive third track of narration — also a kind of order external to it, even perhaps metatextual — is formed by the mottoes appearing at the beginning of each chapter. The passages of the reporter-narrator constitute approximately one quarter of The Emperor; the remaining part — that is the decisive majority, over two-thirds — consists precisely of the voices of the narrating palace people. Their prominence in the structure of the narration is a value-laden decision: the reporter seems in this way to be communicating: let them speak, because they are closest to the truth about the events, the arrangements, the whole complex structure of power — while I shall be only a medium, a mouthpiece through which their voice will flow.

The compositional dominant is composed of various structural elements (from the mottoes to the leitmotifs of the narration) evoking the impression of passing away, the inexorable flow of time, participation in the repeating mechanism of the turning wheel of history. The atmosphere of vanitasery is evoked by a large part of the paratexts. The diversity of authors and epochs from which the mottoes come creates the impression of some universal, timeless debate about transience and the inevitable decline of all power — but also of all human life.

Another characteristic feature is making one of the constructional mechanisms of the reportage’s structure the motif of the passing hours of the day. For the successive monologues are ordered according to the chronology of the succession of stages of the emperor’s daily ritual of governance. This is simultaneously a piece of information about the extraordinarily schematic, ritual manner of governing the country and a vivid signal of the totality of power. At the same time a clock activated somewhere in the reader’s consciousness strikes the successive hours of rule, constituting a symbol of the approaching end of the day, of dusk, of the approaching night — but also of catastrophe, of the End, or indeed of death.

Extraordinarily persuasive are also the titles of the successive chapters. After The Throne, signalling the apogee of power, comes It Comes, It Comes, a title heralding the approaching end — until finally the finale explicitly proclaims The Collapse. The action of this work can be perceived as the construction of an inclined plane, down which slowly, then ever more rapidly, the emperor and his entire palace slide into the abyss of powerlessness, and finally — of non-existence.

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An important feature of the narration of The Emperor is the distinctive interferences and interdependencies of the two main enunciatory instances. The reporter’s voice is the individual “I” of the text; the monologues of the palace people constitute, distributed among individual utterances, the voice of a collective subject who speaks in a homogeneous, almost identical, language.

The situation of constant encounter, some great debate, organises the entire text — and its original source proves to be the actual conversations that Kapuściński conducted with the servants. It seems that in The Emperor the Levinasian encounter as an entry into the otherness of the being of another person does not occur. At the start we only suppose — and in the finale of the reportage we already know for certain — that Kapuściński does not agree with his interlocutors, that he judges the reign of the Emperor of Ethiopia differently. Yet at the same time in no other reportage is the reporter so far and at the same time so close to his characters. The narrator of The Emperor behaves somewhat like an actor who wishes to enter with his whole self into the personality of the role being played.

The reporter-narrator appears in The Emperor in a dozen or so scenes, evenly distributed between the monologues of the palace servants. He doses his knowledge, decides to conceal it, to limit it — in order gradually to guide the reader, allowing him independence in formulating opinions and judgements. Only in the final passages does he explicitly utter his own opinion, writing for example about “the stupidity and helplessness of the elites” or about the palace as “a breeding ground of mediocrity”.

Exceptionally precisely woven is the reportorial prologue — there is not a single superfluous sentence in it. The first paragraph is devoted to a lapidary illumination of the fate of the palace people after the dethronement of Haile Selassie. Whereas in the second a personal, even emotional, tone enters the narration, in which the reporter expresses his goal: “Ethiopians are deeply distrustful and did not want to believe in the sincerity of my intention: I intended to find the world that had been swept away by the machine guns of the Fourth Division.” To find the vanished world means to conquer time, to make the past present — a formula closer perhaps to literature than to journalism.

Evoking tension, anxiety, and chaos is the emotional and narrative dominant of the prologue. A sequence of questions about the identity of the warring social groups, expressed through repetitions of pronouns and tangled syntax, underlines the disorientation in the world of civil war: “Who were they — them or those others? And who are ’they’ today, and who are ’not-them’, those others who are against those ones because they are for these ones?” — the questions seem to engulf both the reporter and his interlocutors and the reader.

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Grasping the narrative situation of The Emperor in psychological categories, one can say that in the case of the attitude of the main narrator we have to do with the psychological concept of the dialogical self (dialogical self). This is a type of personality functioning on the principle of adopting the perspectives of other persons through discussing, comparing, or integrating them. In The Emperor the dialogical “I” of the reporter encompasses above all the viewpoints of the palace people, but also tries to penetrate into the manner of thinking of the main character.

James L. Aucoin argues that this is the main strategy of literary journalism occurring in The Emperor, consisting in the frequent attribution to the main character of certain reflections or emotions, despite the fact that the reporter had no chance of talking directly with Haile Selassie. This narrative technique might be called the strategy of empathic surmise. It will recur in Kapuściński’s later works, becoming one of the main tools of narration, for example in Travels with Herodotus.

It is striking that throughout The Emperor Kapuściński precisely observes a graphic discipline — consistently using italics always when as reporter he speaks in the course of the narration. If he had really managed to precisely separate his own voice from the voices of the characters, we would have to do with an almost classical, in the Bakhtinian sense, polyphonic narration. In this sense the most polyphonic chapter is Chapter 1 of The Emperor. As the narration proceeds the reporter increasingly joins his own tone to the voice of the characters.

As Małgorzata Czermińska wrote: “Admitting many of his informants to speak, Kapuściński sometimes organises a whole chorus. He creates a polyphonic construction in which different viewpoints supplement or rival each other, so that they can even drown out the reporter’s voice. Then, however, he retains the role of conductor — or, using another metaphor, of director, who, introducing successive soloists, still reserves for himself the right to speak.”

One might add that besides the role of director or conductor, Kapuściński is also in The Emperor a make-up artist. The function of this make-up work is performed by the linguistic stylisation “painted onto” the characters. The palace figures thus become a kind of puppets moved by the chief causal instance: the narrator-reporter.

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Let us devote a few words to the question of decorum and the associated narrative aspects of linguistic stylisation. The very phenomenon of the intensive occurrence of rhyme and rhythm introduces into a text on a serious subject — power, its abuses and fall — a dancing, almost playful, atmosphere. When we read: “there arose in the soul a domestication, a consolation, that we shall always wriggle free, rise up, that what we have, we shall not give away, for the very worst we shall outlast” — we find no tone of pathos or solemnity here. This lack of pathos creates room for irony, the grotesque, a kind of unreality of this departing world, its complete, almost absurd, incompatibility with the contemporary.

The linguistic mechanisms of stylisation were described in detail by Janina Fras, who emphasised that besides archaisation, which is as it were the most external trait of the style of this reportage, significant also are the rhythmisations, rhymes, the richness of nominal forms (with the formant -anie//-enie), numerous compound words (e.g. “pokłonno-tylno-kierunkowe” withdrawal), neologisms, and colloquialisms.

Two utterances of the servant with the initials L. C., occurring at the beginning and near the end of the reportage, illustrate this well. The first speaks in a neutral language, almost completely unmarked: “The Emperor slept in a bed of light walnut, very spacious. He was so slight and fragile that one could barely see him; he got lost in the bedding.” The second is in comparison with the first a veritable archaising frenzy: “our lord every little whisper, every little intrigue about succession he always before used to scold and stamp out”, “grown pious, grown incensed with their bootlicking, servility.” One can state that as the story develops, language plays an ever more significant role in the text — it becomes a separate character, fulfilling autotelical functions.

One can also see who is the chief linguistic patron of the work. Not only Pasek or Gombrowicz, but to a large extent — Father Baka. Evidence for this could be the fact that in the press version of the text Kapuściński used as a motto a fragment from Baka’s poem An Admonition for the Young. Perhaps the linguistic whirligig of stylisation and rhythmisation in the work is precisely an echo of the Baroque motif of the dance of death.

It is also worth drawing attention to a certain paradox in the use of archaic stylisation in The Emperor. One can assume that a reporter wishing to render as faithfully as possible what he encountered in Ethiopia should have chosen a transparent form, enclosing the gathered opinions in stylistically neutral formulas. Yet we have to do with an intensification of stylistic procedures that, instead of bringing us closer to Ethiopian thinking, seem to distance us from it — concealing it behind old Polish phraseology, quite foreign to the world being described. This could be read as a signum of the impossibility of crossing the limits of one’s own language. But it is a choice that — although in certain measure disturbing the objectivity of the relation — leads nonetheless to a search for truth about the described phenomena by different methods: not through the faithful reproduction of reality, but through speaking about it in a form entirely alien to it, imposed, but at the same time extraordinarily fitting. The old Polish narrative costume that Kapuściński dressed the courtiers of Haile Selassie in fits them very well.

By describing Ethiopia and the emperor’s history through stylisations and the refined composition of the work, the author achieves the extraordinary effect of universalising this reportage. This is made possible by a certain suspension of the anthropological attitude in favour of the sociological or philosophical one, searching in an individual phenomenon for some general principle — the mechanism of the functioning of the social system — or finally for a synthesis, even a philosophy of history.

Magdalena Horodecka — “Narration in »The Emperor« by Ryszard Kapuściński”, Pamiętnik Literacki XCVIII (2007), no. 3, pp. 21–45. Article published within the framework of permitted use, digitised by the Museum of Polish History and made available in the digital collection bazhum.muzhp.pl.

source: kapuscinski.info